139. Donkzilla on the loose

Even the massively up-armored foot pedal, which Gus uses to beat the bass drum, already looks scuffed and battered.  Why did I harbor the least hope that the naked pedal for the hi-hat cymbals could survive his attentions?  Of course, it doesn’t.  Perhaps it was gradually weakened by a few weeks of microaggressions; anyway, one particularly emphatic stomp cracks the footplate neatly in two — the exact same break that he inflicted on the other pedal.

My doughty amateur-fabricator friend again saves the day, making a barn call to detach the pedal from the hi-hat stem and taking it home to be reinforced.  I’ll be baking him a Very Nice cake indeed . . .  Meantime, Gus and I play with the still-intact keyboard, bass drum, and bulb horn.  

I screw two rails onto his bandstand so I can slot the keyboard between them, to prevent his shoving it off the back edge and onto the arena floor.  That works fine for a few days.  But Destructo Donkey figures out that the keyboard can still slide sideways, so doesn’t he nose it right out between the rails?  He watches it hit the dirt with interest and satisfaction.  I curse him lustily.

In a pilot project to affix the horn to the bandstand, Barbara lends me a fishing-rod-like cat toy.  I use the clamp that came with the horn for attaching its barrel to a bicycle’s handlebars, though the cat-toy wand is so thin that I need to squash a thick rubber washer inside the clamp as I tighten down the screws.  This works pretty well:  the rod is flexible enough to bend as Gus bites the horn and then, when he spits it out, to bounce back upright, ready for his next grab.  

Again, though, all my ingenuity is dust in the gale-force wind of donkey determination.  The rod is slippery-smooth, and the clamp can’t clamp it hard enough: when Gus tugs at the horn he often pulls it off the rod and spits it onto the floor.  So it’s back to the drawing board for me.  Even once I locate a suitable spring or antenna or dressage whip that I can clamp the horn to, I’m sure it’ll take a few tries to install the bottom end of the wand/whip on the bandstand.  It needs to stand up enough to present the horn at donkey-mouth level, and it needs to bend and bow enough to be bitten, tugged on, and spat out repeatedly during a concert.

Am I flailing and failing?  Nope, I’m not even ankle deep in a slough of despond.  Everybody is still learning and making progress.  Gus’s urge to unseat the keyboard is an excellent opportunity for more Leave-it practice.  And holding the cat-toy wand in my hand is a great way for him to practice finding the horn with his mouth as it bobs and sways.  He’s a bit annoyed at first, but in no time he’s following it and gathering it up with his capacious lips.  He’ll have this skill down pat when we finally get the horn attached to the bandstand.  Provided he doesn’t bash said bandstand to smithereens . . .

138. Maestro in the making

Now that Gus is mastering the keyboard, cymbals, bike horn, and bass drum in a near-simultaneous one-man orchestra, the job of conductor falls to me.  He knows verbal cues such as “play it” for the piano and “honk it” for the horn, but I stupidly adopted “stomp it” for both of his pedal-operated instruments.  Not only does “stomp it” sound very similar to “honk it” — especially amid the din of squawks and clashes — but it leaves me no way to distinguish between the bass drum and the hi-hat cymbals.  What I need is a gestural cue for each instrument.  That’ll help clarify matters for Gus, plus it’ll enhance the overall performative hilarity for any audience.

I begin by combining a well-established verbal with a brand-new gesture:  to ask Gus to run his nose along the keyboard, I say “play it” while I also sweep my arm sideways over the keyboard.  After maybe half a dozen repetitions, I switch to saying nothing as I sweep my arm, and he catches on to the gesture well enough to respond pretty reliably.  For the cymbals, I combine the usual “stomp it” with a new motion that’s a dramatic, whole-arm finger-point at the pedal.  Again, he picks up the new cue in no time.  I figure I can use a big pointing signal for the bass drum too, since that gets placed on the other side of his bandstand; in fact, I’ll use right hand for one and left for the other.

Now, what about the bike horn?  My plan is to try repeating a thumb-and-fingers squeeze motion, if for no better reason than I bet I can remember it easily, as it’s how I naturally play that horn myself.  And I expect to need every possible advantage, if I’m to be accurately pointing and sweeping in real time with Gus’s up-tempo, bebop musicality.