When You Are Pretending That Your Scarf Is A Rifle

Some of the acting was really quite impressive in the independent debut production of Small Pieces Fly To Heaven. The stories of multiple women involved in the Iraq war is particularly interesting where it speaks through the perspective of women in the US Military.

In an odd moment for me, actress Maggie Arndt used a scarf to suggest a rifle in her soldier’s monologue On Red Alert. A few times throughout the monologue, she suggested a rifle by throwing a scarf over her shoulder and extending the opposing end with one hand while miming a rifle grip and trigger with the other. This is not a rile to me. To me, this looked more like a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher than a rifle.

An explanation:

I was an impoverished kid in elementary school in the cold war Ronald Reagan 1980’s. One particularly harsh winter on the playground in Northeastern Wisconsin, I actually did pretend my scarf was a rifle. Maggie Arndt could perhaps take a lesson from me circa 1984 when Red Dawn came out and I was a small boy having smaller soldiers and their even smaller guns sold to me by Hasbro:

Here’s You Pretend Your Scarf is a Rifle:

You take one end of the scarf under the shoulder of your dominant hand and press it against your body with your upper arm. Then you take the other end of the scarf and pull it taut with your non-dominant hand. (Make sure there’s no slack in the scarf at all. Keep it as straight as possible at all times.) You then mime the rifle's grip and trigger with your dominant hand. If you need to bring the rifle up to aim and fire, you grab some extra slack with one hand and move your dominant hand further up to mime the grip. THAT’s how you pretend your scarf is a rifle . . .

It’s staggeringly bizarre to me that Arndt’s technique would bother me enough to write an 120-word tutorial on it. Writing it here means that it’s out of my system when I write the review. My apologies to Maggie Arndt, who really is a good actress . . .