Back to the Grind
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After the "Feminine Fancies" appearance, life went back to the usual routines of school and piano, but with less pressure. Mrs. Kent continued to teach, hold studio recitals and stage occasional runout performances involving me and a couple of other ostensible little-boy "prodigies" of hers (said Mom later, a bit disdainfully). This went on for a couple more years before she retired to Joliet IL to live near her daughter. Dad, on his TV-repairing rounds, was teased time and again by customers about my bench-spinning maneuver, which they had all witnessed with hilarity on their now malfunctioning television sets.
Years later, as awareness dawned on me that the WKZO appearance hadn't really been much of a coup, I asked Mom why more hadn't come out of it such as, at least, other conspicuous performances. She didn't exactly answer the question as I asked it, but did tell me that the station hadn't actually wanted us there and had treated us inhospitably on our visit. Soon after Mrs. Kent had booked the segment, they found reason to change their minds and called her back to cancel, but she put her foot down and stalwartly held them to their commitment. So they kept it — grouchily.
A week or so after the show, the village newspaper printed a story about us on its front page: "He first began pecking away at the keys (by ear) when two, then came a time of disinterest, but he was back at it the next year … Although David is a bright and intelligent youngster, … [h]is parents do not have the word 'genius' in their vocabularies. Their wish is to let time take its course … David is going to be living the life of a normal American boy, doing the same things that other boys do." The last self-effacing part sounds like my parents were taking aim, sotto voce, at Mrs. Kent's grandiose conceits.
Soon after that a congratulatory flyer arrived in the mail from our representative in Congress, Ed Hutchinson. He was a local guy, born in neighboring Fennville, and his political editorial column appeared in the same newspaper that had profiled us. The flyer had been bulk-printed but graced with a brief personal handwritten note. Dad showed it to me expecting me to be all impressed with it and pumped, and was let down at my non-reaction. He was further discouraged when I showed no interest in an offer to participate a summer stock musical at the Red Barn. I don't entirely blame him, and I don't think it really had to be that way. Much, much later I would love performing and do it constantly, but at the time I might have felt pretty put-upon by the adults around me and their burdensome expectations. I don't know what Mom thought about it, unfortunately.
That, by the way, is a recurring pattern in my memory stock once I entered school: In the wake of a milestone event, Dad would likely look happy or maybe concerned, stick an oar in, and I'd have some idea how he felt, but generally not Mom. No longer a home-school teacher, she would soon start work full-time in the offices of the pie factory in town.
Another big change happened a few months before Feminine Fancies, when we moved out of the little two-bedroom near the river, and into a four-bedroom, two-story stucco house up the hill with large oak and maple trees in the yard.
While my hindsight impressions of growing up in the tiny house and being in the same sleeping quarters as my sisters are pleasant, we had by conventional standards long outgrown the place. My parents dove right into making the needed improvements on the property, and over the next dozen or so years they remodeled it room by room and added a TV repair workshop in the back (though if I remember right, the claw-foot bathtub stayed).
The decor around the fireplace reflected Dad's preoccupations: the framed Remington print above the hearth, the smaller Spirit of '76 reproduction, the civil war rifles that he and his former neighbor fired every new year's eve after an evening of partying and card playing, the ivory chess hung in a display case that got played often, and the wall of books, bibles and grocery store encyclopedias. This reflected his traditional values rooted in our country's history, the entirety of which Dad's ancestors had lived through and served in the military going back to the American colonies.
Also in the bookshelves, and not 100% in line with all this genteel piety and respectability, were the slowly accumulating binders of Scientific American magazine which Dad had begun to pick up at about the time I was born. Most of the articles of course were above my head (and probably his as well -- he later took to more mass-market publications like Science Digest and Discover while harboring doubts about evolution), but in high school I came to love Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column that was in every issue, and devoured his book Relativity for the Million.
The assigned piano rep continued to be daunting. I remember trying to play a piano arrangement of Seventy-Six Trombones for my first grade class (It probably had to go even slower than the actual tempo of its musical slow-twin from the same show Goodnight, My Someone). L'Avalanche by Stephen Heller was assigned but it busted my chops and I didn't finish it. I doubt very much that I was able to play a single Kent assignment quite up to tempo and fluently during all those three-plus years of lessons with her, or was ever fully aware of how they were supposed to sound.
I kicked more frequently against the goads. I rejected an imposing chart of scales and arpeggios, not so much for its difficulty but because it looked dry and tedious. A piano-vocal arrangement of June Is Bustin' Out All Over from "Carousel"* was placed in front of me on the piano and I sent it right back. During one lesson I asked Mrs. Kent why we were working in book three of the Thompson method without having cracked book two. She deftly replied that it was because I had skipped second grade in school, Q.E.D. (The skipping in the piano books had actually happened long before, before even Kindergarten, but I didn't think quickly enough to argue). I acceded to the first movement of the famous Mozart (call him "Motes-Art") C major sonata K. 545, and got partway through it under Kent, to finish under the next teacher.
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*The selection of show-music mirrored what was concurrent at the Red Barn Theater. I remember that one of my sisters played a simplified arrangement of If I Loved You, and did a nice job of it.
