17Tip By Malia Wollanjust when the mother is due home. Paul
McCartney’s troublemaking grandfather
in ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night’’ persuades Ringo
to go explore on his own, putting the
band at risk of missing its important gig.
But then, the Cat doesn’t merely make a
mess — he also balances a fi shbowl on a
rake while holding a full birthday cake
atop his head. Paul’s grandfather doesn’t
merely put the gig in danger — he also
delivers some of the most captivating,
delightful scenes of the fi lm, as Ringo
joins up with a 10-year-old fellow wander-
er on the banks of the Thames River. The
best mischief makers know what they’re
doing: The destruction they visit upon
their targets is always in service of some
grander aesthetic purpose.
For a long time, I have kept a mental
list of the tiniest little mischiefs. In one,
you buy the exact same toothbrush as the
person with whom you share a bathroom
and put it in your shared toothbrush hold-
er; when your cohabitor notices and asks
about it, act as if you don’t understand
what the problem is. Or if you both wear
contacts, wait until he’s asleep and then
switch your contacts to his contact case
and his to yours.
If mischief is aesthetic — if it’s art —
then it’s valuable for its own sake. But it’s
more than that too; it can be a source of
stealth power in times of apparent pow-
erlessness. It occurs to me only now that
my own habit of collecting mischiefs actu-
ally started during my stickler phase, in
elementary school. Being an eczematous
child of immigrants, a social outcast, I lay
in bed at night devising complex, Rube
Goldberg-like plans to confound my
clear-skinned, white classmates. Once
complete, my mischief would have no
apparent author. In a situation that forbids
explicit expressions of intemperance or
protest, mischief is the perfect solution.
I had a classmate back then whose dis-
dain for me felt palpable: She excluded
me from the group, generally ignored
my existence. One year, our teacher cel-
ebrated each of us in turn by putting a
poster on the wall with one of our names
on it, on which everyone wrote words of
affi rmation and encouragement. When I
thought no one was watching, I wrote on
this classmate’s poster, J___ is rude.
Mischief has often been a creative,
anarchic weapon of defense among the
marginalized: free, adaptable, diffi cult
to control. The ur-trickster of American
culture, Brer Rabbit, was derived from
Southern Black folk tales passed down
between generations of enslaved people;
characters like him, the scholar Emily
Zobel Marshall has written, could outwit
plantation slavery ‘‘using some of the few
means available to them; their cunning,
intelligence and linguistic wit.’’ Other
traditions have their own folk heroes:
There’s Coyote, who appears in stories
from numerous Native American cultures;
Anansi, from West African myths; Maui
the Polynesian; Loki the Scandinavian.
In my favorite trickster stories, in myth
and in life, mischief even has a restorative
power — its apparent badness eventually
giving way to reveal an inherent ideal-
ism of spirit. When Ringo goes rogue, he
gets his camera wet in the river; then he’s
chastised by a police offi cer for throwinga brick. When he fi rst meets the 10-year-
old, they start out tussling. But in all this
chaos, you get the sense that Ringo is, for
once, moving through the world accord-
ing to his own aesthetics, no one else’s.
Ringo’s parade reminds me of the way
my son, during a kindergarten spent large-
ly online, made a point of interpreting so
many of his assignments with unruly orig-
inality. Mischief shows us other ways to
be in the world, ways we might not have
thought of otherwise. Back in elementary
school, my note about J.’s rudeness was
found out. I still remember her expression
when my teacher forced me to apologize:
not rude at all, but bereft, stricken. She
hadn’t known I’d considered her rude; she
hadn’t considered herself rude. And from
then on, through the rest of elementary
school, J. became very kind.How to Attend Camp
As an Adult‘‘Camp is diff erent when you’re an adult,’’
says Bill Syme, a 68-year-old retired
abdominal surgeon from Albuquerque.
Syme recently spent fi ve days with about
two dozen other musicians at the Ghost
Ranch Bluegrass Camp. If you went to
sleepaway camp as a child, the general
contours will feel familiar (the experi-
ence reminded Syme of a band camp he
attended in his youth). Only this time,
you’re sending yourself.
Choose a camp that focuses on an
activity you love. Syme has multiple hob-
bies and has attended tennis camp in
the past, but this year he wanted to work
on his banjo skills. ‘‘Music kept me alive
and sane during the pandemic,’’ he says;
camp gave him an opportunity to playand perform with other people. Expect
most people to be genuinely nice. ‘‘There
were no cliques or anything like that,’’
Syme says. Don’t be surprised, though, if
your instructors are much younger than
you. When you meet new campers, try to
remember names even when people are
wearing name tags (they most likely won’t
be by the end of the week). Ask questions.
‘‘Listen to other people’s stories and don’t
just talk about me, me, me all the time,’’
Syme says. ‘‘I made a number of new
friends by listening.’’
Don’t fi xate on small discomforts.
Maybe the food isn’t great or your mat-
tress is too hard or the shared bathroom
stinks. ‘‘Maybe the accommodations
aren’t fi ve-star, but, hey, it’s a bed,’’ Syme
says. Stay off your phone. ‘‘I hardly looked
at it,’’ he says. Come prepared with the
right clothing and equipment — whether
you’re surfi ng waves at dawn or crooning
folk ballads until midnight. Syme brought
extra banjo strings and fi nger picks.
Commit to the camp’s activity with
your whole being, but not in a self-serious
kind of way. At bluegrass camp, musicians
were split into bands, and Syme’s band of
mostly white-haired musicians diligently
practiced the bluegrass classics ‘‘In the
Pines’’ and ‘‘Bury Me Beneath the Wil-
low.’’ Still, they decided to call themselves
the Coelophysis Singers after a species of
dinosaur whose fossils were discovered
nearby. ‘‘We made some jokes about that,’’
Syme says. ‘‘About being dinosaurs.’’Mischief
has often been
a creative,
anarchic weapon
of defense
among the
marginalized:
free, adaptable,
d i f fi c u l t
to control.Vauhini Vara
is a journalist, an
editor and the author of
‘‘Th e Immortal
King Rao,’’ a novel.Illustration by Radio 17