76 Etruscan Trombones
Went to a museum the other day, saw an exhibit about the Etruscans. Took up a whole floor of the place. Turns out the Etruscans were all the rage getting on three thousand years ago what with inventing the toga and what not. Also good at engineering those Etruscans. Came up with the arch. And religious rituals. Pretty impressive for folks for whom social media was stone tablets.
Lots of Etruscan artifacts—bronze work, pottery, jewelry. Tombs crawling with “highly skilled metalwork, vibrant terracotta sculpture, and distinctive black pottery” (thank you, Wikipedia!) and painted frescoes.
Quite interesting really. No historical records. So scholars have to figure out what the Etruscan civilization was like from pieces of pottery and other archaeological bits. Greeks and Romans left a written record. Not so the Etruscans. Which may be part of the reason I had never heard of them.
I mentioned to one of my running buddies how cool the exhibit was, how much I learned, how pleased I was to now know something about the 300 years the Etruscans hung out in what is now Italy before being absorbed by the Romans.
“You never heard of the Etruscans?” Lyn said. “You’re kidding.”
Feeling threatened I mentioned, “I’m pretty good with the multiplication tables, but no, the Etruscans were not part of the curriculum of Miami public schools.”
“The Metropolitan Museum in New York has over 30,000 works of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art,” Lynn wen on. “It takes up about an entire floor of the museum. The Etruscans were extraordinary!”
“Look if you’re going to make fun of me,” I said, “I’m not going to admit I don’t know much about the Egyptians either.”
“Okay, sorry,” Lynn apologized. “I just can’t believe you are only now learning about one of antiquity’s most fundamental civilizations.”
My blazing ignorance of all things Etruscan reminded me of my favorite lines from my favorite musical. Marian, The Librarian, is explaining to her mother, Mrs. Paroo, where the information of interest can be found. Mrs. Paroo responds:
Well, excuse me for livin’
…
When a woman’s got a husband and you’ve got none
Why should she take advice from you
Even if you can quote Balzac and Shakespeare and
All them other hifalutin’ Greeks.
At the risk of “explaining the joke,” I love, love, love the fact that Mrs. Peroo conflates French (Balzac, 1799-1850) and English (Shakespeare, 1564-1616) authors across centuries and cultures (Greeks before Etruscans.)
At the risk of switching to a serious topic, I wonder if Mrs. Paroo is any happier or more fundamentally satisfied with her early 20th century fictional Iowa life than is her more educated, angsty, daughter. And I wonder if her advice, “consider marrying the Robert Preston character, a charlatan selling a fake boys’ band” is worthy counsel.
Eighty something years since The Music Man appeared on Broadway and “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” has become more cogent. Early 20th century folks of the female persuasion were limited to secretarial, teaching, nursing, or sex worker professions. Mrs. Paroo’s direction to marry anyone even a charming charlatan is loving if misguided. Yes, Harold Hill and Marian Paroo are together at the end of the play; no, I don’t see that marriage lasting longer than it takes to defrost a chicken.
What else do we get wrong? What other advice to we bestow (“inflict” is such a harsh word) or our beloved children? I hear a lot of “go to college” on my side of the street. “Education is the only thing that can’t be taken away from you” makes sense to this author his not-so-blissful ignorance of the entirety of the Etruscan Civilization notwithstanding. But I also wonder if other paths are possible.
I’m not proud of it, but I have managed to stumble through some years of teaching and counseling the blazing holes in my education notwithstanding. I guess the takeaways are: 1) everyone knows some things; nobody knows everything. 2) Don’t trust an institution to teach your beloved children everything you want them to know and 3) There’s a lot of good stuff out there—Balzac and Shakespeare among others. Let’s help our kids to spend less time staring at fashion influencers, more time loving the volumes Marian Paroo recommends.