It is a fine moonlit night.
In a glade in a forest are an orchestra and an audience.
The orchestra are arrayed in standard crescent formation.
The audience are scattered all around the rest of the glade.
To the casual observer, it would seem to be nothing more than a gathering of
classical music fans in a forest glade, excepting the fawns bussing champagne flutes from small custom-made saddles on their slender, tawny backs.
Look closer though, as a good halfbaker should, and a number of curious details emerge.
The orchestra are resplendent in finest evening formal wear on their top halves, and surf shorts on their bottoms - a style known as “Formal Boardwear” in certain surfing circles. The surf shorts have all been chosen in accordance with the classic “Triple F” code (Flowers, Flames, Fluorescence).
The wind instruments have large plastic pipes issuing from their bores. The pipes coil all around the orchestra and disappear off behind them.
The pipes are airtight around the instruments. This will do curious things to the sounds.
If the volume produced is insufficient, microphones will be inserted in each instrument’s tube (airtight seal around the microphone). The pipes will alter the sounds of the instruments and pick up on the players’ breathing to produce a sound that might be a distant cousin of the Star Wars cantina band (Figrin Dan & The Modal Nodes, shout out to all my geek playas). Alternatively, I guess “really weird muted sound” would be as good a description as any.
The Paddling Pool Symphony is a traditional four-part composition.
The first movement is slow, pensive, sometimes romantic but at times almost mournful.
The audience sigh and sway along with the tune, savouring the company of loved ones and the beautiful woodland setting.
The second movement offers suggestions of liveliness and expands on the scope of the first as if to hint at the majesty of the distant, eagle-littered mountains.
Unnoticed by the audience, a crumpled rubber silhouette has begun to rise around the orchestra.
The third movement retains the broad range of its immediate predecessor but is more energetic still. All across the audience, feet are tapping and heads bobbing. Behind the orchestra a giant tap gurgles into life, adding a burbling percussion to the proceedings.
The fourth movement explodes in a riot of brass and woodwind.
Crazy improvisational xylophones skit over indulgent, nine-minute tuba riffs.
Frenzied timpani pound, violins are sawed at as if to produce fire from the strings.
As fireworks erupt from the trees behind the orchestra, the conductor - a wide-eyed man with a shock of white hair in a lab coat - turns to the audience and invites them to join the orchestra in the giant paddling pool that now looms about them.
With shrieks of delight, the audience kick off their shoes, hitch their skirts and run to the pool. Close up, they can see the pipes from the instruments feeding into the giant paddling pool that hitherto lay crumpled and inconspicuous on the floor.
They all jump in and dance in the water like savages as the orchestra continue to crank the party like only crazy surfer classicists know how.
The event rages on until sunrise when the fawns bring restorative cocktails and everyone settles down in the pool to watch the dawn break.
Yeah.