Sweet Sweet Tepee Licks

With our percussionary ineptitude we kept the beat like seven-year-olds wanting to impress their mothers. Yet, if the breadth of our grins read anything but genuine delight, it was that matched rhythms meant nil.

The gal with the tight blond locks and arm-warmers to match those for her legs was on the primary-colored xylophone. Two plastic mallets. Seven metal keys. To her right was a boy intent on syncopation. Somehow his drum head banged richer with its packaging tape patches, yet the drummer could not yet deduce fingers or small branches to be a producer of better resonance. To his right and further to his right were spaces rotated by newcomers too uninspired, too scheduled to take time, or too good at performance to last one-half of one bad melody.

The astroturf just inside the structure’s crawlspace portal found someone else to stay. She mustered her imagination and the four-key keyboard, again plastic in material and primary in colors. Her hair was perfectly cropped to fit the role of either boy or girl, timelessly lost within the belly of this dark circular construct. “It’s a good thing I only know four keys,” she yelled smiling above the clamour.

On we shook and banged our plastic-bead-filled maracas and plastic and tin tambourines, and gleamed. I didn't know these beauties but the wonderful terrible music had us already acquainted. If we were again seven and on a playground, brevity and sincerity would have found us just the same, grasping hands instead to proclaim friendship. But then it was time to move on. The silk streamer and orange lamp campfire had me sweating.

This art was not an accessory to its witnesses and subsequent owners; something only able to be viewed and discussed and become borrowed bragging rights. Rather, this anonymous tepee, adorned with painted rainbows and green fields and a Gondry-esque working cottonball sky, beckoned interaction.

And the result was beyond witness and subject.