Wow. Music. I miss you.

I've got a few posts in the works right now, and unfortunately since I seem to want to make most of my posts into essays, they're taking a while and are frustrating to write. So I've got drafts and I'm still organizing my thoughts on these things, and one will be messy anyway, but meanwhile, I've got something I'm so ready to talk about.

I'm realizing every day the height of importance music holds in my life. I've played piano twice in the ten weeks I've been here and lately, I've felt as though a part of me is missing. This is by far the longest I've gone without touching a piano since I was three years old, and the separation just became excruciating.

Several weeks ago I went with some friends to see a one man show at the Irish Cultural Center. The show, called "Mimic," was the (fictional) life story of a man with a phenomenal talent for mimicry who eventually found himself alone, miserable, and dependent on artificial, impersonal pleasure in order to survive because of his own personal dysfunction as a human without his own identity and the overwhelming dissatisfaction of living in his futuristic, individuality-obliterating society. The text this performer created was absolutely beautiful poetry, and as he sat at the piano and scored his performance, I found myself impressed by his skills (and soothed by his fantastic Irish accent) but longing to be in his place. When the show ended and everyone left the room, I went up to the piano and sat down. A Steinway. Steinway grand, I noticed. I closed my eyes for a moment, straightened my back, and started to play "Willow, Weep For Me." The first, most superficial pleasure came in noticing that my hands still knew exactly what to do. But then the music washed through me and an incredible warmth consumed me. I felt as though I'd been powerfully embraced by the arms of an old friend or family member I hadn't seen in years and hadn't thought much about until that moment of reconnection, when all the memories came flooding back. A part of me I'd neglected was alive again, and the feeling was overwhelming; I realized just how much of me that part was.

The piano is my oldest, most supportive friend. I remember when I was a toddler, sitting on my grandmother's lap on Sunday afternoons at the piano, both of us laughing as we played the duet she'd taught me.

I remember my first piano lesson--April 27th, 1999--as my teacher told me "this key is Middle C. Play Middle C." I did. "This next one is D. Play D." I did. "Does that make this one E?" I asked. "Yes!" She said. "And this one F?" I asked, more excited. "Yes!!" She agreed. "And this one G?!" I exclaimed. "Yeah!! Right! But watch out, because the next one is not H. It's A. We start at A and end at G, but Middle C is in the middle of the piano, which is why you and I started there." "Oh, right."

If there's one thing I've never had to learn from any teacher, it's how to enjoy playing piano, how to play with love and sensitivity. To me, that's almost always been the clearest thing. Whether it's because the first few years I learned piano I nearly only played music I loved--Good Day Sunshine, Help!, We Can Work It Out, Ticket To Ride, Thriller, The Entertainer, the Ghostbusters theme, the Starwars theme, and You Are The Sunshine Of My Life come to mind--or something else entirely, I don't know, but I've always loved playing. Then learning jazz piano opened my mind more and gave me more freedom while also exposing me to an incredible variety of music I didn't know but came to deeply adore.

Even during the two and a half years I didn't take lessons, I played all the time and kept writing and learning music. Sometimes it was ten minutes a day, sometimes an hour a day, sometimes an hour in a week, sometimes five hours in a week, but I don't think I ever went a week without touching the piano. This past year studying classical piano and practicing at least an hour a day every day brought me to a level I hadn't been at before, and since I finally had the maturity and self-discipline to make a devoted habit of really working on it, I gained new skills, but loving it was not one of them. The piano was already a part of me and had been since a long time ago.

On Thursday I went to a bar with a friend from my clown school acting class. It was a piano bar, and there was a young Brazilian man playing accompaniment to a young French woman singing mostly American songs and a few French ones. The woman was not a very good singer and her attempt at the American "R" sound was far too hard and just made words sound harsher than they needed to sound, a shame considering that her native accent would have done just fine. The piano player was the one who got my attention though. Technically, he was not too bad. He had good dexterity and could play lots of notes fast. However, his touch was just stale. It was shallow. It was hollow. Watching them and listening to them, my hands started physically aching. My whole body had an itch to get up there. To hear someone playing for a bar full of people and sharing so little love and so little emotion while being given a gorgeous and out of this world opportunity broke my heart. After not very long, I asked the manager if there'd be a break in the set and if they'd let "other people," meaning me, go up and play. Of course, she said no. I asked again half an hour later and the answer was still, unsurprisingly, no.

My teacher at clown school, Philippe Gaulier, despises being bored. He absolutely hates it. And he hates when an actor isn't having fun, or just as bad, isn't sharing the fun with his or her scene partner(s), or also as bad, they aren't sharing the fun with the audience. So in the last few weeks my tolerance for boredom/lack of fun has been seriously depleted. Watching this pair play made me wish, cruelly, that Philippe Gaulier was in the bar so he could've shouted at them, as he does to everyone in the class several times a week, "Zat was fuckeeng boreeng! So awful. Sank you for sharing zat orrible moment. Now leave ze stage!"

Harsh? Yeah. Pretty harsh. But deserved, and not in a punishment way, but in a benevolent way, actually. Philippe teaches people never to accept mediocrity from themselves, partly because if they do, in their heads, they'll hear him scream "ZAT WAS FUCKEENG TERRIBLE!" but mostly because the pleasure of sharing a beautiful, vulnerable moment with people is one of the most profound joys anyone can experience, and can be revelatory for audience and performer alike, and to waste an opportunity for that, for whatever reason, is beyond shameful. Love what you do and share that love with me is his primary lesson, I think. Question his means all you want, but honestly his method works, and the last time I played piano I felt that lesson in action.

I miss the piano. A lot. And if there's one thing I've learned from this separation, it's that I'm never going this long without playing again. It's too god damn beautiful to stay away from.