Read Online A Field Guide to Awkward Silences by Alexandra Petri - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Alexandra Petri
Ads: Link
Adele mask and firing a plastic gun—one of those fake guns with “BANG!” on a flag that comes out of the muzzle. It was definitely something. Roy won.
• • •
I tried to make friends with the other whistlers, but every time I thought I had a handle on them as characters they would turn around and pull the rug out from under me. One woman was there from Canada. She seemed friendly. We both admitted we had never done this before on a professional level and were “just here for fun.”
(There was a white-haired lady sitting next to her. “Ah,” I said, “you must be the WHISTLER’S MOTHER.”
She gave me a blank look. “What?”)
I was proud that I had isolated and identified at least one other normal person. Then she stood up at the Whistlers’ Dinner and announced that “I hold the Guinness World Record for the highest note ever whistled, and for the longest time whistling a single note—almost 24 hours!—which my swami encouraged me to do as a test of my mettle and a quest of self-discovery.”
Oh good, I thought. Yes. Well. Good.
The other normal person was named Maggie. She was from Indiana and could befriend anyone at the drop of a hat. At some point in your journey from childhood to adulthood, usually somewhere on the childhood end, someone sits you down and says something stern about Not Talking to Strangers because Who Knows What Might Happen, Maybe They’ve Got a Trunks Full of Axes, Maybe They’re Skinwalkers Who Have Faces with No Eyes or Mouths but They Can See You.
Or, in my case, they administer the lesson in two blows: a Berenstain Bears book about Stranger Danger called
The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers
(Brother Bear almost gets into a stranger’s car to see his “model plane”!) and another book called
You Can’t Be Too Careful
, which consisted entirely of shortened newspaper accounts of gruesome accidental deaths. Neither of these had really sunk in, in my case—just a few months earlier, I had given my number to someone with a neck tattoo, named Galaxy, whom I met at a bus stop.
But at least someone had
tried
. With Maggie it seemed that this had never happened. She greeted people at the neighboring gas station/convenience store like long-lost friends. She talked to some policemen as we crossed the street and somehow we wound up whistling “Amazing Grace” to them. She was the Midwesterner foreigners imagine all Midwesterners are like but most of us can only dream of being.
My other friend, Lars, was a mustached paterfamilias with a full rack of shoulder-chips. He was still upset, he told me, that a palate whistler had been denied the title a few years earlier. That man had been incredible. That man had been so good that Lars had rushed the stage and mobbed him before the man’s wife could even get there. That man had whistled “Free Bird.” That man had been robbed, robbed! It was because the judges were biased. That man’s whistling was unlike anything you had ever heard or would ever hear again.
• • •
The host of most of the festivities was a New York whistler who seemed to have traveled directly from the Borscht Belt sixty years ago, without stopping to update his jokes. “He’s from Tsingtao,” he said of the Chinese contestant. “Where they make the beer.” He introduced a Japanese contestant as “one of our ninjas.” This seemed to be exactly what everyone expected. People got a real kick out of his joke about how he, a whistling champion, hailed cabs. (“Taxi!” he mimicked, raising a hand. “Taxi!”)
He stalled for me while I tried to get my music ready. There are few places left on Earth that still require you to use a CD to play music, but the International Whistlers Convention is one of them. I had not come prepared. Instead, I had the tracks on my iPhone, and the sound guy could not get them to play.
I had decided to whistle “Singing in the Rain” because after attending Whistling School I realized that
• • •
I tried to make friends with the other whistlers, but every time I thought I had a handle on them as characters they would turn around and pull the rug out from under me. One woman was there from Canada. She seemed friendly. We both admitted we had never done this before on a professional level and were “just here for fun.”
(There was a white-haired lady sitting next to her. “Ah,” I said, “you must be the WHISTLER’S MOTHER.”
She gave me a blank look. “What?”)
I was proud that I had isolated and identified at least one other normal person. Then she stood up at the Whistlers’ Dinner and announced that “I hold the Guinness World Record for the highest note ever whistled, and for the longest time whistling a single note—almost 24 hours!—which my swami encouraged me to do as a test of my mettle and a quest of self-discovery.”
Oh good, I thought. Yes. Well. Good.
The other normal person was named Maggie. She was from Indiana and could befriend anyone at the drop of a hat. At some point in your journey from childhood to adulthood, usually somewhere on the childhood end, someone sits you down and says something stern about Not Talking to Strangers because Who Knows What Might Happen, Maybe They’ve Got a Trunks Full of Axes, Maybe They’re Skinwalkers Who Have Faces with No Eyes or Mouths but They Can See You.
Or, in my case, they administer the lesson in two blows: a Berenstain Bears book about Stranger Danger called
The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers
(Brother Bear almost gets into a stranger’s car to see his “model plane”!) and another book called
You Can’t Be Too Careful
, which consisted entirely of shortened newspaper accounts of gruesome accidental deaths. Neither of these had really sunk in, in my case—just a few months earlier, I had given my number to someone with a neck tattoo, named Galaxy, whom I met at a bus stop.
But at least someone had
tried
. With Maggie it seemed that this had never happened. She greeted people at the neighboring gas station/convenience store like long-lost friends. She talked to some policemen as we crossed the street and somehow we wound up whistling “Amazing Grace” to them. She was the Midwesterner foreigners imagine all Midwesterners are like but most of us can only dream of being.
My other friend, Lars, was a mustached paterfamilias with a full rack of shoulder-chips. He was still upset, he told me, that a palate whistler had been denied the title a few years earlier. That man had been incredible. That man had been so good that Lars had rushed the stage and mobbed him before the man’s wife could even get there. That man had whistled “Free Bird.” That man had been robbed, robbed! It was because the judges were biased. That man’s whistling was unlike anything you had ever heard or would ever hear again.
• • •
The host of most of the festivities was a New York whistler who seemed to have traveled directly from the Borscht Belt sixty years ago, without stopping to update his jokes. “He’s from Tsingtao,” he said of the Chinese contestant. “Where they make the beer.” He introduced a Japanese contestant as “one of our ninjas.” This seemed to be exactly what everyone expected. People got a real kick out of his joke about how he, a whistling champion, hailed cabs. (“Taxi!” he mimicked, raising a hand. “Taxi!”)
He stalled for me while I tried to get my music ready. There are few places left on Earth that still require you to use a CD to play music, but the International Whistlers Convention is one of them. I had not come prepared. Instead, I had the tracks on my iPhone, and the sound guy could not get them to play.
I had decided to whistle “Singing in the Rain” because after attending Whistling School I realized that
Similar Books
