Mean Judge: “I sentence you to 20 minutes of having two children practice their recorders in your car.”

Me: “Nooooooooo! Please! Mercy! Whip me instead! Hang me! Water board me! Not recorders! NOT RECORDERRRRS!!!!”

(Prisoner, foaming at the mouth, is escorted from the court).

The torture instrument known as the recorder (an ironic name in that it has never been recorded without attendant ear pain and screaming), is one of the more popular contrivances inflicted upon parents by sadistic music teachers.

Other dreadful appliances in this category include the Xylophone, Glockenspiel, Messerschmitt, Budweiser, HakanLoob, and Woodblock.

Technically, the recorder, or ‘Annoying Large Whistle’, is the physical interpretation of what a badger being run over by a five ton truck might sound like.

The sweet melody produced by these instruments (we really do need a sarcasm font, don’t we?) always brings back memories which I thought had been erased by many years of therapy.

It all started in elementary school, where I was sentenced to several years of musical instruction by my parole officers, or ‘parents.’

My first music teacher was a charming French woman named Mrs. Boehnert (pronounced Bo-nair).

Mrs. Boner, as we instantly and maturely called her, was a charming and matronly woman who was deaf as a post (no doubt from prolonged recorder exposure) and unable to speak English terribly well.

Her favourite (perhaps only) English phrase was “Vey fine!” (very fine). Everything was “vey fine,” no matter what transpired.

Me (raising hand): “Mrs. Boner? MRS. BONER! May I please go to the washroom?”

Mrs. Boner: “Vey fine!”

Me (after an hour of wandering the halls, committing assorted acts of vandalism and truancy): “Mrs. Boner? How do I play this recorder thing?”

Mrs. Boner: “Vey fine!”

“Mrs. Boner? What’s the fastest way from the Bronx to the Vancouver Airport?”

“Vey fine.”

Over time, I hormoaned along from the small, childish recorder on up the instrumental food chain to the large and manly saxophone, after discovering that a skillfully loaded sax can hold more cans of beer than a clarinet. You probably always wondered what that neck strap was for didn’t you? Now you know.

I will never forget the sound of our high school band, winning music competitions with sweet melodies like “Overture for Puberty,” “Variations on a Theme of Zits,” and “Concerto for Dorky Uniforms Vey Fine.”

Band tours were common. We routinely inflicted ourselves on unsuspecting communities where families, who had upset the local school authority in some way, were forced to take us in.

People not only had to let us stay in their homes (“Back away from my daughter or I’ll play this recorder!”) but, prodded by the bayonets of their local militia, were also forced to listen to us ‘perform’ in local gymnasiums. Ears bleeding and faces twitching, their piteous whimpering drowned out by our squawking, these unwitting patrons of the arts would endure random acts of our note playing for up to an hour. Those who did not survive were buried in mass graves during the coffee social after the concert.

These and other warm memories come flooding back to me as I observe my children beginning their musical odysseys.

I observe only, since I am wearing earplugs.