My Piano

Oh my gosh!  OH MY GOOODNESS!  Imagine My surprise.  I love the chest of drawers!  Who would think.  The dresser looks good & is beautiful!  It occured to me that the reason I dislike (HATE) the orangy cherry stained wood is because that is the color of my piano downstairs..   My mother & her awful 2nd husband (but that's another story) brought it all the way from LA to our house in NJ so I could have the childhood piano I grew up with. 

My piano - a beautiful french provencial spinet with graceful legs & scalloped-like top; the orangey cherrywood teenage torture device I practiced every day on, studying to try to become the concert pianist my parents so dearly had dreams of.    sigh.  I DiD try year after year until I FiNaLLy was allowed to give it up.  To give up. 

I was good, won 1st place blue ribbons at the "auditions" I had to go to every year at SMU, but only after hours of excursiating practice I hated. And forget about my NERVES... around the 8th grade I started to shake & my hands would sweat, slipping off the keyes when I would have to perform... So much stress. Fear Id be found out a no-talent phonie.  I couldnt sight read & I couldnt play by ear, whereas most pianists can do either/or.  I was NEVER GOOD ENOUGH to go to say, Julliard, NOR did I want to. 

I wanted to DANCE with all my heart.  I wanted to skate. (Yep I was a professional ROLLER skater,) ( Well, it was TEXAS & it was so hot that there were NO Ice Arenas around in those olden days,)  (Sounds dorky, but I LOVED it.)  I wanted to do ANYthing other than practice the piano 1 more day. 

The thing is, I HAD wanted to learn to play Rock & Roll, Blues, & what I now recognize as Gospel, when I 1st started lessons in the 4th grade at 9yrs, but NO.  Mother & Daddy only Wanted to listen to classical music every day.  So I became (somewhat) skilled at that, but was never taught chords or how to improvise on the keyboard.  I try to learn now, but it just doesnt work - I cant do it.  Wish I could.  I dissappoint myself.  Im sure my parents werent thrilled when I began to Hate the piano & begged so long to quit, before they Finally relented after my Jr year. 

So my Sr Year I got to focus on being an "Eaglette" (our high school drill team) (ahh, the importance of adolescent peers) & FINALLY was... Mrs. DeArmond free.  My lovely piano teacher, a nice person & highly sought out musician, even pretty.  (She DID have a creepy husband with a black plastic eye patch in his wire rim glasses, & a yucky skinny mustache.)  Somehow my parents thought he would be a good one to tutor me in Algebra at which I kept failing, & his help didnt change that.  Not that it was HIS fault, I really just DIDNT get numbers (stupid) ... didnt really have to since my Daddy was an accountant, & therefore I still really CANT to this day (yep, still math illiterate. Makes writing real estate contracts next to impossible.  But that's another story.)

  Then there were her dear Children, Peggy & Jimmy whom I suppose I had a love/hate relationship with, well maybe that's too strong, it wasnt hate it was more like resentment...  My Mother was ALWAYS LATE, ALWAYS LATE,

A L W A Y S  LATE. 

So after my piano lesson, she was never there to pick me up when the hour was done.  I mean maybe it was only 45 minutes, but she wouldnt just wait, or do only 45 minutes worth of something like everybody elses mom who could seem to pick THEIR kids up on time.  NoooOOOOoooo, MY mother would swing by about 2 or 3 hrs later, & Id be just stuck there with Peggy & Jim.  Babysitting, as it were, as their mother went over all those pieces with her next vertuoso, then the next, then the next until my freakin' mother would eventually pull up, & out Id run, FINALLY jumping in the car then back to Richardson we'd go.  (When we lived in Dallas, Mrs DeArmond would just come over to our house which was a MUCH better arrangement.) 

     GOD, more than anything I HATED my mother ALWAYS being late & how she'd always make ME late, & Alan, & Daddy late.  It was humiliating.  Like for example when we'd end up being 30 or more min late for frickin' Church & have to march up to the frickin' front row pews because all other seats were frickin' filled...  right in the middle of the fRICkin' serman, for Christ's Sake... GeyAAAAAaaaaa.  SO EMBARRASSING.

  Sometimes Id have to stay after school because Id be late in the morning. Not good. Lordy, there are so many other examples but I wont bore you any longer here.  And maybe Id be late as a narcisistic, self centered grownup myself (Chronically late people are TOTALLY, unequivocally narcisistic & self centered), if I hadnt eventually become a Flight Attendant where I HAVE to be fucking on time for every flight or Id be fired.  So consequently Im usually always EARLY.  For everything.  ALways.

     Anyway, I grew to hate my piano, & the color didnt help, & the color clashed with pink, which my mother put a light pink screen with gold  behind the piano to separate the living room & dinning room, trying to blend her color palates with this piano.  sigh.  And here I am again with wooden, orangy-cherrywood furniture in a pinkish room...  It still looks lame.  At least now I understand my aversion to that color, to Cherrywood.  The only place it looks good is as kitchen cabinets with hunter green counters.  I could put a hunter green carpet here in the bedroom, but it's just not my idea of a feminie boudoir. Guess I just havent reached such ardent butchdom yet, at least not in the bedroom anyway. My livingroom has pink carpet with a green, velour wrap-around sectional couch...(behind which I hid my piano.) Well, hmmm, one never knows what tomorrow brings...