The OK End of Funny Town

by Mark Polanzak

  It is not our mission to “take over” the town, as some in the media have suggested. Our mission, as we stated from the beginning, which everyone at first appreciated, was, has always been, is, and will continue to be to educate the citizens of this fine community, of which we are fiercely loyal members. We are proud educators. If our practices have changed, if our offerings have deviated from “the norm,” this is in no way intended to harm anyone or the community as a whole. To the contrary: we aim to educate and help, yes, help everyone in this town. Some critics have decided that we are now aiming toward a revolution, but we are humble. Revolution has never been our pursuit. We love where we live and would change not one thing about it. We simply wish to offer, to those who desire it, the best education we can provide in whatever field they choose. It is not “radical” to create curricula suited for the chosen ambitions of so many of our citizens. If we were harming individuals, then we would see a drop in enrollment. However, we see only demand and gratitude. It may sound as if we are defending ourselves, and to some extent we are, and to some extent we are resentful at having to do so. And although we refuse to apologize for creating just what we have a need for, the staff, board, faculty, and loyal students of the Community School feel pressured to clear their names. We never thought anyone would label what we do “increasingly dangerous.” Our critics claimed that there was nothing to learn from our courses. They claimed to not need these lessons. They believed that they were all fine, believed themselves to be well, believed they had nothing to learn. Our opposition leveled accusations that Our New Community School was creating a new “class” of dissatisfied people. Honest people. But we are proud of our brave students. We will not go away, as some clearly want from us. We will not hang our heads. But we will, also, not pretend to be unaware of the vicious opinions that are circulating.

  Form

  There is a difference between who we are on the inside of this wall and who we are when we walk out the sliding glass doors of the main entrance, to the other side, to the sidewalks. Within these walls, we are a dedicated and passionate group of educators and students. On the other side, we are people living lives, having successes and failures, squeezing avocados at the market, all on our own, without a mentor. But this division was an impediment to some courses. We have a policy at the Community School of allowing any individual associated with the endeavor, from board member to night security guard, to make suggestions that improve our level of education. One such suggestion from our web manager, Keith, for a New New Practical in Achieving Geographical Disorientation in the Modern World, we believed to be a breakthrough, the kind of idea that seemed so incisive that we were shocked not to have thought it before. Keith requested to teach a course outside the main campus. He noted that wisdom could be imparted in the classroom, but many of his insights came to him in the alleys of our town, out in the park, in the sunlight, or during a rainstorm. If he could have students meet in the park, where they could, for the allotted time, wander and disorient in a natural environment, the students’ appreciation and advancement would accelerate. We sought real-world application of our most important subjects, a chance for students to learn not only the academic but the applicable. To do so, we ventured out of the classroom. After content, we experimented with form. It didn’t make sense, in most cases, to meet in a white-walled classroom with desks and air conditioning units and fluorescent lights humming. The very essence of a New Practical course is to prepare students for the intellectual lives they will someday lead. And almost nothing is applicable in a classroom on the third floor of a schoolhouse. The classroom is a vacuum, a space where information flows most easily and the actual application of information proves impossible. We reassigned our Encountering Scents to Conjure Unidentified Nostalgia class to meet at scheduled class times in gardens and kitchens around town; our Feeling Small in the Scope of History course to meet amid the ruins of centuries-old forts and barracks; our Cultivating Irrational Fear class to meet at the hospital; our Observing Art While Lamenting Why God Did Not Bestow Upon Us Talent class to meet in museums and galleries; our Acute Regretting of the Cheap and Ruinous Affair courses in bars and cafés and motel rooms. Students initially showed up to the forests and museums of our town with their backpacks and satchels, looking for numbers on doors. They were stressed when finding the meeting places, often asking museum patrons if they had seen a group of students. But eventually, the students settled. They reluctantly gave up their notebooks and pens, their books and desks. They eased into it. The instructors were patient, allowing students several more minutes to arrive than they usually would in the classroom setting. Over time, everyone realized that learning did not happen solely in the classroom, that education could be refreshed, that meaning could come through in more and more environments, in these new forms. We razed all buildings on campus but the main schoolhouse. Our very first traditional courses—the poetry, the computer science, the history—with their dwindling student numbers, continued to meet in white-walled classrooms with a window slightly cracked, letting a sliver of the outside in.

