“How was rehearsal?” I asked, my eyes wide in a type of trance. He reached for his cigarette, drawing hard to reignite the dying ember. “We messed with the songs for the play for so long, that by the time we got to Tangerine, those guys were too wasted to rehearse. Dan puked twice and Smokey passed out on the floor,” Jack muttered in disgust. Jack did not like people to pass out or vomit. He said it defeated the whole point of getting high. Why waste money and drugs, he would say, when you could lick raw chicken to achieve a similar effect. “I shoved Smokey’s pony tail under the drum stand,” he said, “so he’s in for like, a totally rude awakening.” “I’m glad you came,” I told him, which was true, I was glad. “I came up with a nice riff—want to hear it?” He began to sing a wordless melody, Da-da da-da da-da dum dum da da-ah da. “God, Jack. That’s really beautiful.” We listened to Ella sing Cow Cow Boogie, and we stared at the Candle. That cat was raised on local weed He’s what they call a swing half-breed Singin’ his Cow Cow Boogie in the strangest way— The Candle looked like a square drinking glass. It was a rectangular mosaic of translucent panes—eggshell white, moon yellow, lapis blue. Each side depicted the same thing, the seashore, with planes of sand, sea, and sky comprising equidistant thirds, and directly in the center, a flying bird. Because the landscape was collapsed, it was hard to tell whether the bird was flying over the beach or over the ocean. Dan looked inside. “Are you sure that’s the original wax?” “Positive,” I said. “It’s the candle that Jesus blessed,” Jack said caustically. Dan respectfully replaced it. “It’s definitely over the beach,” he declared, referring to the bird. He wiped his wire-rimmed glasses with the hem of his shirt. “If it were over the ocean,” Dan speculated, “it’d be closer to the line between sand and sea.” “Right,” Jack agreed. “If the bird had been positioned at the bottom of the middle instead of at the top, you would think low—small. Small, meaning farther away, meaning over the ocean.” “But it’s not,” Dan went on. “It’s high in the middle, meaning big and near. It’s over the sand.” Read Chapter 1 of Anthropology of an American Girl

From Hilary T. Hamann, the Author:
COW COW BOOGIE • Ella Fitzgerald

There are several versions of this song, but the one I refer to is by Ella Fitzgerald. It was from one of my mother’s albums which we discovered when we were fifteen. I don’t think that album ever made it off the turntable—we were obsessed! I don’t recall the name of the record, but these songs were on the same side—A Tisket, A Tasket, Stone Cold Dead in the Market and Stairway to the Stars.
At first we thought Cow Cow Boogie was camp, but at some point it stopped being funny and it became an anthem. We were a creative group of people—very anti-establishment and somewhat marginal, but not exactly losers—and I guess somehow we identified with the song’s bizarre iconoclastic American overtones.
There were probably a dozen of us at my house on any given night, and at least as many drifters, and I can honestly say Cow Cow Boogie was universally loved.
I like this scene very much, though it was difficult to write because I didn’t want to show Evie and her friends as smart so much as I wanted to show them experimenting with intelligence in the sanctity of each other’s company. I wanted to describe the feeling of being in a space in which you don’t have to protect yourself. That space was lost, for me and I think for a lot of people, in the 80s when everyone became paranoid and competitive. I must have considered cutting the scene about a thousand times, but in the end it is so completely true to my experience of high school, and true as well to what I treasure most in retrospect—sanctity and creative experimentation—that I’m glad I kept it.
Every time I think about things like Columbine, my thoughts naturally go to my own high school friends and how lucky we were to have art—music, film, books, drawing, whatever. We were faced with the same bullshit social hierarchy, the same savage life expectations, the same hollow truths, but we had creativity to turn us from all things negative. And of course as role models, artists are (or anyway, they were) independent and original, which is exactly what teenage minds should be seeking out.
People tend to discuss violence as though it materializes out of air, as though it is itself a cause of crime and not the psychic consequence of chronic boredom and basic disenfranchisement. I’m convinced that the arts—serious and community-supported—should be part of the lives of young adults. For instance, what could be better than theater? It’s risky, physical, brainy, and it happens in the dark! And there’s something for everyone—tools, make-up, literature, electricity.
I’m also a proponent of yoga in schools. We had this coach who came in and out of the blue started teaching us yoga—at first we were like, what the fuck is this? You know, it was 1979. All of a sudden, many of the kids who previously sucked in gym excelled. Schools would do well to realize that sometimes a person might be physically capable but too smart or independent to succumb to the false fraternity of teams. What’s really sad and ironic is seeing those team players in their forties, overweight, disenfranchised and disillusioned just like we started out in high school. Meanwhile, the yoga people look great!

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