PLZ HELP!!!! Below is the story. I will put the questions in the comments below!
My father’s family is not a musical family. They are a family of words, a family that thrives on long discussions, Sunday crossword puzzles, and puns. My brother has my father’s dark hair, his love of a good argument, and his incisive wit. I take after my mother. From her I inherited a curious nature, a sense of adventure, bright red hair, and a face full of freckles. I did not, contrary to her hopes, inherit a talent for the piano. That fact was established beyond doubt after prolonged and futile attempts to draw music from me.
The piano lessons began when I was four. My mother was convinced that I would be a child prodigy, one of the rare, startling creatures who sits down at the piano for the first time and discovers, in a few swift adjustments of fingers, how to make the piano sing. She had made some phone calls and found the ideal teacher to nurture such a prodigy—Madame Oblenka, a stern Russian woman of indeterminate age, whose tight bun and pursed lips were enough to intimidate a wild horse into submission. Madame Oblenka, who expected a little M o z a r t, was not overly delighted to find herself saddled with a little girl banging her fists on the keys.
I tried to please her. “Feel the music,” she urged. I “felt” it and winced my ears—for what is more unpleasant than a series of wrong notes played in succession? She “felt” my music, too, which is why she always left with an even deeper scowl than when she came. My parents endured the sounds of my practicing, buoyed by dreams of me one day taking the stage in a famous recital hall. Madame Oblenka survived our lessons by wearing earplugs. I endured in whatever manner I could invent. Once, when I was ten, I managed to record one of my own wretched rehearsals. In order to escape my practice sessions, I would close myself behind the door of the piano room, put on the tape recording, and read until the tape had finished. That method worked for a week, until my mother began to wonder why I always missed the same B-sharp. She knocked on the door, and, receiving no answer, came in to check on me. She found that I had fallen asleep while the tape of my performance played on and on.
I was twelve when my parents finally acknowledged that any latent talent I had was not about to emerge any time soon. My mother, refusing to admit defeat, told me to pick another instrument. “Choose anything you want, Honey,” she said, assuming that freedom of choice would inspire devotion. I thought long and hard and chose the drums. My parents, acutely sensitive to noise, would be less than overjoyed by a daily bombardment of pounding. I imagined my father in his study, cotton wads in his ears, wincing each time the cymbal crashed. He, apparently, had exactly the same thoughts as mine, and promptly vetoed the idea.
My next choice was the tuba. I stubbornly decided that if I couldn’t play the drums, I would pick the biggest and loudest instrument I knew. However, the music teacher, a large, flabby man by the name of Mr. Tuttle, was lazy by nature and refused to travel to our home. “If you want to play,” he said, “I’ll teach you after school.” Luck was once again on my side. The aisle of the school bus was too narrow to accommodate my tuba case; if I wanted to learn to play tuba, I would have to walk to school with it. That was out of the question, so the tuba, too, was out.
I worked my way through several other instruments—violin, trombone, penny whistle—before my mother hit on another idea. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be an instrumentalist but rather a singer. After all, I was always walking around humming pop tunes from the radio, and when I screamed for my brother to come to dinner, my voice was plenty loud.
Mom helped me rehearse a song to audition for the school musical. I didn’t get a part. I didn’t make the chorus either, but the drama teacher assured me that he’d find a special spot just for me, one more suited to my talents. He put me backstage, painting scenery. Once I recovered from my sense of injury, I realized the wisdom of his choice. I loved the bustling, practical backstage world, and I discovered that I had a knack for constructing and painting. I loved the challenge of taking our scanty supplies and using them to make something beautiful. Imagining a scene and then seeing it emerge before me—this, to me, was close to magic.
To give my parents credit, when they noticed my newfound interest in set design, they eagerly embraced it. In fact, immediately after the show ended, Mom offered to send me to weekend art classes. Her hand was on the telephone, ready to start calling around, when I stopped her. “Mom,” I said, “don’t push me. Right now, I just want to have fun with art. I don’t want to lose that.”
