Piano Lessons
The Source
My first piano lesson was rough. The teacher’s name was Mr. Neil who was the local music instructor and had majored in tuba. .. never had a piano lesson in his life. Frank Neil was known for two things: producing excellent musicians, and scaring the hell out of kids in order to make them excellent musicians. In my case he succeeded in the latter and the jury’s still out on the former. Mr. Neil would stand behind me as I sat at the piano bench and pound out the rhythm on my head. I had a burr hair cut. There was but a hair or two between his baton and my brain. It wasn’t unusual for me to leave the band room crying. Mr. Neil allowed no excuses for not practicing and tuba degree or not, he could tell when my “Teaching Little Fingers to Play” instruction book had not been disturbed since our last session. One day my after school lesson was going especially poorly, the temperature in the band room was approaching combustion, he stopped the lesson. “You like Pepsi?” he said. Heck, what kid doesn’t like Pepsi? “Sure!” We walked together down to the lunchroom, he picked the lock on the chest-type fridge, and looked in. There was no Pepsi. This was the stash of the school cooks but apparently they’d forgotten to re-order. It really didn’t matter. It was an act of kindness from an unexpected source. I was a happy little pianist. Mr. Neil finally moved and was replace by a fellow who out of fear of him ever reading this I’ll call Mr. Bird. Mr. Bird was a real tweet. He only came to school on days his wife gave her permission and then he was constantly running home to check on her. In his words, “She’s trying to get pregnant.” My Jr. High brain had only a rudimentary knowledge of biology in general and hardly any on human reproduction specifically, but I always wanted to ask him, “Without you there?” We seldom finished an entire lesson. He was always being called away… I guess to make his own peculiar brand of music. My final teacher was a treat. Actually, the real treat was the fact that she lived fifteen miles from my home and every Wednesday afternoon I got to drive my car to the lesson! When you’re sixteen you can endure root canals, limb removal, and certain types of water boarding as long as you can drive to the event. Her name was…and still is… Edna Mae Brown. Edna Mae had been playing for the local Methodist Church ever since God was a boy. When she looked at the sounding board of an upright piano she could honestly say that she’d known that tree personally. “Kind but firm” was her mantra in teaching teenage fingers to play piano. Sometimes she came down a bit hard on the firm. “Like a hay rake,” she’d say. “Keep your fingers curved like a hay rake.” When you are sweating bullets, struggling your way through The Spinning Wheel Song, desperate to read the left-hand notes, and muttering at the dead composer for putting it into a key with sharps, the last thing you care about is the shape of your fingers. I was in plane going down fast and she was asking me to tuck in my shirttail before we crash. Years later Edna Mae was the rehearsal accompanist for the musical Shenandoah. It has one wicked score. The notes for 30 orchestra members had been compressed into one ugly, black-noted page of music. I couldn’t help myself. I snuck back into the orchestra corner, learned over the top of the piano while Edna Mae was desperately trying to make sense of this musical Armageddon, and said, “Edna Mae?” She looked up. “Please keep your fingers curved…like a hay rake.”