For me, the Musical Museum in Deansboro, New York. It closed a few years back but lives vividly in my memory - rooms full of old pianos and music boxes and record players and jukeboxes and bizarre musical inventions. The organ room, where you could actually play old pump organs with cracked keyboards and yellowing stops - some of them sounded like asthmatic giants, some were unexpectedly sweet and full. The room lined with nickelodeons, where for a handful of change you could dance to tunes popular a century ago, and watch the keys ripple and the bellows puff and the little figurines inside swing around in circles. The Mississippi riverboat organ that would deafen you if you didn't put earplugs in before turning the crank. The little mechanical bird with ancient faded feathers that whistled a song and flipped its tail. All of those intricate and carefully fashioned instruments and musical machines, old and worn, but still making the most beautiful music. I would have lived at the Musical Museum gladly - I could hardly be convinced to leave when we visited. I miss it very much.
Family tree assignments are not a good idea for more reasons than adoption, in my opinion. In my case, for instance, I went through high school living with my mother and her partner, neither of whom were out, hence in public she was called my aunt. If I had gotten a family tree assignment, although I know they usually come up in elementary school, I would have had the choice of leaving my "aunt", a woman who was very dear to me, out of my represented family, outing my family and possibly making them lose their jobs (as they were involved in the local school system), or not completing the assignment. Children of LGBT parents in Florida, where I live, who are going through the adoption process, also have an additional sword of Damocles, since gay people are forbidden by law from adoption, and if they completed a truthful family tree, they could be taken away from their parents. I don't believe that deciding whether to lie, get a bad grade, or out your parents is a burden suitable for schoolchildren.
In an ideal world, where all gay families are out and proud and laws like the one in Florida are nonexistent, and teachers don't imply that the proper family tree model has a mommy and a daddy, but encourage representations of divorce and adoption and gay parents without stigma, a family tree would be a wonderful assignment. I just don't think that we're there yet.
And sometimes it works anyway: "take arms against a sea of troubles" is a mixed metaphor, nobody would actually take arms against the sea.
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea.
I went to a local production of the Mikado last night, and KoKo's "little list" included Tom DeLay (the audience thought that was great.) Fast work.
From "The Masque of Plenty" by Rudyard Kipling
SCENE - The wooded heights of Simla. The Incarnation of the Government of India in the raiment of the Angel of Plenty sings, to pianoforte accompaniment:
"How sweet is the shepherd's sweet life!
From the dawn to the even he strays -
He shall follow his sheep all the day
And his tongue shall be filled with praise.
(adagio dim.) Filled with praise!"
(largendo con sp.) Now this is the position,
Go make an inquisition
Into their real condition
As swiftly as ye may.
(p)Ay, paint our swarthy billions
The richest of vermilions
Ere two well-led cotillions
Have danced themselves away.
.......
Triumphal return to Simla of the Investigators, attired after the manner of Dionysus, leading a pet tiger-cub in wreaths of rhubarb-leaves, symbolical of India under medical treatment. They sing:
We have seen, we have written - behold it, the proof of our manifold toil!
In their hosts they assembled and told it - the tale of the Sons of the Soil.
We have said of the Sickness "Where is it?" and of Death "It is far from our ken,"
We have paid a particular visit to the affluent children of men.
We have trodden the mart and the well-curb - we have stooped to the bield and the byre;
And the King may the forces of Hell curb, for the People have all they desire!
.......
HIRED BAND, brasses only, full chorus:
God bless the Squire
And all his rich relations
Who teach us poor people
We eat our proper rations -
We eat our proper rations,
In spite of inundations,
Malarial exhalations,
And casual starvations,
We have, we have, they say we have -
We have our proper rations!
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