Andrew J. Lederer

The head of the (Brooklyn school) District 21/22 chorus I joined when I was a kid was a teacher named Paul Anish, with a hard a.

If I had been a little older, maybe I'd have been clever enough to think of him as Mr. Anus, even though he wasn't particularly an asshole, but because I was still in single digits, I instead thought of him as Mr. Amish, also with -- incorrectly, because my cousins had visited the Pennsylvania Dutch (really Deutsche) country and come back saying it that way -- a hard a.

So, because I was too dumb to know how to pronounce Amish, I thought he had a funny name, but if I had known how to pronounce Amish, I would have thought he didn't have a funny name because I was too young to know the word anus, the existence of which means, for reasons other than those I suspected, that he did have a funny name.

Did I intuit that his name was funny and find a way to make it so without the knowledge necessary to find the right answer? Or was it one of life's coincidences that led me to internally laugh at the name of someone who's name deserved to be laughed at for a slightly different reason which was unknown to me?

Maybe that's why he taught elementary school. (He may have taught older kids, but let's proceed for the moment as if he didn't.) Could be he knew that pre-teens and older would have recognized the scatological potential of his name and make his life a living, unholy hell..

On the other hand, if I'd for some reason said "Mr. Amish" aloud one day, even if he was capable of figuring out what I meant, he'd have smiled benignly, recognizing the harsh fate he'd escaped.

Thank goodness none of this was cluttering my mind during those halcyon Saturday mornings as I willingly missed Saturday morning cartoons -- permanently putting me out of step with my generation -- to learn "The Ash Grove" and fa-la-las and all that rot (which I loved).

No, my mind was cluttered by the name of my more immediate choral instructor -- Mr. Gustafeste (guss-ta-fess-tee). Man, I love that name to this day.

He was the first guy, as far as as I know, that I ever saw wearing a cumberbund, which I, for a long time (of course), thought was pronounced cumberbun, as if it were a baked good. (And by a long time, I mean until pretty recently.)

Shouldn't a guy named Gustafeste wear a cumberbund?

I think he should.