Remember the old joke, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

In yesterday’s post I mentioned that perhaps ten or fifteen minutes at the keyboard should be enough to get me up and running on one of the easier hymns, even though I don’t spend much time on the piano anymore.

So I decided to challenge myself. I downloaded the music to “Rock of Ages”. I don’t think I had ever played that hymn in church, let alone Sunday School but it’s one that I always liked the tune. And I could picture it in my mind’s eye as being in the key of B-flat. As it happened, the music I downloaded was in the key of B-flat.

So I tried to see if ten minutes or so at the keyboard would bring me up to snuff.

Sadly, no.

It did get me 90% there. I could very easily play each hand by itself, but putting them together brought just enough wrong notes or hesitations to keep me from unveiling it publicly. So it would take a bit more than ten minutes of practice on my part, even for such an easy piece. A couple more days of ten minutes each day and I should be good to go.

But it did remind me of a time in seventh grade.

Mr. Paine, our English teacher, was in charge of putting on some sort of show, I no longer recall just what the occasion was, but it was to be given at the movie theater in Newmanstown. So he was recruiting talent to fill the hour or whatever that he had to fill.

I don’t know if I volunteered of if he somehow knew that I tickled the ivories. In any case Pam Barry and I were recruited to provide a short piano piece each.

In those pre-Sondheim days Rodgers and Hammerstein were my musical idols, and South Pacific was my absolute favorite of their works. Still is. It has a great score where every song works well in its context and yet also works as a standalone number. And its story of love and prejudice in an exotic locale during World War II is as timely as ever.

But I digress.

I decided to pick something from that musical. In fact I decided to do a medley of its songs.

I picked out the songs I wanted to use and worked out the order and how I would transition from one song to the next. As I recall I began and ended the medley with “Bali Ha’i”, I mean how else would a South Pacific medley begin and end, right? But I needed some help with the key changes and other details, so I took what I had to my piano teacher at the time, Mrs. Penchard.

She liked how I had ordered the songs, but she made several suggestions for improvements. For example, for some strange reason when I got to the end of “Some Enchanted Evening” I wanted to transition to the next song without playing the final note. She rightly pointed out that the song had built up to that climax and I should not withhold it.

She also helped out with the key changes and with the transitions.

Finally, she said, “Now what you need to do is memorize this so you don’t need the sheet music.” 

I agreed.

Well, I agreed in principle. But that would mean a lot more practice, practice, practice, than I was normally able to force myself to do.

In the end, I practiced it so that I could play it well enough with the sheet music, but I didn’t trust myself to try it without. Certainly not in front of an audience.

So the day of the show arrived and on the bus to Newmanstown I sprang a surprise on Pam Barry.

“Uh, Pam, I need a page turner for, uh, my, uh—could you please turn the, uh, pages for me?” 

She assumed, of course, that this was just a standard get to the end of the page and turn to the next, so she readily agreed.

Poor Pam. 

Then I showed her the music with all the paper clips in it and explained how to go back and forth and where and when and she got dizzy from my explanations. We really should have had a couple rehearsals so she would know when I was ending one song and where to turn to the next one.

But there really wasn’t any time to rehearse at this late date.

So the show began and it was my turn, and Pam and I went up to the piano. Oh, I should note that Pam had already played her piece flawlessly and had gotten a warm round of applause.

Now it was my turn.

And I started out well enough. As I said, I could play the notes just fine with the music in front of me. The problem was that Pam really didn’t know when to turn the page and only had a vague idea of which paper clip controlled which song and which order I was playing them.

We got through the first transition to the second song without a hitch, and I was feeling confident.

But then there was a cadence in the second song, and Pam started to turn the page too soon and looked questioningly at me and I shook my head and the audience broke out in laughter.

And from that point on, although Pam always managed to turn to the correct song, there was a constant interplay between us nodding and shaking heads to try to indicate when to and when not to turn the pages.

And the audience loved it. I doubt that they were hearing a note that I was playing but they were having a great time.

Somehow I managed to get to the end, and Pam and I left the stage.

I guess there was applause but I don’t really recall.