Spirit Week Music T Friday: Formal "Police" Report

There's an unbloggable inside joke involved in today's post but since I can't write about that I'll discuss the shenanigans involved in trying to keep up with today's Spirit Week: Formal Friday festivities and reconcile it with the "Music T Friday" habit I'd started before the hiatus. To start with, I accessorized my t-shirt with my Parent-Teacher Interview suit:

Music T = check. Formal Friday = check.

And then I tried to pinpoint moments in my life soundtracked by The Police. I've always appreciated the fact that Sting started out as a teacher and I imagine Mr. Sumner would've been a fun guy, if a little distracted. The band's music has permeated so much culture that I was immediately able to snag several flashbulb memories associated with certain songs by The Police:

1) Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic - Cupid "End of an Eros" (1998)

As I've met and become friends with more musicians, my understanding of the value of TV and film licensing of music for both monetary gain and exposure has deepened. As a television viewer, I appreciate the difference between a good song and the ideal song in pivotal scenes. At the end of episode 9 of the short-lived Jeremy Piven series, there is a mundane moment spun into love-match-making magic where a jaded and embittered cosmologist (that's space not make-up) turns to face his perfect mate under a spectacular canopy of an astrological observatory's laser show as this Police song cues. Over-the-top is under-rated. Moments like that one are what television and film were made for.

2) Roxanne - Moulin Rouge! (2001)

 

Because my parents' grasp of English was sketchy at best when they came to Canada, I heard a lot of music played as a kid with lyrics that went well over my head until I was older. (The best example of this is probably Cher's "Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves" which I tried to explain to my mother when I was in my 20s and Mom just wouldn't believe it.) I had heard Roxanne played multiple times throughout my life but the lyrics didn't hit home until the scene in Moulin Rouge! which, quite honestly, felt like it deviated from the central plot. I understand it was there to make Satine's circumstances clear (and to showcase some awesome dancing) but I've always felt it was a mis-step on Luhrmann's part.

3) Don't Stand So Close to Me - Glee "Ballads"

Like I said before, I figure Mr. Sumner would've been an ace teacher and the music video takes The Police back into a classroom to tell this Nabakov-esque story. And while I'm not a fan of Glee any longer, I was back in Season 1 and the mash-up of "Don't Stand" and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap's "Young Girl" was brilliant.

4) Message in A Bottle 

I've always loved the story of this song where one voice in the middle of nowhere receives a "hundred billion" responses. It's a bit of a metaphor for the social media of the world today. We are so used to instant responses today that it is unthinkable to have to wait a day (forget a year) for a reaction to confirm that we actually exist, that what we say and/or do matters. But we keep putting it out there, don't we?

Spirit Week: Gender Bender Day

I honestly wonder if at some point we'll have a full-out, openly declared Cross-Dressing Day in Spirit Week. Sadly, it'll probably still be considered a bigger social risk for guys than girls. Today's Spirit Week gender bending was for girls to wear blue and boys to wear pink. 

With the growing recognition of Pink Shirt Day, observed on the last Wednesday of February (at least it is in Canada), which makes a stand against bullying in all its forms, you'd think (hope) that the colour pink would've be de-listed as an stereotyped indication of femininity. As a (female) child, I remember having a distinct dislike for pink myself. And I don't think I was the only girl to feel that way. Of course, being a girl, gender bending was, to a point, acceptable. I was a tomboy of a child for much of my school career to the point that my mother was once congratulated on having two healthy and strong sons AND I was once stopped from going into a ladies washroom at a restaurant. As a teen, I still preferred practical clothing to the fussiness of fashion-awareness.

The gender-fying of clothing has an interesting history. Like Coca-Cola's role in our modern day North American visual of Santa Claus (my favourite snippet from the Wiki entry: "Images of Santa Claus were further cemented through Haddon Sundblom's depiction of him for The Coca-Cola Company's Christmas advertising. The popularity of the image spawned urban legends that Santa Claus was in fact invented by Coca-Cola. Nevertheless, Santa Claus and Coca-Cola have been closely associated, except for 2005 when Santa was replaced in advertising by Coca-Cola's polar bears."), advertisers and marketers had a direct influence on assigning specific colours to girls and boys. The linked article from the Smithsonian is fascinating. I especially like the comment on the rising consumerism of children.

So my bluest shirt (that hasn't already been on this blog) is not only blue but features characters known specifically for being blue, yet happy, The Smurfs. The tee is a Kerri-gift and more than just retro thanks to a film reboot in 2011. Also, a tangential point on the theme of gender-fying, Smurfette is one of those anomalies in children's programming that few people think about unless it's in hindsight. (Mind you, I vaguely remember an episode where Smurfette's origin was revealed that she was a Pandora-like trap made by villain Gargamel to ensnare/corrupt the Smurfs. I could be making it up completely but if she was a Mark 1.0 Cylon Fembot reprogrammed by Brainy Smurf and assimilated into Smurf society, it does kind of explain a few things.)

Finally, because any discussion of gender needs a Whedon connection, and because this video fell out of the sky and onto my Facebook newsfeed just yesterday, (and because he really is my Big Damn Wordsmithing Hero), here is Joss Whedon addressing the 2013 commencement class of Wesleyan University from last Sunday. He doesn't exactly address gender issues but I'd like to think that in "accepting duality to earn identity" on a macro-level, we would all recognize the inherent strength and value in every member of society - no matter their gender, age, race or creed - and, instead, work to grow the connections that really define us as individuals, collectives and communities. Wouldn't that be Smurf-tastic?

Spirit Week: Colour Wars

Truth be told, I always get vestigial tremors of Miklowitz's "The War Between the Classes" when Colour Wars is declared for Spirit Week. No ranking involved here - each grade gets a colour assigned and on Colour Wars day, you wear the colour of your grade to see which grade has the most spirit. Teachers usually get neutral territory like black, white, or school colours (black & gold). We were given the option of black or white today. I went dark. And sparkly.

My Dreamgirls shirt should be a collectors' item, meaning that I should probably wear it less and with more care than I do. When the Jennifer Hudson movie opened in 2006, the studios promoted it by running it on a super limited "roadshow" release in three select cities - New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Being in Vancouver, I sent a proxy - my brother, who was whiling away his time as a paralegal in SF at the time. I bought the ticket, he attended and picked up the included souvenir lithograph and program that I coveted. Generous soul that he is, he bought me a t-shirt too. The lithograph is framed and hung in my upstairs hallway. The program is filed away safely with my Broadway and West End collection. And this t-shirt gets worn at least once a month.

Which brings me to the difficulty with dressing in all black. Like green, which the human eye can supposedly distinguish the most shades of any colour, black is hard to match and, counter-intuitively, easily clashes with itself. My well-worn black tee is tinged more grey than my cardigan which is tinged more "brown" than my slacks which are pinstriped black on black. Don't even get me started on my socks and boots. It's a good thing students barely register teachers as people, forget fashion plates.

To end on a Big Thought: this trivial clothing experiment supports a generalizable adage. Variety is good. Contrast is great. The more diversity we embrace, the stronger (and more interesting) we become. So maybe the fact that Vancouver's largest theatre company is currently staging Dreamgirls with a slightly un-Motown-looking ensemble should probably direct audiences to look for red-hot innovation rather than stone-cold imitation in this production.