The Arts.

January 06, 2004, 11:12 am

At our company meeting this morning, a girl from the Fund for the Arts came to talk to us about withdrawal-from-paycheck donations. And the whole thing kindof weirded me out.

First of all, I hate it when people talk about “the Arts.” It's like I'm allergic to it and when anyone says “the Arts,” I automatically have a negative reaction. There's something inherently condescending in those words.

Second, the girl spoke to us as if we were cretins that knew nothing of music. I was involved with music in high school for nine years. My sister was in the Louisville Youth Orchestra. My uncle is the tympanist for the Utah Symphony Orchestra. I'm in two bands that play original music, some songs written and/or arranged by me. Whatever.

And then she told us this story about how when she was a kid growing up in Paducah, she chose to devote a lot of her time to learning to play the saxophone instead of doing drugs or getting into trouble. The rest of her story was boring so I imagined another in which her lifelong dream (at 12 years old) was to play saxophone in an orchestra only to learn there are no saxophones in the orchestra! Kinda like a music-nerd episode of the Twilight Zone.