  Structure

  Empowerment and confidence are the most useful things to gain from a course. If a student feels comfortable with his or her own ideas, confident that he or she can contribute to a field of study—whether it is another institution’s traditional offering of British Romantic Poetry or our New New Practical of Picking a Daisy While Feeling Ugly—then the course has succeeded in bestowing upon the student all it can hope to. The role of teacher and student will always imply a disparity in authority, in command of subject. Instructors observed that students continually deferred to them. And so, many instructors took to disguising themselves in the New New Classroom. The teacher would not lecture in the galleries and restaurants and subway stations. Instead, an instructor would arrive and pretend to be meeting with the group like any other student. When no instruction came, when no one announced him or herself as the leader of the class, the groups panicked and sometimes dissolved. There were no syllabi. We didn’t anticipate the level of anxiety caused by the lack of syllabi. Many students reported the need for a clearer set of expectations. Many students walked out of New New Classes. But those students who continued to attend the classes that met in the park, on benches, under oak trees to learn to Talk About the Weather and Look Down to Hide a Reddening Face and Welling Tears with more ease, those who stuck it out reported learning “actual tools.” And this is when we saw critics suggest that we were misleading our students, pulling the wool over their eyes, insulting the educational system itself, rebelling. They said we shouldn’t delude our students into thinking that these careers were within reach.

  Over time, students became comfortable with no identifiable instructor. They taught themselves, confident that an expert was among the group and guiding the lesson unnoticed. Groups of students gathered at the bar to Remember Childhood Dreams and Eye Strangers With Growing Envy. They realized that they had more learning to do; they could learn from each other, be experts themselves. The instructors, too, noted a refreshing take on subjects they had previously taken to be their forte. Instructors learned. Students taught. Walking in the woods, groups of people asked each other if anyone knew How to Return Home to Apologize Too Late; riding on buses, students looked out the window to View Passing Row Homes of Impoverished Neighborhoods and Feel Unjustified for Personal Sadness. And when class ended, they headed home to share what they had learned.

  Time Frame

  As if we were the arbiters of education, we, the Community School, were blind to the idea that learning could occur outside class start and class end. Many in town believed that we had vanished when the brochures ceased to be printed, when our website disappeared, when we no longer listed the courses that met outside the crumbling schoolhouse. Time was our final experiment. Now, every moment became teachable. Randomly, while playing tennis in the park, a person may, all of a sudden, Acknowledge Loss of Youth. All of a sudden, in line at the post office, a person may reveal
him- or herself to be a teacher while Gripping a Long Overdo Love Letter to be Finally Sent. Buying milk and eggs can be done with deeper Distraction from Lost Ambition. Discussing a television show with a spouse can alloy with Resignation for a Life With the Wrong Person. Our classes happened spontaneously. Washing a mug from a zoo in California, right then, something educational about Realizing It Is Too Late to Take the Risk. Checking the mailbox and never seeing the letter in order to Confirm the Missed Opportunity. Sipping coffee can become a significant moment of Foolish Thoughts Over Legacy. One-on-one courses of one, two, three seconds in length. Examining one’s job benefits portfolio, quickly, a single person, teacher and student combined, squints through her reading glasses and calls class to attention in her mind, lecturing silently on the subject of Replacing Hope with Responsibility. We will not go away. We cannot stop. We want to help you. We want to be helped.

