“The Musical Chairs Tragedy” by Ian Randall Wilson (Poetry ’02, Fiction ’16)

      When the music stops someone doesn’t get a chair.

It’s a simple description of a game that’s been played for more than three centuries with many, many names and one outcome: Triumph and defeat all in a moment of silence.

When the music stops someone doesn’t get a chair.

It’s the simple line on which I’ve based an entire career. You’ve read them: The Final Rotation: Game Play in Musical Chairs, Last Seat Taken: A Winners History, The Chair-Height Dilemma: Strategies for Victory, Don’t Stop the Music: The Enduring Popularity of Musical Chairs in America and Around the World.  You’ve read them all, I hope, along with more than a hundred essays and a set of scholarly monographs on the subject.  Still there is so much we don’t know.

1962, early morning.  My mother dresses me in a tweed suit identical to my father’s except I wear shorts.  We both had on lace-up shoes which seemed heavy on my feet.  He led me out to a large black car with a driver, and off we went.  I am 7 years old.  My father told me that when got to the studio, I was to say nothing, and during the program not to laugh nor applaud unless directed to.  I must be there and not there.  “Invisible,” my father said, “Like the man in your picture comic books.”