The greggar kits are sitting on my kitchen counter, complete with instructions on how to assemble them. I'm still missing some of the materials for their construction, but I'll be taking care of that well before this coming Sunday. I'll be bringing them in and trying to teach a bunch of jaded middle-school aged young 'uns how to put 'em together and why there is this crazy holiday in the Jewish calendar that sanctions noisemaking in a house of worship, getting into the craziest costumes imaginable, and getting so completely drunk off your butt that good is bad and bad is good. And no, I am not talking about Mardi Gras.

I think the toughest thing to get across to a group on the edge of their teens is this idea that masking can reveal your true self. The place in which these kids live prides itself on concealing so much behind the guises of "historical records", of long-held traditions, of regional pride, of the way things have supposedly always been done. And that's just New Orleans. The individuality that fuels our popular culture these days has little room for the truth unless it serves some kind of purpose somehow, usually one pertaining to monetary, social, or political gain. We are encouraged to take on certain masks nearly every living moment because the way that things are depends on it.

So how can a disguise be a window to what lies beneath, no matter what that "beneath" is?

I suppose one could start with alcohol. The stuff has a way of knocking our disguises clean off and yanking our inhibitions out from under us as though they were flimsy bits of carpeting. Just ask anybody who has been under its influence....which, in this town, is at least every other person. Being a teetotaler here is akin to denying that we all have needs - and, at times, those needs include the right to make complete and utter fools of ourselves.

It doesn't mean that we should be drinking anywhere and everywhere, however - a friend of mine said to me recently that she is most content and comfortable when drinking with good friends, preferably at their homes for parties. When everybody is already familiar with everybody else, and they all have a good idea of how each person is when they are drunk, it only adds to the pageant.

So, hmmm, it's okay to have no inhibitions in a controlled environment...

Oxymoron!!!!

Well, what else is to be expected of a holiday that reveals hiddenness? Of a learning experience that had my kids getting plastered - with gauze that hardened on their faces into masks for them to remove and decorate? Of the celebration of the day a drunken party animal of a king kicked an anti-Semitic adviser out on his ass and saved his new bride as well as a large chunk of the population of his kingdom? Of a day when we are supposed to blot the bad guy's name out by making as much noise as possible, and yet we keep relating the same story, with Haman's name in it, every year?

Everything right is wrong again, y'all....and I can't help but think that we are in the perfect time and place to explore that.

As for the middle schoolers, something will stick. Kids really don't change in one mostly hidden way: everything is going in. We just have no clue as to when, where, or how it's gonna come out.*
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Oh, and, speaking of oxymorons...

My thoughts on all the school linkeroos today dovetail nicely with the following:

"We were designing just one step ahead of the pile drivers, as it were," van der Gracht recalled. "Construction was always on the heels of design," was the way Renshaw put it. Indeed, construction sometimes got ahead of design, often enough that Luther Leisenring, the architect in charge of the specifications group, took to referring to building specs as "historical records"; by the time they were written, there was often something else already in the building.

"How big should I make that beam across the third floor?" architect Allen Dickey was asked by a colleague.

"I don't know," Dickey replied. "They installed it yesterday."**

My only questions are: Are we looking at "historical records" in the making, in the form of the charade of getting parents in on the planning processes behind the RSD schools? Or will they simply be historical footnotes?


*One of the best, most fitting Purim costumes ever really stands out for me. In grade school, for a Purim pageant, we were encouraged to get into the craziest getups we could possibly think of. Since Purim doesn't occur at the same time as Halloween, we were generally SOL on the store-bought costumes and had to fend for ourselves. A super-popular jerk of a girl (well, she always treated me like crap) ended up coming in with a standard school-issue globe of the world wired on top of her head. If that doesn't reveal volumes about the pressures kids are under these days, I don't know what does.

**The Pentagon: A History, Steve Vogel