Smoke and Mirrors

Last night Chieko brought home a bunch of ice cream from Baskin-Robbins. In Japan, theoretically because 'Baskin-Robbins' is hard for people to say (what with the 'b's' and 'r's'), they refer to the chain as '31' (you can figure that one out yourself). The problem there is that the whole 'th' cluster is also hard for the Japanese to say, and they pronounce it as 'saty wan.' So there's your linguistic tidbit for the night. The relevance to this post, or rather to the above picture, is that in the bottom of the bag was a bunch of dry ice. I promptly looked up some experiments on the internet, and came up with the totally unoriginal 'put the dry ice in a glass of water' routine. We also put some dish soap in another cup of water, but that just made a big, bubbly, smoking mess. There just been all sorts of action in the kitchen around here the last few days.

In keeping with the 'smoke and mirrors,' 'things are not as they appear' theme, I had an epiphany this evening.

We are required at work to put on 'mini-workshops' once every couple of months. These are 1 hour classes that we can use to teach basically whatever we want as long as it pertains to English. They are a bit of work, but they offer us a nice chance to stray from our pretty regimented curriculum and do something a bit outside the box, or maybe to address whatever pet-peeve English mistake that our students always make.

Some folks do creative things, others do more practical, grammar or usage oriented workshops. I've got mine coming up at the end of December, still a ways away but I'm always trying to think of topics well ahead of time. I've been planning to bring my guitar in and do a workshop on Christmas songs. The timing's right, and a lot of western Christmas songs, albeit with Japanese lyrics, are popular here, and when I've used my guitar in classes before the students have been surprisingly receptive and willing to sing along.

So tonight I was having a strum when I remembered a really cool thing one of my teachers did in high school. When I was a junior or senior I took a journalism class. One day the teacher told us John Lennon was coming into class. Most of us had an idea who John Lennon was, but he spent some time filling us in on the details and giving us a better idea of who the person was. When he had us sufficiently interested he said he was leaving the room to go get Lennon. A few minutes later the teacher returned, fully dressed like John Lennon, speaking in a British accent, and the class proceeded to interview him. It was really cool. This evening I suddenly latched onto the idea of doing something similar for my mini-workshop in December.

I'm thinking Bob Dylan will be the special guest, come all the way to Japan to visit me and my students, field some questions, and play a few tunes. Dylan works on several levels. Not many of my 19 year old students know who he is, so they will have plenty of interview questions to ask. He's an interesting dude by any measure. And perhaps most importantly, I know lots of his songs, and all I have to do is sing like crap to sound anything like him.

So where to go from here? Start acquiring some Dylan-esque garb, particularly a suitable wig. Figure out which songs to sing that will be accessible enough for my students to have a chance in hell of understanding. For example, 'Desolation Row' is probably not going work. Also, must bone up on my Dylan biographical knowledge, and practice my 'Dylan voice.' Going to have to put on my copy of 'Don't Look Back' and start reciting lines. This should be fun.

It's perfectly cool outside tonight. Windows open, no A/C, no fan even. It's supposed to be pretty warm tomorrow but getting uniformly cool at night these days. This is the magical time I talked about before. And I'm very happy to be finishing the day on a positive note after the day I had today. Good night.