Stink Face: A Midsummer’s Appropriated Lesson on Fairy Culture
Conjure the stink face.
Conjure pure unadulterated disgust frown, disappointed-in-you-but-I’m-better-than-you-Mom eyes, a brow that aspires to but falls slightly short of pretension, puffed-pale blowfish cheeks, squalid strings of tree bark hair.
This is the juvenile face of a gender non-conforming it-person who in our first encounter as communicating humans, says: “Mr. LaFontaine, I think I need to talk to you about cultural appropriation. I have some concerns about your Midsummer Night’s Dream project.” (I’m enthralled as I imagine how my plan for a symposium discussion of the play’s ideas — one where each student chooses a character and dresses up accordingly to debate — is going to be dubbed, somehow, offensive.)
“Oh?” I feign, pretending I wasn’t already primed for this moment thanks to the incessant bitching of a vast array of sensitive youths I weed through on a daily basis.
“Yeah, …” cue frog-face smugness, dandruff-shouldered delight at telling an adult they’ve botched the politically correct pantomime that passes for modern communication. “…I just wanted to talk to you about some concerns I have about you assigning a project that culturally appropriates the dress of an oppressed group. Did you watch that video I sent out to the staff last week?”
“Yes, we viewed and discussed the segment in Home Room, per my responsibility as an instructor.” I say this without a trace of visible condescension, with eyes light and slightly upturned mouth clearly articulating (lying) that I bear this young it-student no ill-will.
“Oh, good!” The creature’s surprised, tender in the moment knowing her millennial will can put a ding in the little universe that is a high school. The whole conversation so far seems designed to catch me fucking up, in this case failing to show and discuss the segment per the commands of my administration, but when this fails she converts to instructor, reviewer, assessment officer gently prepared to steer me, the wayward adult, away from conditioned habit and into the PC Hell that is the sensitive puppy-eyed millennial mentality.
“You see, [dramatic pause as she gathers momentum, her eyes raise skyward, hands aflutter] acting like, wearing the trappings of, quoting, or playing as any cultural reference point other than your own is not acceptable. It is a micro-aggression, an act of violence against disrespected cultures, oppresséd peoples generally.”
(All of these years teaching, and only now do I learn — thanks to it-kid’s glorious pronunciation — that oppressed has an accent mark and is actually pronounced: oppresséd.)
“I’m familiar with your definition of cultural appropriation, however…”
It-girl cuts me off, rolling her eyes in a way that explodes with excitement at correcting an officer of the educational establishment.
“You see Mr. LaFontaine, its [surely how she’d spell it] a standard definition used by most [Tumblrs, YouTubers, and crybabies across the Internet-void].”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, …” I’m prepared to kill her on the spot if she takes the bait. I see myself strike her once in the caratid artery with my Bic, the blood spurting up into a glorious rust-colored platelet fountain I dance around as I proclaim to all the death of millennial tyranny.
Instead, I sip my bullet-proof coffee, lean back professorial-like in my IKEA chair, arch my right eyebrow, tilt my head slightly, and gently glide my fingertips together and then apart again. “…but, it is not cultural appropriation if we study, discuss, and illuminate the cultural perspective, historical context, and peoples in question prior to donning their guise. The ancient Athenians…”
I’m prepared to launch into the regurgitation of facts I’ve culled from ancient Greece, peppering them across her infertile knowledge of the real world, carefully exhibiting how each was used to deepen our understanding of both the play and culture in question prior to the assgining of the project, when, she absolutely stuns me.
“No,” she says, shaking her pudgy pockmarked poor excuse for a brain-helmet. “The culture I’m concerned you’ve appropriated is Oberon and Titania’s, the fairies. Fairy culture!”