Previous: A Few Brief Digressions Next: Promotion
After the "Feminine Fancies" appearance, life went back to the usual routines of school and piano, but with less pressure. Mrs. Kent continued to teach, hold studio recitals and stage occasional runout performances involving me and a couple of other ostensible little-boy "prodigies" of hers (said Mom later, a bit disdainfully). This went on for a couple more years before she retired to Joliet IL to live near her daughter. Dad, on his TV-repairing rounds, was teased time and again by customers about my bench-spinning maneuver, which they had all witnessed with hilarity on their now malfunctioning television sets.
Years later, as awareness dawned on me that the WKZO appearance hadn't really been much of a coup, I asked Mom why more hadn't come out of it such as, at least, other conspicuous performances. She didn't exactly answer the question as I asked it, but did tell me that the station hadn't actually wanted us there and had treated us inhospitably on our visit. Soon after Mrs. Kent had booked the segment, they found reason to change their minds and called her back to cancel, but she put her foot down and stalwartly held them to their commitment. So they kept it — grouchily.
A week or so after the show, the village newspaper printed a story about us on its front page: "He first began pecking away at the keys (by ear) when two, then came a time of disinterest, but he was back at it the next year … Although David is a bright and intelligent youngster, … [h]is parents do not have the word 'genius' in their vocabularies. Their wish is to let time take its course … David is going to be living the life of a normal American boy, doing the same things that other boys do." The last self-effacing part sounds like my parents were taking aim, sotto voce, at Mrs. Kent's grandiose conceits.
Soon after that a congratulatory flyer arrived in the mail from our representative in Congress, Ed Hutchinson. He was a local guy, born in neighboring Fennville, and his political editorial column appeared in the same newspaper that had profiled us. The flyer had been bulk-printed but graced with a brief personal handwritten note. Dad showed it to me expecting me to be all impressed with it and pumped, and was let down at my non-reaction. He was further discouraged when I showed no interest in an offer to participate a summer stock musical at the Red Barn. I don't entirely blame him, and I don't think it really had to be that way. Much, much later I would love performing and do it constantly, but at the time I might have felt pretty put-upon by the adults around me and their burdensome expectations. I don't know what Mom thought about it, unfortunately.
That, by the way, is a recurring pattern in my memory stock once I entered school: In the wake of a milestone event, Dad would likely look happy or maybe concerned, stick an oar in, and I'd have some idea how he felt, but generally not Mom. No longer a home-school teacher, she would soon start work full-time in the offices of the pie factory in town.
Another big change happened a few months before Feminine Fancies, when we moved out of the little two-bedroom near the river, and into a four-bedroom, two-story stucco house up the hill with large oak and maple trees in the yard.
While my hindsight impressions of growing up in the tiny house and being in the same sleeping quarters as my sisters are pleasant, we had by conventional standards long outgrown the place. My parents dove right into making the needed improvements on the property, and over the next dozen or so years they remodeled it room by room and added a TV repair workshop in the back (though if I remember right, the claw-foot bathtub stayed).
The decor around the fireplace reflected Dad's preoccupations: the framed Remington print above the hearth, the smaller Spirit of '76 reproduction, the civil war rifles that he and his former neighbor fired every new year's eve after an evening of partying and card playing, the ivory chess hung in a display case that got played often, and the wall of books, bibles and grocery store encyclopedias. This reflected his traditional values rooted in our country's history, the entirety of which Dad's ancestors had lived through and served in the military going back to the American colonies.
Also in the bookshelves, and not 100% in line with all this genteel piety and respectability, were the slowly accumulating binders of Scientific American magazine which Dad had begun to pick up at about the time I was born. Most of the articles of course were above my head (and probably his as well -- he later took to more mass-market publications like Science Digest and Discover while harboring doubts about evolution), but in high school I came to love Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column that was in every issue, and devoured his book Relativity for the Million.
The assigned piano rep continued to be daunting. I remember trying to play a piano arrangement of Seventy-Six Trombones for my first grade class (It probably had to go even slower than the actual tempo of its musical slow-twin from the same show Goodnight, My Someone). L'Avalanche by Stephen Heller was assigned but it busted my chops and I didn't finish it. I doubt very much that I was able to play a single Kent assignment quite up to tempo and fluently during all those three-plus years of lessons with her, or was ever fully aware of how they were supposed to sound.
I kicked more frequently against the goads. I rejected an imposing chart of scales and arpeggios, not so much for its difficulty but because it looked dry and tedious. A piano-vocal arrangement of June Is Bustin' Out All Over from "Carousel"* was placed in front of me on the piano and I sent it right back. During one lesson I asked Mrs. Kent why we were working in book three of the Thompson method without having cracked book two. She deftly replied that it was because I had skipped second grade in school, Q.E.D. (The skipping in the piano books had actually happened long before, before even Kindergarten, but I didn't think quickly enough to argue). I acceded to the first movement of the famous Mozart (call him "Motes-Art") C major sonata K. 545, and got partway through it under Kent, to finish under the next teacher.
--------------------------------------------------
*The selection of show-music mirrored what was concurrent at the Red Barn Theater. I remember that one of my sisters played a simplified arrangement of If I Loved You, and did a nice job of it.
Previous: A Few Brief Digressions Next: Promotion
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