I’m working my way through Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood. It’s the most entertaining memoir I think I’ve ever read. Here’s one story from it I just had to share, and since this is my only audience here goes:
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Our Home Economics teacher, Miss Ricker, was a humourless person for whom dinner was a green thing, a white thing, a yellow thing, and a brown thing on every plate, no matter what they tasted like. Clothes were inner seam finishes and linings, not style. For our Grade Twelve class she rashly allowed us to vote on a “special project,” which she herself hoped would be the making of stuffed animals with lots of curved seams, to be given to sick children. But voting is a risky business. I’d seen enough of curved seams by then to fear them, so I persuaded part of the class to vote for putting on a Home Economics opera instead of labouring over the demanding cloth tigers and elephants. Miss Ricker, noticeably bewildered but with her foot caught in the fox trap of democracy, said yes, we could do the opera, but it had to actually be about Home Economics.
It was. The heroines of Synthesia were three synthetic fabrics called Orlon, Nylon, and Dacron, the daughters of Old King Coal, as all were coal or oil derivatives. King Coal, his princesses, and his queen indulged in some singing, most notably a song about laundry. “Fabrics need a swim in the suds, it makes them feel just like new—whites are whiter, colours are brighter, take on a brilliant hue…” The plot came along in the person of Sir William Wooley, who had a terrible problem: he shrank from washing! This was ultimately solved by a wedding with Orlon and the production of a new synthetic/wool blend in the form of a bundle of cloth, joyously celebrated. Wild applause, the audience being the other members of Home Economics and several bemused teachers.
Once I was a published writer and was going about the country doing literary events, an original cast member might pop up out of the audience and we would burst into a Synthesia song. The laundry chorus, set to the barcarolle from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, was especially memorable. I once sang it in an elevator to Richard Bradshaw, the late artistic director of the Canadian Opera Company, and he said I had ruined Offenbach for him forever.
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I soooo love Atwood!