Last weekend, as I reported here, we went to the suburbs to watch kids lip sync. Last night, I went to my kids' school in the city to see actual art, and I noticed a few key differences.
1.This event was free. Anybody could come in and see fabulous visual and, uh, kinetic art (or whatever one calls dance).
2.They fed us. Both the urban and suburban events ran from 6 to 8 at night, but whereas, in the suburbs, they had crappy bags of pretzels and cheez-its for sale, in the city, we got free pizza! Bargain! (Baked goods were for sale, and somebody made some chocolate chip cookies that were freakin' awesome. The parent council volunteers (of whom I am not one, my masochism only going so far) wisely charged a buck each for these homebaked slices o' delight. But the point is, if you run an event during dinnertime, it's nice to offer people some actual food, which the urban school did and the suburban school did not.
3. Dance and theater are cooler than lip syncing. We saw a little play about how Anansi stole stories from the sky and selfishly tried to keep them for himself but then fell and spilled them all, which, apparently how we got stories. (Anansi: I and all the other novelists praise both your craftiness and your clumsiness, you wacky mythical spider, you!). Then there was a dance performance and some girls played violin and flute. It was all cool and, best of all, brief. We also went and saw all the cool visual art projects the students have been working on. It was authentic in a way the other event wasn't.
4. Shameless Boston City Councilor John Tobin dared to show his face inside a public school after defending the practice of the city paying 2 million bucks a year to transport private school students to school while my kids' school doesn't even have copy paper or crayons. ("They should pick them up in limousines," he said. "Their parents are paying for a system they don't use." I don't know whether this is just shameless pandering to private school parents or actual stupidity, but, in either case, this weasel has lost my vote forever. Good luck on that mayoral bid, John!) Apparently he thinks public school parents are idiots who will vote for him despite his obvious contempt for public education just because he shows up in a suit and makes a lot of noise talking in the back of the auditorium while the kids are trying to perform. I'll say this for the suburbs--at least their weasel politicians run around lying about how they're going to improve public schools instead of bragging about their complicity in underfunding them.
