BUZZY BEE & The Band

About a week before Earth Day I was checking the library bulletin board, to clear away whatever was out of date. I spotted a notice put up by Antioch professor Jim Malarkey about an Eco-Slam. I thought - hmmmm! I wonder if they could use a puppeteer? A couple of days later Jim showed up in the library and I inquired, and he said the words I love to hear: Why not?

Things began to fall into place. I spent my tax stimulus which I hadn't yet received on a blue tricycle, and took my trike out on the Yellow Springs-Xenia bike path.  I pedaled happily along until I came to the chemical stench of an unfortunate farm field which had just been something-cided. When I got past the stench I stopped to admire dandelions along the bike path, and that reminded me to look for honeybees.....Actually, for any kind of pollinator at all. Remember just a few years ago when every blossom would be covered by bees and other bugs? Not now. Out of hundreds of dandelions I surveyed, I found six pollinators, none of them honeybees.

So - then the character I began developing last summer, Buzzy Bee, came to mind. Then a song - "Just Say NO NO NO To Lawn Chemicals!" took me over. It's a cute little tune, made snazzy by pronouncing "chemicals" as "Ka-MEEE-kals."

Around that time a little band had begun to form up: Maggie on banjo, Bill on the big old bass, and me with my little guitar. (Joe on fiddle joined us later....). I asked Bill and Maggie if they'd be up for being Buzzy Bee's Backup Band for the Eco Slam, and we were on! We got the routine down:

 Buzzy stowed under my blue B hat, so I could have a bee in my bonnet.....I'm telling a little story about counting pollinators, and they're all gone....and how bees can overwinter, but I can't find my little friend Buzzy anywhere.....then suddenly I grab my head because there's a bee in my bonnet, and ---- ta-da! There's Buzzy and she is mad! I put her up to the mike: "Bzzz Bzzz BZZZZZZ Bz Bz BzBzBzzz!"  I ask the audience if they understood that? No. So I ask Buzzy to go slower.....She's still in Bee talk, and the audience doesn't get it. So I ask her to speak in English and she says, "Just say NO to lawn chemicals!"

I say, "Buzzy! That sounds like a song to me!" and Maggie and Bill on the banjo and big bass (notice they're playing B instruments?) start in pickin' and soon we're singing "Just say NO..." in harmony, and getting the audience to sing along.

The song over, I look for Buzzy - but she's missing from my lapel. Someone in the audience hollers out, "You stepped on her!"

Oh, NO! I look on the stage floor - luckily, Buzzy is just fine, and the audience gets a big kick out of the whole thing. I get them chanting "Aummmmmm," which is actually, truly, the sound that a healthy beehive makes. We send healing Aummmm to Buzzy and her whole hive, and visualize the bees increasing in health and well-being and bzzzzziness. And as the audience chants, Maggie and Bill and I play and sing a little song for the Earth: "Beautiful Planet, joy divine! Beautiful Planet, yours and mine."

Buzzy was a huge hit. For days afterward, patrons would come up to me where I sat at the library desk and say, "Bzz bzz!", their eyes a-twinkle.

A couple of weeks later my little letter-to-the-Editor of the Yellow Springs News came out, and it was about bees, pollinators, and chemicals. So many folks have expressed gratitude for the letter, I'm hoping that before too long a gentle wave of rethinking  what we and our neighbors put on our lawns/into our groundwater will move through the village, and we'll change what needs to be changed on the books and in our minds, for the better.

In the meantime, I'm blessing every bee, every pollinator, and hoping for some way for there to be enough food for the wild creatures over winter. In parts of China, humans are pollinating fruit trees with paintbrushes. This could be us, and very well might be. Bless the BEES!