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FAIRFIELD COUNTY, Conn. Do you have any folk talents? I do. I can play that annoying popcorn song by alternately flicking both of my cheeks with my fingertips, manipulating the size and shape of my mouth and making melodious, mellifluous music (sort of).
I can do this thing where I combine finger snapping and hitting the palm of my right hand against the side of my left hand to imitate a galloping horse or "The William Tell Overture." And my proudest achievement of all -- I can combine whistling and a low hum to create something that sounds remarkably like a gravely ill foghorn. It baffles science.Now, I will never play Carnegie Hall, dressed in a swallowtail coat and striped pants flicking my cheeks, snapping my fingers or imitating a foghorn. I know how surprised you are to hear that. Folk talents, by their very nature, are destined never to strut the stage. But they do make regular appearances on the "stage of life."You'll be sitting in your cubicle at work, bored out of your skull, and you'll finally break down and start talking to that guy who sits across from you and eats that odd-smelling food which he carts in every morning in old Tupperware containers. One thing will lead to another and before long you will mention -- out of sheer desperation because you don't want to hear any more about his mother-in-law's impending visit and her lack of front teeth -- how you can thump your head and get something that sounds vaguely like a jug band that has been buried alive.
"Cool!" he will shout (I told you he was weird), "do it!" Now, it makes absolutely no difference where you are, the time of day, who is around or if a nuclear exchange with Pakistan has just begun, when someone asks you to perform your folk talent, you are biologically hardwired to say, "OK, sure." It's part of the reptilian brain stem, right back there at the base of your skull where your kid brother hit you with a can of peaches that time. You are flattered and must say yes.So, you find yourself sitting there in your office, the business of the nation being conducted all around you while you thump your head and make a noise that is possibly recognizable as "We Are the World."
Your neighbor nods approvingly because this is entertainment. It's rotten entertainment, but it beats playing solitaire on your desktop for the fifth hour in a row -- barely, but it does beat it. Soon, the noise -- excuse me the music -- draws other cellmates and before you know it, a little knot of bedraggled humanity is enjoying the oldest known form of show biz.
After you're done, your head pounding, you get a little round of applause and smiles. There is nothing better -- you have just experienced your own little version of the reason Mick Jagger is still doing his rooster strut on stage at the age of 111. Your audience loves you and has forgotten for the moment how you loused up that presentation last week and they all had to stay late to fix it.
Invariably, somebody else says, "I can imitate a lion!" And the crowd, growing into a folk talent mob says, "Do it!" So now, Bob from HR does his lion -- it's not a bad lion and you barely notice that he has hair plugs where his mane should be. He gets the love too.
Then Shirley does her imitation of Sammy Davis Jr., Ted bends his thumbs backwards to touch his wrists, Molly wraps her right leg around her neck and hops around the office and Tom rolls his eyes back in his head so he looks like a zombie or Little Orphan Annie.Eventually, the boss pops out of her office and you think you're all in trouble, until she asks if you'd like to see her snap her fingers and hit her hands together to sound like the "William Tell Overture."
Of course, everybody says yes, but there is a twinge of sadness because you all know that this has to be the finale -- after all, she's the headliner and, in show biz, the headliner always closes out the show. She does a passable job (mine is better), there is applause and the crowd breaks up and goes back to business. Your neighbor goes to heat up his weird-smelling Tupperware lunch and you go back to lousing up next week's presentation.
But everybody has a little smile because they have all shared something human and silly and wonderful. We all have something we can do and we love to show it off. It's just a matter of finding the right stage and the right audience. People expect an awful lot at Carnegie Hall, but if they're just standing next to the fax machine, a gravely ill foghorn can sound pretty darn good.
Kurt Ringquist is the author of numerous scraps of doggerel, superfluous information and questionable prose. His work has appeared in Kansas Quarterly as well as at the bottom of bird cages in and around Fairfield County. He is the former publisher of the LW Flyer, a satirical newspaper with as many as seven readers, all coincidentally named Ringquist. Comments and questions may be directed to Kurt at kurt@kurtswords.com. For more nonsense along these lines, visit www.kurtswords.com.
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