{"id":1114,"date":"2011-09-26T12:52:15","date_gmt":"2011-09-26T18:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/?p=1114"},"modified":"2014-05-04T09:08:18","modified_gmt":"2014-05-04T15:08:18","slug":"cb-chronicles-ii-roy-glee-club-and-the-baseball-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/cb-chronicles-ii-roy-glee-club-and-the-baseball-game\/","title":{"rendered":"CB Chronicles II: Roy, Glee Club, and The Baseball Game"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Charlie Brown experience almost got off the ground circa 1978, when my mother had been enslaved by the Boy Scouts of America to serve as Cub Scout Den Mother to myself and my fellow almost-Webelos. She got the idea of doing a production of You\u2019re a Good Man Charlie Brown<\/em> at church, but when she did the math, she realized there were only four boy parts \u2013 CB, Schroeder, Linus, and Snoopy – and five actual boys. I suggested adding a section to the show so one of the boys could play Roy, a minor character that only appeared in the strip when Charlie Brown went to camp. \"\"<\/a>I was even willing to write Roy a camp-oriented song, but my mother was wise enough to recognize both my songwriting limitations and the inevitable copyright lawsuits, so the show was shelved indefinitely. (Not scrapped altogether, mind you \u2013 just shelved. Behold more foreshadowing! Foreshadowing is a very effective literary device.)<\/p>\n

The tidbit that came out of that experience was that my mother had wanted to cast me not as Charlie Brown, which was, I thought, my destiny, but rather as Snoopy, which she insisted was a better part. She was right, of course, but I drew the line at her suggestion that I should study how my dogs behaved in order to research the role. My dogs spent far more time licking things than I thought would be appropriate in my interpretation of the character.<\/p>\n

But life went on, and I was neither Charlie Brown nor Snoopy until about two years later, when I was asked to sing a solo for the Los Angeles Children\u2019s Choir, which I had joined the year previous against my will. (That was my mother\u2019s influence again. Other kids my age were playing little league, but my disastrous track record with organized sports required an alternative extracurricular solution to get me out of the house.)<\/p>\n

Serendipitously, the L.A. Children\u2019s Choir had a history with the Charlie Brown show, having produced the musical at Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in Hollywood the year before. In their concerts, then, they included two excerpts from the show \u2013 \u201cGlee Club Rehearsal\u201d and \u201cThe Baseball Game.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGlee Club Rehearsal, \u201d which may well be the funniest number in the entire show, involves Schroeder leading his fellow Peanuts in a rehearsal for tomorrow\u2019s school assembly performance. While singing \u201cHome on the Range,\u201d CB, Linus, Lucy, and Patty slip in musical asides that continue their feud about a stolen pencil and Linus\u2019 labeling of Patty as \u201can enigma,\u201d which causes problems because none of the other characters knows what an enigma is.*<\/p>\n

For some reason, they changed the whole thing to reflect the idea that this wasn\u2019t happening in the Peanuts universe, but rather in a children\u2019s choir. So the stolen pencil became a stolen sheet of music, the whole enigma thing was mangled beyond recognition in ways I can\u2019t remember, and the line \u201cwhat are you trying to do, stifle my freedom of speech?\u201d became \u201cwhat are you trying to do, ruin my chances to sing?\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, it had all the Peanuts and all the funny drained out of it. Why? I guess it’s just one more enigma.*<\/p>\n

The one funny part I do remember, though, is that the centerpiece of the whole number was a very nice kid who couldn\u2019t carry a tune if it had handles on it, so the director gave him a part in the manufactured drama in order to give him something to do. When he wasn\u2019t in the number, the director called him our \u201ctacit\u201d singer, meaning he should just stand there and mouth the words and not befoul the choir with his actual voice.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cThe Baseball Game\u201d was far more faithful to its source material, and it involved me \u2013 FINALLY \u2013 playing Charlie Brown, the (non-licking) role I was born to play. The rest of the choir was my baseball team, with My Esteemed Colleague leaping out at one point to shout \u201cM!\u201d with ludicrously precise pronunciation when the players were called upon to spell the word \u201cTEAM.\u201d Without prompting, My Esteemed Colleague also decided to play a janitor at the end of the song, sweeping up after everyone else has abandoned poor Charlie Brown when he single-handedly loses the game.<\/p>\n

My problem, though, was that my voice had entered that Peter-Brady-mid-puberty-cracking-at-the-high-notes range, and I couldn\u2019t really sing the piece, per se. I pointed that out to the director, who told me that Rex Harrison couldn\u2019t hit the high notes, either, so he spoke all of his songs. I tried that once, I think, and I found that while that might work when you\u2019re performing \u201cWhy Can\u2019t a Woman Be More Like a Man,\u201d its application to \u201cThe Baseball Game\u201d is iffy at best. So, instead, I dropped parts of the song by a full octave, which didn\u2019t sound much better. But what did that matter? My Charlie Brown journey had begun, and July 13, 1985 was a full five years away. (More foreshadowing. If you don\u2019t know what foreshadowing is, look it up.)<\/p>\n

* e\u00b7nig\u00b7ma<\/strong>
\n[uh-nig-muh]
\nnoun, plural -mas, -ma\u00b7ta<\/em> \u2002[-muh-tuh]
\n1. a puzzling or inexplicable occurrence or situation: His disappearance is an enigma that has given rise to much speculation.
\n<\/em>2. a person of puzzling or contradictory character: To me he has always been an enigma, one minute completely insensitive, the next moved to tears.<\/em> (I think this is the one that applies to Patty.)
\n3. a saying, question, picture, etc., containing a hidden meaning; riddle.
\n4. ( initial capital letter ) a German-built enciphering machine developed for commercial use in the early 1920s and later adapted and appropriated by German and other Axis powers for military use through World War II. (Maybe this applies to Patty, too.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MyCharlie Brown experience almost got off the ground circa 1978, when my mother had been enslaved by the Boy Scouts of America to serve as Cub Scout Den Mother to myself and my fellow almost-Webelos. She got the idea of doing a production of You\u2019re a Good Man Charlie Brown<\/em> at church, but when she ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1114"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3222,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114\/revisions\/3222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}