The Judges by Eric J Matluck

Author:Eric J Matluck
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798986425313
Publisher: Eric J. Matluck
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Jinete College was a small liberal arts school with fewer than five thousand undergraduate students. Its campus occupied three hundred eight-seven acres in the northwest corner of Yagoda, Iowa, which was thirty-nine miles northeast of Cedar Rapids, and whose population was slightly less than that of the school. It was a picturesque little village, with a broad boulevard, South Rapids Road and North Rapids Road, intersected by its main thoroughfare, Eberle Street. Downtown was a street corner, but there one could find, radiating from it for a block in each direction, a furniture gallery, a carpeting and interiors store, a Chinese restaurant called the Green Dragon, a Protestant church, a luncheonette, a men’s and women’s clothing store, a bank, an optometrist’s office, a pawn shop, a sporting goods store, and a tattoo parlor. Cutting diagonally between North Rapids Road and Eberle Street was Lera Street, which ran for five blocks. On one side was the college campus, and on the other side was the president’s house, several blocks of ranch houses, and a small art museum.

Although she’d never been to Iowa, Mary grew up with a vaguely positive impression of it. She remembered her mother telling her how, when she was in the fourth grade in the New York City public school system, her class had to take “the Iowa test,” which was a national IQ test—not so named—in which students were asked hundreds of questions in a neatly printed booklet, that they could answer on a separate sheet of paper by marking a series of lettered ellipses with their sharpened number 2 pencils. Iowa, Mary had been told, had, or once had, the highest number of literate residents in America. It was also where Dvořák lived during the summer of 1893, and where he wrote his New World Symphony, among other works.

INTERVIEWER: Are there any places you really don’t want to perform in?

MARY: Las Vegas. The city with a museum devoted to Liberace and nine out of ten people who’ve never heard of Mendelssohn.

INTERVIEWER: Don’t be an elitist.

MARY: I’m not being an elitist at all, but I’m not surprised you didn’t pick up on that. And make it ninety-nine out of a hundred, to be more accurate. Here’s the problem. Classical music is a specialized art form, but it’s sold in the entirely wrong way. It’s geared to appeal to a real minority of people, people who pride themselves on being in a minority, and if more people, even if, God forbid, the masses, started to find it attractive, it would lose its allure. It would become common.

INTERVIEWER: Okay, understood.

MARY: You know how I developed my love of classical music? From my father. You know how he developed his love of it? Through watching Saturday morning cartoons. Racist fare, yes, often, but at least they brought culture to children.

INTERVIEWER: Nobly.

MARY (Laughs): Oh, please, there was nothing noble about it. The producers used it because it was in the public domain, so it saved them the cost of hiring people to write background music.

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