Preschool Confidential 2: Inspiring Terror in the Tots
In which former Uncle Rock fans approach and share
“I was terrified of you when I was little.”
A beautiful, smiling young woman says this to me at an outdoor event near my home. Her mom, also smiling, also beautiful, about my age, stands behind her. We’re queuing up at the concession tent. Catskills summertime dusk is falling, the scent of rain in the air. The magic hour light flatters everyone.
“You probably don’t remember me,” the young woman says.
Oh, but I do remember her. Of the hundreds, maybe thousands of kids from early Uncle Rock days, she’s one I recall.
I apologize for scaring her. I tell her I scare myself sometimes, too.
She and her mother laugh. The young woman is now a college sophomore, and she assures me it’s OK. She wants me to know she loved my music, but yeah, my persona upset her. I share my amazement that Uncle Rock songs, particularly my “hit” “It’s Hot! (Don’t Touch It!)”, have shown up on Tik Tok. She says of course they have.
I tell her it’s not the first time I’ve connected with an erstwhile fan I unintentionally terrified back in the day. I was fulltime Uncle Rock from about 2006 to 2011, so my first audiences – two- to seven-year-olds, mostly – are nearing or entering their twenties. The Hudson Valley is not that big, so occasionally our paths cross, probably more than I realize. I reckon they recognize me more than I do them, for obvious reasons. Most, I’m guessing, don’t acknowledge me. But some do.
How these young adults remember the crazy-haired, tall, loud guy in the cowboy shirt, if they recollect me at all, is a mixed bag. Most seem to do so with nostalgic glee, the way I recall, say, Sesame Street muppets (Grover in particular). Some, especially those still in late adolescence, are embarrassed at how much they loved me. I see them, they see me, and it’s like we went on a bender together.
And finally, a small subset remember me as something that induced panic, like Krampus. Sometimes, like the aforementioned young woman, both love and panic. Perhaps the most interesting and complicated relationship of all.
Of course I remember the occasional screams of terror. In the library, the preschool, the birthday party, the rock club. A friend of mine once posted on his Facebook page a photo of his red-faced two-year-old daughter crying into his shoulder at one of my concerts. The caption: “Madeline hates Uncle Rock!” (Yes, I was tagged. With friends like that…)
For a few tykes, my recorded music, divorced of my presence, controllable, is the preferred method of Uncle Rock consumption. (On streaming platforms. Go for it.) Once I perform in front of them, ragtag, funky, and loud, most enjoy it. But sometimes my aggressively strummed Martin D-28 guitar and my bellowing voice are untenable, triggering, and a caterwauling kid will need to be removed from the mini-mosh pit by an adult. Or they flee on their own.
(Of course, I am compelled to note an increasing amount of kids have sensory integration issues, and/or they’re on the autism spectrum, and that is why Uncle Rock distresses them. I get it. But, fascinatingly, earphones often alleviate their unease.)
I quickly learned that for quite a few kids, I was – and still am – their first experience of live music, not pre-recorded, not on an iPad, not through (often shitty) speakers. A child’s reaction to such a thing, whether joyful or otherwise, is pretty amazing. In fact, my being responsible for this experience is one of the reasons I still “do” Uncle Rock at preschools. I am on a mission to show small children that music is interactive, organic; they can be part of it, they can make it, with their voices, and with their bodies. I work to engage. It’s one of my skills.
Yes, live music may overwhelm them. But they will be OK. Actually, experience has shown me, better than OK.
For many 2023 preschoolers, music-as-activity is revelatory stuff. And, I regret to inform, getting them to sing loud, to move, is more challenging than ever, especially since Covid lockdown. (Don’t get me started.) Children have been actively musical for hundreds of thousands of years, but because music is ever more a passive experience, I find myself needing to say, “Hey! I am not an iPad! Sing with me!”
I often feel I’m not teaching these preschoolers how to sing and dance. I am reminding them.
Every September, I get introduced to a new crop of two-, three-, and four-year-olds at two local preschools. Usually about 20 kids. When most of them see the 6’ 2” man with the big acoustic guitar thing walk in, they are varying degrees of excited; some joyful, some laser-beam curious, some quietly fascinated. But without fail, at least two, sometimes as many as four, are absolutely horror-struck, especially when I start singing. Eventually, most of this subset come to love me. They throw themselves at my legs when I arrive, attempting to climb me like I’m a tree. A few play hard-to-get. Some never warm up to Uncle Rock, and that is OK. They are probably the ones who will retain the sharpest memories of me.
Interestingly, when young adults inform me I was once afeared, they’re never mad. Like the aforementioned young woman, they’re always smiling. The process of getting over their Uncle Rock anxiety seems not only to have strengthened them, but also to have crystallized a memory that now serves as a touchstone to their earliest years in this realm, a dreamtime, before they knew their letters and numbers or anything about the internet.
My work here is done.
I love your Uncle Rock story about how you impact your toddler and young people students. I have a few similar stories. I also run into people who took pictures with me about 65 years ago, at Frontier Town, a western themed tourist attraction, where my family worked. Some were scared. Others were mesmerized at seeing a little Indian girl, dressed in leather, who was "different" and dark in the summer sun. I danced to a drum beat and had a father who sang in a different language and was bare chested, wore leather chaps, a breech cloth, a headband with a feather. It was a different era. Some children were terrified of me because of the stereotypical violence in TV westerns. That made me so sad. Sometimes I would take all day, as a child of 6 years, to befriend those children. I just didn't get it. I couldn't understand why anyone would be afraid of me. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why people say and do what they do and don't understand that we are all just people. Occasionally, someone from 50 years ago, from Frontier Town days, find me on facebook and are happy to say hello and tell me their memories. They tell me that they were inspired to study music, Native culture, dance, history, or ecology, or sociology, or they chose a career in medicine to help people, etc. That's a wonderful thing. When it comes down to it, over the years, we learn that we are basically, of the same heart. Life's an adventure, thankfully! And I'm still adventuring.