Confessions of a teen dweeb
In this excerpt from The Bassoon King, Rainn Wilson recalls his glory days of adolescent geekdom.
Having studied piano as a kid and then clarinet at Kellogg Junior High, just north of Seattle, I went to my band teacher and told him I wanted to quit clarinet and play tenor sax. Saxophone was just way cooler. Guys in the sax section would crack jokes, goof off and wear sunglasses in class sometimes. Clarinet wasn’t pathetically loser-ish (I mean it wasn’t French Horn!), but it’s not the most masculine of instruments either. Sure there was a clarinet-like instrument in the Cantina scene in Star Wars, but let’s face it, clarinets are for girls in braces and Woody Allen. (Who loves girls in braces. Ba-dum, dum!)
My band teacher, John Law (real name), really pulled a fast one on me. He said something to the effect of “well, you COULD play the sax, but we’ve just got SO many saxophones right now. You know what’s an amazing instrument? One that’s really cool and unique?” I was all like “What? What’s really cool and unique!?” He was like “The Bassoon.” And I was like: “Wow. THE BASSOON. What’s that?”
And with that manipulative interaction, a bassoonist was born.
The bassoon is ridiculous. They should be banned for being horrible, unnecessary and adenoidally grating.
It takes like an hour to assemble one. They’re enormous. It’s like they’re made out of Lincoln logs, aluminum twigs and paper towel tubes. There are these tiny double wooden reeds that you have to soak and trim and tend to all the time. There’s a strap that you actually have to sit on when you play so the whole thing doesn’t fall onto the floor like a bundle of garbage. And, after all that falderall, they end up sounding like an anemic donkey with laryngitis.
Later, after I was digging into my bassooning, Mr. Law was thoughtful enough to let the class know that originally the bassoon was called the ‘fagotti’ in Italian because it was like a faggot (bundle) of wood when you were carrying the pieces around. That went over really well. People in junior high just loved commenting in all sorts of interesting ways on me and my enormous ‘fagotti.’
I would also occasionally play in the pep band and marching band as a . . . wait for it . . . xylophonist. Our High School team was the Highlanders and thusly the marching band wore kilts and knee-high socks. If you went to a Shorecrest game or pep rally in 1982 or ’83 and saw a tall, pimply, gangly teen in a plaid tartan kilt with a xylophone strapped to his skinny chest, that was probably me. Also, it should be noted that the “cool” guys in marching band would go “commando” under their kilts as they played “Tequila” and “On Wisconsin” and floppily marched around like pubescent idiots.
As if the bassoon, xylophone and science fiction obsession wasn’t enough, I then took up an interest in chess. It’s as if the sirens of dweebdom lured me inexo- rably into their pimply lair, from which I never really returned.
So I joined the chess club at Shorecrest High School. The team was centered around two guys whose name sounded like shoe: Terry Hsu (Chinese dude) and Jeff Schuh (white dude). They were really good at chess and taught the rest of us dorks a ton. Terry was first board and Jeff second. Other team members were Blake Kremer (3rd board), David Potter (5th board) and me manning the 4th board. You see, a chess team is comprised of the five best chess players and you put them in order from 1st board to 5th.
When you play another team, they bring their five best and you both have at it in a silent room with a handful of awkward, acne-draped spectators. We did pretty well with the “shoe” brothers and went to the state championship one of the two years I was on the team. We even beat the fancy-pants private school, Lakeside (al- ma mater of Bill “Fancy Pants” Gates). We crowed about that victory quite a bit, I can tell you.
Once the cheerleaders mockingly made a bunch of chess team banners for the school entranceway that said things like “CONGRATS CHESS TEAM STATE CHAMPS 82!” and stuff like that. Everyone at the school snidely guffawed and thought that was a total hoot and we slunk past the banners in shame. Jeff Schuh, however, had purchased a “chess” letterman’s jacket with a giant knight’s profile on the back and wore it around proudly. He was a nerd rebel and didn’t care what the majority of Highlanders thought of him. Like “Spock” and “Potsie Weber” from Happy Days he immediately became a nerd hero. Reprinted by arrangement with Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Rainn Wilson, 2015