The recitals! Oh, the terrible, terrible recitals.
In college if you were a music major (or, in my case, an elementary education major with an emphasis in music), you had to participate in recitals. I really preferred to call them Those Days and Hours of Dread Followed By Three Minutes I’ll Have To Burn From My Memory.
Awful. Awful. Awful.
It didn’t help that I didn’t like practicing. Well, let me take that back. Practicing was o.k, but what I loved doing was practicing by myself late at night in the big fancy practice room with the grand piano and the full-length mirror, preferably when no one else was in the building- and pretending that I was absolutely brilliant! Oh, I sounded so fabulous! The applause! Please, people, stop clapping! Your hands will be bloodied! Really – I must insist!
I didn’t like practicing to improve. Bleh. I always felt so phony. That ‘right’ voice sounded nothing like my shower voice, and my shower audience was almost as appreciative as Practice Room audience. Enough, my adoring fans! I really must towel off now.
And then came the actual recital. The actual recital where I would sing in front of a handful of decidedly non-imaginary people and their quiet, polite applause that followed my mousy performance. Reality – bleh.
Brad had to do these, too, and it didn’t help that he was better than me. Stupid, non-nervous Brad. Kristi was there, too. She, in her brilliance, was willing to be the accompanist that I’d ask the day before the recital, “Um, could you please play this for me?”, and it occurs to me that I never did anything to thank her. (Kristi, you’re an angel.)
There were other recitals for flute (one) and piano (I think…. two? three?), but they have been successfully burned from memory.