publication - Jumblies Theatre

I start the ball rolling as the first wonderful fool. I offer up a sound true and familiar to the story of mydaily life, a howl with a trill at the beginning and an “M” in the middle, that starts deep in my throat andgradually gets higher in pitch until it sounds like a whine that cracks my voice. The students sit in atentative silence. So I do it again. There is a laugh. Then silence.“It’s a cat,” says Antoinette, a student I met for the first time that evening, speaking with what I havecome to know as characteristic solid frankness. Antoinette is working hard during the days to finish gradetwelve so she can go on to take social work in college. She has an air of toughness, both in build anddemeanour, and her large brown eyes sit behind wide framed glasses that only accentuate her direct gaze.I have never personally seen her smile, perhaps even blink. Her sentences come out like a one-two punch.“I know that sound, that’s a cat. For sure,” she says. I confess that, yes, it is my cat, who wakes me everymorning with a terrific howl. People laugh, hearing about my life. It was a banal detail, possibly, butcomplex to notate. How will we score exactly what I have said and done, using the written language weknow? I make the sound again, asking people to note what letters they hear in there. They call out O’sand M’s, N’s and R’s. And a P. Michele, the teacher, seems pleased that they are recognizing theletters and their relationships to sounds. I arrange them in a long line, with anarrow at the end to show howthe call goes up:13