odysseys of the mind
The first rule is adults cannot help, so when the backdrop falls off the cart, the teacher can try and tell the kids how to tape it back on—”I’d do a long vertical piece of tape over the bulldog clip, K! Really long! Longer than that!”—but they cannot, under any circumstances, touch it. Part of Odyssey of the Mind is journeying to a place where adults have to let shit fall apart and fail.
At 7:30 a.m. on a given Saturday, we are in a classroom in someone else’s school. It is affecting the way all classrooms are, learnings stuck on the walls, corners curling. Scout’s teacher gets a call from the grandmother of one of the team members, who is at the wrong place. She is almost an hour away, if she had a car, which I don’t think she does, so the team have to shuffle things: someone else will need to get perp-walked in the arrest scene, since Z won’t be there.
I’m not sure how the cardboard port-a-loo factors into the arrest storyline, or how either applies to the “problem” that the kids have designed their presentation around: a mechanical friend that cheers one or more characters up. The kids are supposed to use lateral thinking. It means that where you see an AV cart and construction paper, the kids see something else.
This is all part of the odyssey, wondering where we are going.
Rule: Each problem has infinite possible solutions.
The competition starts in a middle-school gym in Coxsackie, which is a small town on the Hudson River with a very large prison tucked in by the road that leads to Woodstock. The walls of the gym are hung with banners that show individual members of the softball, soccer, and basketball teams. This is the most American thing about the school for me, a foreigner. I’ll never get over the self-determination of senior portraits. Even in the end times, the branding is just so strong.
The judges have clipboards, and gather around to take in the creativity of the teams. One judge has on a dairy-cow hat on her head, its legs reared out in front. Another judge is in a motorized wheelchair and has a race car on his head, which I respect.
First up is an elementary-school performance that is inscrutable. Some characters are too quiet to hear; one has cardboard octopus mask over her head that muffles the dialogue, while another kid projects every line in fluent Town Crier.
The “robot” is certainly there, an embellished shoebox that gets lots of attention from the characters. The judge with the cow on her head has taken a knee, scribbling notes. After eight minutes, it is TIME, and the kids drag their cardboard backdrops out of the gym, triumphant and relieved.
Then it’s Troy’s turn.
Scout, who wrote the script, shouts every line (OWNER: Hi boss! Whats up / ANGRY BOSS: THE SKY YOU FOOL!!!!! AND HI BOSS YOURSELF).
She also functions as a Spongebob-esque narrator, delivering a series of “one day later”s as the narrative jumps forward.
After a dramatic interlude in the port-a-loo, her Angry Boss character is arrested with toy handcuffs (“probably a critique of the carceral state,” Noodles and I reassure one another) and perp-walked behind the backdrop. Then a piece of string with a magnet on the end is lobbed over, hitting the ground with a smack—later, we will learn that the missing kid was supposed to clip it to something so it unfurled a new backdrop at this time. Instead, they finish the play with the landscape rolled tightly on its string hanger. You can still get points for ideas that didn’t pan out.
The play ends with Scout yelling, “You fool! You ruined my reputation, you ruined my plans, and worst of all, you brought the COPS HERE!” Then all the kids do a shoulder shimmy.
There are some funny bits, there’s Chekhov’s banana peel, and that is what impresses me the most. Kids writing their own jokes. They will always slip on that banana peel—classic.
Rule: Functional fixedness is a mindset, or the tendency to perceive an object as being able to carry out only the function for which it was designed.
At 10:30 a.m. the school cafeteria begins serving hot dogs, which Japhy has been waiting for. Ah, urn coffee, Skittles, and a hot dog at 10:30 a.m.
We move over to the high school gym to see some of the older teams compete. The Division III problem is “cooking the books”—I gather that they have to write a play inspired by a book, involving cooking, with some kind of technical element.
One is a game show hosted by Willy Wonka. “A bit predictable,” thought my FIL. The next was also Top Chef-esque—low-hanging fruit, to grab the lowest-hanging metaphor. But I did enjoy the cardboard cakes, suspiciously light and prone to toppling.
