Misadventures in Music: Greeting Card Blues

Fourth in a series of musical misadventures.

When I was in high school, I had a crazy civics teacher who was entertainingly easy to confuse. One day someone took the mechanism out of a musical greeting card and stuck it to the ceiling of the classroom, where it continuously played “Happy Birthday to You.” Our teacher was a little hard of hearing so at first he didn’t notice, but eventually he became aware of music emanating from… somewhere. He asked us if we heard it too, but we all denied it. He nearly went crazy searching for the tiny mechanism, and it used up quite a bit of the morning too. (This was a summer school class, so it went much longer than classes during the year.)

That teacher did have some good stories. He kept promising to take us to the courthouse to watch a trial, which he never did, but at least he told us about trials he had seen. One day he took his morning class to a personal injury lawsuit, where the defendant, a large corporation, had a slick, big-city attorney and the plaintiff had a small-town guy like from a TV show, in a jacket and bowtie. It was very entertaining, he told us, but the afternoon class was sitting in on a murder trial, so he warned them it would probably be a lot of boring forensic evidence. Instead, they were cross-examining an eyewitness who got so tired of the questions from the defendant’s attorney that she stood up, jabbed her finger at the defendant, and said, “I know what I saw! I saw this son of a $@#* attack her!” So apparently murder trials aren’t always boring.

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