Piano Chords
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
�Funny Stories about Music Lessons & Piano Lessons
�Funny Stories about Music Lessons & Piano Lessons: "
True Funny Stories About Music Lessons...
How Summer Camp & Prayer Turned Me Into a Halfway Decent Piano Player
- Or -
�Scout Shinn, Where Are Your Pants?�
When I was 8 years old, I was one of the worst piano students known to mortal piano teachers. I stared out the window, dreamed about baseball, and drove poor Mrs. Graham, my 70-year-old piano teacher with whom I had a lesson every Saturday morning, to distraction. I even wore my fielder�s glove to a lesson one day.
It wasn�t that I didn�t like music � I did � but all those old guys like Bach and Brahms and Beethoven just didn�t match up with stars such as Joltin� Joe, Scooter Rizzuto, Stan the Man, Ted Williams, and guys like that. I lived and breathed baseball, and my daily piano practice was a rude interruption into the world of home runs, stolen bases, and off-the-wall leaping catches.
My folks were patient with me � more patient by far than I deserved � and yet they insisted that I put in my required half-hour per day of piano practice. My older brother, Garland, even typed up an �I promise to practice� document and made me sign it. (It resides to this day on the wall of my music studio.) My seat put in its required half-hour on the piano stool, but my mind spent more like five minutes on scales, chords, and thrilling pieces such as �Left Thumb, Right Thumb�, �Swans On The Lake�, and the ever popular �Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum�. The musical situation, in short, looked bleak, and at 8 years of age I seemed destined to spend my life in the pursuit of baseball dreams.
But life is stranger than fiction, or so I once heard some wise-looking adults observe, and the summer between my 4th and 5th "