Next came a beautifully costumed team pushing out a rickety PVC-pipe frame with a papier-mâché masterpiece on it. Here is where this squeaky gymnasium becomes a portal to somewhere amazing:
EXTERIOR, DAYTIME: a forest.
Robin flits out and begins singing about how lovely the day is, and how she’d love to make a friend. Her wings are layered with crepe paper feathers and her voice trills lightly as she does her recitative. The robin can SING.
A depressed tree with a gloriously rigid headpiece does his best nihilistic teen thing. All his friends went away, he says to Robin, bummer.
So the robin gathers food—platters of flowers, a cardboard feast—and the other creatures return. Ecosystem restored, the forest undergoes a TRANSFORMATION. The stick-season backdrop is hoisted around its PVC frame to reveal, on the backside, a carpet of plants in bloom. Paper beats rock. Art beats science. Even the sign identifying the team’s division, problem, and school name, has been worked into an elaborate tree stump that enhances the mise en scene.
Us adults on the bleachers know that we could never have done this. When we see a water bottle, we imagine it carrying water. Our minds have been seized by functional rigidly. We have whittled away the infinite possibilities and can no longer taste the rainbow.
The judges rush the stage at the end. Scoring is a secret, and kids are unable to discuss their performances afterward, but we know.
We all know.
former Odyssey kids, show yourselves
once again I am hosting the playdates because otherwise they don’t happen
kid, following me into the bathroom: what are you doing, Janet?
me: I’m just gonna brush my teeth and then we can all go to the playground
kid: Okay, I’m going to watch and see how long it takes you
me: no
the sum intel of every girls’ weekend I’ve ever taken
tretinoin is magic
it’s very difficult to teach a partner how to play with your hair
but everyone agrees that it would be amazing to have them just brush your hair for an hour
basically we’d like to just be tucked into bed like a toddler
the ideal duration of sex is: 7 minutes
which leaves a lot of time for activities and/or sleep
get a bigger water bottle (even bigger than that)
everyone wants a zaddy like Pedro Pascal
no one except me has Jack Black as their hall pass (do they?)
the names of a lot of birds and plants
let’s take a walk
pregnancy and childbirth: what the fuck was that???
if you like jon fosse, then great, but also maybe just try again in a decade if you were like what is this
your partner is prob gonna get more + more attractive as they get older
the kids also are going to get funnier + funnier
plant some tulips
also befriend a prepper with a greenhouse and maybe an arsenal, just in case
when your kids grow out of picture books, you can decide to keep buying them for yourself
BITCHIN sauce goes with everything
if your rage is timed to the moon cycle, your bones are about to crumble like a bath bomb, so get on something
goodies
“I tripped the wire of unconscious gender bias: I resolved to read more books by men. My taste skews toward stories about family and friendship, mothers (absolutely its own sub-category), marriage and sex.” Greta Rainbow on ~serious books~
killed it with this essay“We knew it would happen and it has. The first mega, unspinnable example of the shambles permeating the Trump shit show in his hastily assembled cabinet of hams.” CABINET OF HAMS. Ah, Tina Brown.
not to bum you out, but “my peak salary was … more than $166,000 per story”
ALSO new Samantha Hunt in Yale Review
this story about Georgia O’Keeffe’s friend/honorary son/beneficiary/??? Juan Hamilton
love
’s newsletteryou, too, can induce a state of torpor to get through winter
Miranda and I and all of us are so busy so bored
oh hey, what the fuck
My favorite part of OM was the “spontaneous problem” part of competition day when you and your teammates had to complete a brand new task, timed, with magnificently odd constraints. I remember one of the practice problems was “name as many types of keys as you can” and the example answers ranged from car key to COOKIE. I was never the same.
I did OM in elementary and middle school in the town just north of Coxsackie (would have told you the pizza joint is pretty darn good, even for a NY slice snob.)
highlights were building a derivable frying pan-shaped car with a table saw at the age of 10, firing pottery in a hand made kiln (and the photo of me freezing in my very 1993 Starter jacket) and discovering Shakespeare by comparing different comedies to episodes of Jerry Springer that my mom did not love me watching.