Gigs are far and few these days so I’m especially glad to have a four-week after-school residency at a South Side school – Donegan ES. I’ll do an hour of work/play and hopefully come up with a song about climate change. We’ll see.
The first session on Thursday was fairly scattered as an assembly was wrapping up in the gym, the site for my session. The coordinators were running around, getting snacks and shuffling the other groups off to class rooms. I got a corner in the gym.
My group is a posse of five 4th grade boys, a challenge unto itself. As it turns out, these boys are pretty bright and responsive. One boy speaks a minimum of English, so that will be my challenge for this session.
I started out with I Like Peanut Butter, talked about the guitar, We Gave Names to the Animals and introduced rhythm bag and the rain stick. Through out all this, we chatted, joked around and I got to know the kids better. A couple kids are especially bright and we enjoy our company.
The kids wanted to know if I knew any of the songs from the film Coco, especially Poco Loco. I said I’ll work it up for next week. And, upon reflection during a head-session early morning (trying to sleep), I thought it might be a good inspiration for our climate change songwriting challenge. We’re somewhat crazy to be using carbon-centric fuels when we have wind, sun and tidal technology.
I even had the Peter Gunn tune in my mind. Sheesh….
Who says I’m wasting my time asleep? I have my homework cut out for me.