Mr. Rick was a total dick

Mr. Richard Phillips of Birmingham Alabama who taught at The Advent Day School throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s was a total dick. I assume he still is one if he still lives today. He did not strike me as the type who grows and learns. He struck me as the type who needs an adoring audience. He struck me as a self-centered asshole who resented the fact that he was a music teacher and not a music creator. To this day I can’t listen to Christmas music without remembering bits of his detrimental influence on my life.

Mr. Rick taught music at the private episcopal day school for ages 4 to 14. The school boasted a robust music program, and I cannot deny that I learned how to read music. I also learned a lot about the baroque period and various other bits of classical music trivia. I learned that Mr. Rick represented a whole subset of the music industry, being a person who had complete and utter disdain for all modern music. As a 42 year old, it seems absurd that you might try to teach music appreciation to 12 year olds while also telling them their performing idols had no merit. That was Richard Phillips through and through. Classical music was correct, church music was correct. Every other musical expression was a fleeting pile of shit that held no value.

Mr. Rick was a fun clown to us from ages 4 to 8. His three day a week class involved us playing with xylophones and singing songs on stage. I remember it was fun. In second grade his attitude changed. He now wanted us to call him Mr. Phillips. We got homework from him. We were issued our plastic recorders that year. I remember looking forward to this moment. My older sister had a recorder that I wasn’t allowed to touch. I couldn’t wait ‘til it was my turn to get my own. When that day came, it was terrifying. We had crossed some line in his mind and we were now ready for his hard-ass teaching style. This was now a “serious” class. We had math and science and history and English every day, and music was only three days a week. Nevertheless, he expected us to do his homework and learn songs on the recorder. I was terrible at the recorder.

I recall in 4th grade he actually pushed it too far. He got it in his head that we should be reading thirty pages a week of classical music history leading up to this big test on the Baroque period. I just plowed through, doing the minimal amount of studying and expecting to get a D on the test. I guess several of my more studious classmates had hit a wall of despair trying to memorize all the esoteric shit he foisted upon us and petitioned their parents to help study for this intense exam. I guess those parents engaged with the material he gave us and noticed it was both dense and also poorly organized. I guess those parents complained to the headmaster who then asked Rick what the hell he was trying to teach the fourth graders. The exam was given to us but we never got the results back. Rick’s curriculum returned to its original form, that of a music teacher.

Despite his attempts to make his music class into a history class, Richard Phillips continued to behave like a man worthy of admiration. As we entered the 5th grade, Mr Phillips announced we were now eligible to audition for his choral ensemble. This meant spending three days a week in practice with Mr Rick after school. It meant performing for the school every Wednesday during chapel. The ensemble also travelled to various churches and retirement homes to sing hymns while Mr Phillips waved his arms about. The ensemble got to wear fancy red scarves while they sang. It was all very lah-Dee-dah.

In order to be in the ensemble, you had to audition. This meant performing a song for Mr Phillips solo while he judged your worth. I could not have less interest in this proposition. I’m sure he could see that I was neither wooed by his strength nor was I intimidated by his sway. I did not want to be on his team nor was I jealous of those who were on his team. His approval meant nothing to me and therefore he hated me. To be honest, I thought the whole audition was a loyalty test. In other words, I thought the will to perform solo in front of Rick was enough of an ordeal to grant you a place in the ensemble. Everyone can be taught to sing. Wrong. I have it on good authority that Rick has rejected several nine year olds from his ensemble. Not good enough. Untrainable. Rejected. Nine years old.

The man is a joke. An absurd failure of a human whose desire for praise extends to middle schoolers. A forty five year old man who needs to be admired and feared by ten year olds. Worse than zero, he is a negative one. He negates positivity.

The reason he is on my mind is because it is December. Mr. Rick had an annual circlejerk to his talent every Christmas. He called it Lessons and Carols. It was a performance by the children of the Advent Episcopal Day School that he took credit for every year. It was a four hour concert of children’s choirs attended by roughly 1000 parents and grandparents. It was an opportunity for Rick to bask in the glory his position afforded him. He put his name on all the musical pieces to indicate that he arranged them. He would leave off the actual composer’s names since hymns are public domain. He decides to add some eighth notes here and there and boom, his name is more important than Mozart.

Each grade performed a song leading up to the middle school ensemble. They sang a much more intricate number. The crowning pinnacle of the ensemble sung the solo parts. This role was chosen after months of trials. The finalists had to spend hours of one-on-one time with Rick Phillips to determine who was worthy of the solo role. The one chosen would have the glory of starting the concert by singing Once in Royal David’s City alone in the church full of one thousand pairs of ears. The soloist would have no accompaniment and would begin with no instrument to set the tune. The soloist was always a boy under 10. There were a few notorious failures where the child got nervous, couldn’t find their voice, and the whole performance began with total silence. The student lived with this shame for the remainder of their time at Advent Day School.