  Sometimes, a member of the community will pop in at the old schoolhouse, where we began our pursuit to educate. Sometimes, people sign up for a foreign language course. And while reciting the declensions of a particular verb, students and teacher alike will look out that crackedopen window and believe this is the only way, the proper way to learn.

  CAMP REDO

  I’m going for the pussy badge. It’s my last one left. I got the midnight-rendezvous-by-tire-swing-over-water badge; the getting-caught-running-through-girls’-cabin-withunderwear-on-head; the sneak-a-beer-on-roof-of-messhall. All I need is the pussy badge. And you know what? I’m going to get it.

  We are allowed personal calls on Sundays. Mostly I call Steven to check in on the restaurant, and my wife to get an update on the kids. When I call, I talk like a thirteen-year-old (required for the “full experience”). I say: “Hey, Susie, how’s it going? (Then I pause like I don’t care), and then say: “Yeah, yeah, I love you, too, Sue. Gotta run.” And then I hang up the phone and run to hang out with my new best friends on the dock. When I run, I run like a thirteen-year-old over to the pond (legs flailing out at the sides, almost a skip). I was taught in orientation to jump from time to time for no particular reason, like the spontaneity of being a new teen. I got the running-like-a-carefree-kid badge real early on here.

  At the dock, they’re all wearing swim trunks circa late ’80s, and the girls (women) have their hair in that era’s style, too. Scooter (Dr. Phillips) hasn’t done well in completing badge missions, so he’s still working on push-new-best-friend-into-water badge. Me, I’ve got my eyes on Betsy (Professor Stevenson from the small college in the city). She’s going to give me my pussy badge, and I’m going to give her her penis badge. I shove her in the water, tell her she’s an idiot, and then ask her to meet me back here after lights out. She giggles and says, “Eww gross,” and, “No way.” I know she’ll be there.

  It’s a catch-22, in a way. When you get all the badges, you’re done. So, you can’t stay. But until you get all the badges, you haven’t fulfilled your lost childhood. So, you see? I have mixed feelings as I skip whimsically (for the full experience) in the shadows down to the water. I know that I have to get the pussy badge, and Betsy needs the penis, but then it will all be over.

  I remove my sandals and throw away my gum and dip my feet, up to my knees, in the cool pond water, making ripples in the moon’s line of white on the black satin. Luckily, no one is around when I break character and remove my oversized baseball cap and rub my bald head. I catch myself and put the oversized cap back on (askew of course). My camp-issued T-shirt, bearing the logo of my favorite sports team (a team I’ve never heard of) hangs over my nylon shorts, covering my gut (supposedly making me look like a fat kid, not an overweight restaurant manager). I wait, trying to think about capture-the-flag and shaving cream on my best friends’ hands, and warm water to make them piss—but I keep thinking about where I will go tomorrow, after I get Betsy’s pussy badge. Sue, the kids, my job, bills, all the dreams I gave up. And the thought of a wife, kids, a job (my wife, my kids, my job), it hurts. So, I continue to think about batting for the baseball team on my shirt, hitting home runs and playing for the rest of my life, having wishes. I think about building giant Lincoln Log cabins, snow forts, tree houses, and living in them with my best friends forever and ever. I skip a stone, picture ladybugs, and sharply dream of catching fireflies, blocking it all out for just one more night. Then, I hear someone step onto the dock behind me.

  She doesn’t say a word. She won’t meet my eyes, awkward, looking all around, glancing behind her, appearing nervous about getting caught (she’s good at this). I try to try looking cool (in the frame of mind of a thirteen-year-old) and don’t say anything either. Betsy sits down next to me, leaving a foot of space on the dock in between our wrinkled bodies and youthful personas. She knows it, and I know it: I’m getting in her pants, and she’s getting into mine. But I don’t want to leave this camp. I want to fail this mission. But I can’t tell if she does.

  “You got some gum?” I ask, looking at the water.

  “Yeah, here you go.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out nothing, mimes removing gum from a pack, then hands it to me (she’s really good).

