When I was young, I loved Bugs Bunny cartoons. I remember Foghorn Leghorn speaking to a little hawk and denying that he was a chicken. “You don’t know what I am.”
“I know what you are,” the young hawk said, ” You’re a loud mouth schnook.”
Cartoon Opera
My favorite Bugs Bunny cartoons were the operas. In one, Bugs appeared on a hill dressed as Brünnhilde, with her long blond hair, from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, mounted on Grane, a giant, obese, white horse. Then Elmer Fudd sang, “Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!” Bugs, looking into the camera with a cockeyed face said in his confused voice, “Kill the rabbit?”
In the cartoon Barber, taken from Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Bugs sings as he plants flowers on Fudd’s bald head. I loved that stuff. I would see my parents in my peripheral vision as I stood in front of our huge cabinet color television. They thought I was…odd.
Opera was something I was exposed to no where else. It was beautiful, and these cartoons hinted at something more. More than I was exposed to as my parents raised me in a 1960’s blue-collar neighborhood in a small town isolated in the Panhandle of Texas.
A Teacher’s Influence
Years later in elementary school, my music teacher, Mrs. Capwell, a tall woman with blonde hair stacked on top of her head in a beehive, played classical music for us for two days. She was excited and kept telling us that the Symphony had an important musician coming that weekend and that we must have our parents take us. It was the first time I had ever heard classical music anywhere but in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. And here was an adult who loved the music, too.
The producers of those cartoons wanted to expose children to classical music and opera that they otherwise wouldn’t get the opportunity to hear. It worked with me. I’m a season ticket holder to the opera now. I’m listening to Pavarotti while I write this.
The Music Continues
I live across the street from DiscoveryGreen Park in downtown Houston. With each new season, the semi-private park produces new art accessible to children from all over our area. Two years ago during Christmas they built a giant dome that changed colors to the beat of classical music. Last Christmas, they built a neon hallway the size of the oak tree path: it encouraged people to sing into one side and listen as synthesizers changed their song as it moved down the path. This fall, moonGarden, created by the art collective Lucion of Montreal, is scheduled.
It’s Bugs Bunny all over. I walk my dog in the art work at night watching the children’s excitement as they discover what I did ages ago. When I watch their faces, I can still see myself dancing in front of that old television.