“I got a broken one,” I said after three forceful blows into the squarish rectangular hole.
“You hum into it,” Dave gently reminded me as we walked toward Macon’s Amphitheatre. My 7-year-old self would’ve shaken her head and disowned me on the spot, but at 43, I didn’t entirely believe my husband. Still, I was hooked after my second hum projected a vibrational little orchestra.
Two and a half hours later, I’d kazoo’ed and shaken my tail to Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” The Allman Brothers Band’s “Ramblin’ Man,” and Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” all from the best seat in the house—right behind a guy I later read about on Macon.com in an article titled, “Is third time the charm? 1,500+ attempt to break kazoo world record in Macon.”
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
But the man in front of me? Turns out, according to Macon.com, he was “Aaron Sadovsky, a self-described rocker, who drove nine hours from Coconut Grove in Miami to Macon, solely to try and help break the record. A gold kazoo he won during a Jam Cruise hung from his neck.”
Me? I drove thirty minutes, and before tonight, the kazoo was nothing more than a background character in my life—so far down in the credits it wouldn’t even be listed. But tonight, it catapulted itself right below the xylophone on my personal instrument ranking list, thanks to an unexpected amount of history and hilarity delivered by comedian Ian Karmel.
Karmel has too many impressive things under his belt (including an Emmy) to grace the kazoo stage. But there he was and all the better for us. I appreciated his closing remarks—about how divided we seem as a country, and yet, here we were, gathered to hum into plastic and make fools of ourselves together.
And like I said last night: I needed it. I really did.
Had we broken the record, the night might’ve landed in my Top 100 Dopest Nights of All Time. Since we didn’t, it’s still up there—maybe around #9,452.
I’ll leave you with some of Ian’s kazoo comedy and a video of a bunch of adults (and a few kids) kazooing their ever-loving hearts out.
Love, Jaclynn
Going On 40 