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clarinet from below. Thus, a properly motivated student with a frac- tured right thumb, or such a student acting under compulsion, would still be able to play by balancing his instrument on his plaster cast. This, of course, assumes that the same student was capable of playing prior to the fortuitous fracturing.
The orchestral experience, designed both to have me enhance my musical abilities and to teach me how to function in a group that, as was essential, functioned as a unit, consisted of my playing as a “third clari- net,” which meant, in turn, that as the music proceeded, I would play and hold, for example, a C for an extended period of time, perhaps four beats, and then do the same with an A. I did not, and could not, rise to the level where I could play either Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major or, for that matter, “Stompin’ at the Savoy” (featuring Benny Goodman, who, in my house, was almost as revered as Sandy Koufax)—but I did hold a mean set of F-sharps during the orchestra’s ever-popular rendi- tion of “Greensleeves.”
And, finally, there was metal shop. It was there that I learned that the word solder, like the word llama, has a silent l, and, even though it has a single d, it isn’t therefore pronounced soda, which I guess would have been confusing, not to mention dangerous. It was also there that I prob- ably took my first unconscious steps on the road to become a lawyer or, in any event, something else that didn’t require any real skill when I grew up.
Virtually everything else that I do recall was, loosely speaking, social, not academic. (As we shall see later on, most of what I shall refer to as social in junior high school was, however, about as academic as it comes.)
My social relationship with Joe Chassler did have at least two important effects on me, one political and one intellectual, if I may use that latter term. At some point early in the first semester at our new, much larger school, Joe decided to run for president of the (entire) sev- enth grade. Because he wanted some company in that endeavor, and perhaps because of what he knew about my political record in P.S. 193, he persuaded me to run for the office of vice president. (Based upon my
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