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” She laughs a little, then sighs and swings her legs, skimming the top of the black pond with her toes. I like the look of her thigh all of a sudden and reach around her waist and kiss her on the mouth, pull back, remove the gum, throw it, and then push my hand up her shirt and feel my face heat up. She takes her shirt off, and I am awed. I’ve never seen boobs before. I reach down her frayed jean shorts, undoing the button and pulling on the zipper. This is so new, so scary. What is down there, under her shorts? How will it feel? What should I do? Then I touch it—it feels so unclear—and before I even realize that I have finally graduated, I remove the badge from her shorts. I lean back, catching my breath, allowing her to pull down my nylon shorts. She reaches down and removes the penis badge, and we hug. We sit there, still, a little proud, a little foolish. We realize we have to leave this place, and we hug. Hug and cry, and get scared for the future.

  A PROPER HUNGER

  Although we had all seen the bubbling tanks with rubber-banded and sullen lobsters at the front of the house in many restaurants—displayed to assure the patron that the crustaceans would be fresh killed and were living, however pitifully, mere moments before being consumed, producing the effect of allowing the wild outside world into the ordered environs of the eating establishment, and adding, too, a reminder of where food comes from, providing higher consciousness to the meal, building layers of understanding and perhaps respect, but mostly displayed there for us diners to feel confident ordering lobster at the restaurant because it wouldn’t taste funny (for no one who has eaten a non-fresh lobster can forget the weirdness of the mouthful, the unpleasantness of the realization, the minor horror of the experience)—and though we had recently learned of the locavore movement in certain areas in the Northeast and the West Coast—eateries intent on minimizing the distance foods travel from ground, wilderness, sky, or sea to kitchen, maintaining a guarantee of peak freshness, allowing for fewer if any preservatives to be injected into the ingredients, ensuring that the foods are in season, restricting the patron for the patron’s sake, limiting the menu to foods that would be available to a wild man, perhaps an early pilgrim, all of which philosophies brought forth in us the revelation that we hadn’t been eating as we should eat, that we had, somewhere along the line, been duped by some great unknown food charlatan, assuring us that this meal was good, correct, safe, proper, natural, organic, celebratory, rare, our new favorite, gave us a new “vore” suffix, which we liked very much, and had us telling everyone about new farm-to-table restaurants that others must try, because it was the ideal way to eat—and although, finally, we had all, of course, dabbled (with varying degrees of success) in Community Sponsored Agricultures and home gardening and public gardening—plots wherein we planted our tomato vines and basil plants and pepper seeds and cabbage roots, where we dug our fingers into the
soil, smiled up into the sun and prayed for the suckers to grow and yield, and which sometimes did grow and yield, and which we did pluck and carry to our home kitchens to make salad or pasta sauce or stew, a fact that delighted us and our guests to no end (“you grew this? you plucked it this afternoon?”) and was ultimately a stronger connection to our meals, carrying, as it did, notes of self-sufficiency and patience and wonderment at ingredients that were mere dirt weeks ago—despite all this, we were unprepared for the next steps in dining.

  As much as we had thought we had connected with our food, acknowledged where it came from, thought about it as not simply a filet mignon on our plate but a cut from the short loin of an actual sentient living steer, we realized we were fooling ourselves with how connected we thought ourselves when Animal Farm, the first of the “New Restaurants,” showcased its livestock, in a larger-scale version of the lobster tank, in a covered barn attached to the restaurant. A long glass window gave sight of the cows, pigs, chickens, lambs, turkeys, and ducks, housed in this hay-floored room, as patrons walked in the front door. Along the wall, above the lobster tank, the long window proved to us that everything was fresh. There they were. Walking around. The animals were treated very well. Cage free. No antibiotics. No hormones. The animals looked happy enough in that room, through the long window, as we entered. Happier than the pitiful lobsters awaiting their hot fates. The closest farm-to-table experience one could get.