I think it’s weird when choir leaders choose to focus on prepubescent boys. It’s probably harmless 99% of the time. Mr Rick probably wasn’t a pervert or a racist, but he behaved like one sometimes. Choir leaders can be hypnotized by the allure of young boys voices. They can’t stop chasing that high and see every young boy as a potential instrument. Mr. Phillips was insistent that we all use our “head voice” rather than our “chest voice”. This became more and more humiliating for the young boys as their voices started to change. You enter fifth and sixth grade and you want to start being attractive to the opposite sex. Making us sing falsetto in front of the girls was tantamount to making us wear pink tutus and braid our hair. Now, I admit that all boys should be more open to traditionally feminine things, but this was the mid 90s for me. I am sure the girls were equally humiliated in their own way.

That was the thing with Mr. Richard Phillips of Birmingham Alabama - he was a bully. He wasn’t a violent bully, he was a mocking bully. He had decades of experience on us so of course he was able to roast us with hilarious results. You were expected to take the roasting happily with good humour. If you got upset it was your own fault somehow. Mostly he liked to do character bits. He had his “black guy” character, his “black girl” character, and his “Chinese person” character as his main repertoire. He would do these character AT the students who had these racial features. He would do little bows at the Asian students and he’d do mock gang-signs at the Black students. Other characters who would show up were his lispy gay guy, “y’all sound worse than Helen Keller on a bad day,” was a favourite line.

I remember the media fiasco that was the John Wayne Bobbit spousal abuse case. The details of a marriage so desperately sad were fodder for ten thousand low-effort late night jokes. The shudder that enters a man’s spine when he considers being mutilated thusly is incomparable. Maybe childbirth is a million times worse - i will never know. What I do know is that everyone should be ashamed for ever finding that situation funny. Mr Rick thought it was a fucking laugh riot. He wanted to make jokes about it so hard but he was just so devoid of creativity that all he could do was wave his scissors towards the boys, snapping them shut over and over with both hands yelling “Bobbit! Bobbit!” at us. He’d laugh at his incredible joke, we’d recoil and get uncomfortable.

When I imagine being my age (42) and making repeated references to 7th grader’s genitals, I picture myself getting fired in disgrace later that afternoon. Rick Phillips made this reference dozens of times over several months. It was always directed at us boys and always in front of the girls. I recall mentioning it to my parents over dinner just casually. “Mr Rick loves to make this joke about that guy whose abuse drove his wife to mutilate him.” My mother was well acquainted with the headmistress of the school and I think she relayed this fact to her. I think Mrs. Battles marched down to Rick’s office and was like “Jesus Christ Rick?!?” Probably not so spectacularly in reality. I know my mom asked “are you sure he’s not saying “bob it”, like the Bob haircut? Like he’s threatening to give you a haircut, not threatening to cut your penis off in front of the classroom?” I assured her that was not what he was referring to.

Anyway about a day after that conversation, Mr Rick did the Bobbit routine again, but this time he specifically said “you know I am referencing the bob hairstyle right? I don’t know what else you could think, but I have definitely been saying ‘bob it’ this whole time.” What a coward.

The final Mr Rick Phillips of Birmingham Alabama story I have is from our final year at Advent. It was 8th grade and we were 13-14 years old. There was a mere 22 of us in the class and only four were boys. We always had more girls in my year and the imbalance just continued. For whatever reason, Mr. Rick wanted to teach 7/8th grade together, but separate sessions for boys and girls. At this point I had so little respect for him that I was doing just the barest minimum. I remember one time him playing the “match this pitch” game, where he tried to get us to sing up high as usual. I was just done, and pretended I couldn’t do it. He’d hit a key on the piano and I’d flatly say ‘laaaaa’ a couple octaves lower. He was so sure he could just force me to do it. I was thinking how little power he held over me and I was glad to receive an F. I was already accepted into highschool. His class was not core curriculum. He was so so angry. He got red in the face. He threw his heavy set of keys (why did he have so many keys) against the wall so hard it made us all jump. Matching pitch was supposed to be the last twenty minutes of class, but he spent the whole time trying to make me do it.

Then I graduated and entered High School across town. I was so humiliated by Rick Phillips that I had no desire to even consider joining the High School choir. I regret that decision. I met the high school choirmaster and he seemed nice. I later had the opportunity to sell weed to a friend of his. I realized he was a self-actualized unashamed gay man who loved music of all kinds. He was basically the opposite of Mr Rick Phillips. He taught his students technical theory and a love of the broad artform that is music. Mr Rick Phillips taught us bullying tactics.

So if anyone out there ever wants to Google around for information about Mr. Richard ‘Rick’ Phillips of Birmingham Alabama, choirmaster of Advent Day School, I hope they find this document enlightening.

To be clear, Mr Rick…. was a dick.