Playing the Piano

I started piano lessons when I was in first or second grade. I used to bicycle over to the old lady piano teacher’s house – until one day, when I got there and found a sign on the door: No Lessons Until Further Notice. It turned out she was dead. The next piano teacher drank. She'd offer you a little glass of juice, and she always had a little glass of juice for herself. But hers was laced with vodka. The third one was a short horrible woman with tiny hands. I have big hands – I can easily span an octave. She couldn’t. And she’d tell me to finger something the way she would, and my big hands would get all tangled up. I loathed her.

My fourth and last piano teacher was the music teacher in my junior high school. He was a metrosexual, long before that term was coined. He worked out at Jack La Lanne, drove a convertible, and created a clicque of personality around him. He also taught us a lot about music. His classroom was very close to the cafeteria, so it became a lunchtime hangout for the music theory nerds amongst us. Painted onto the blackboard was a thermometer shape – like the kind the Community Chest puts up in front of the post office each year to show how the fundraising is going – but in his classroom, it was the Hostility Meter. If too much sass and sarcasm started flying, someone would run up and increase the level of the Hostility Meter. He also dated the widowed mother of a classmate, and years later, was accused of impropriety in the classroom. I know he was verbally inappropriate in my day, but now it’s politically incorrect and therefore verboten.

All those years of piano lessons, and I can’t play a damned thing on the piano except the Bach Prelude in C where you never strike more than one note at a time.