My piano lessons

Hi everyone this is a story from when I was a young boy and my parents sent me to have weekly piano lessons in the music room portable ,at the Wonthaggi technical school .

It all started as a young boy at primary school school where my Nana on my father’s side was the school music lady ,and on the days that all of the school classes took turns at going to music and singing class , my nana was the school pianist that strung it all together.

So there was ,

a talented musician in my family , and sadly by the time that I think I was around 8 years old Nana who had had fallen ill and had a stroke two years earlier passed away , which was for the first time ever in my life as a child that I was dealing with a death .

When her house was packed up and emptied her beloved piano was transported back to our house and placed in the back porch area , for my eldest sister Vicki to have to play and practice on as she had began taking lessons.

I remember at the time that I had a toy steam donkey engine that was powered by methylated spirits in a tray that was lit on fire and placed underneath the boiler ,

to make steam to drive it and I was for some strange reason playing with it on top the piano lid , that was made of really beautiful timber , when I accidentally spilt some metho on the lid and it just happened to catch fire .

I panicked a lot , and I eventually used a rag that I found in the shoebox to smother it and put the fire out .

I thought oops this is really going to hurt ,

but on a close inspection there were only a few tiny blisters in the lid as the fuel had only burnt above the surface ,

so I never got caught for that incident and I also never lit up the engine on the piano ever again .

So Vicki’s lessons went on for quite a few years with Vicki becoming a lot more advanced in her playing.

Then one day out of the blue my mum asked me if I would be interested in learning to play the piano?

I was not that keen on it as realistically I thought it was a gay instrument for boys as mostly my only example to go by at the time was Liberace ,

a world famous flamboyant piano entertainer.

I recall that at the time that my mum had recently been to a concert of his and that is where I believe that the idea of me being a future pianist in mums eyes was born from .

Reluctantly I began classes which I sort of enjoyed for a while and mum and dad had then gone out and brought me a fancy electronic organ to practice on ,

so for a while that made things a bit more interesting and enjoyable.

My lessons were once a week and I paid for them with the cash that mum gave me for the lesson week to week and as I went to class.

I really struggled to understand and to actually read sheet music which is the fundamental part of learning to play but I was trying .

I ended up sometime ordering an easy play music book , featuring the Beatles whose music I loved at that time .

The thing is with that type of music book , that I could teach myself new songs and that actually became really important tool for me a bit later on .

As a young teenager , we had places that we would hang out with friends before and sometimes after school and we all smoked cigarettes back in the day , so my local hangout was a local milk bar in Mcbride ave Wonthaggi and it was called the Larder

The Larder had a row of pinball machines in the back room that we all gathered and socialised in and they were really popular to play and well utilised by everyone.

At the time It was owned by a couple of the boys parents so it was a great place to hang out .

So back to me and the piano lessons

Every week , I think it was on a Thursday

I would go back to the school with my music books tucked under my arm for a lesson from Mrs Moore , and as I was floundering with everything and it became a real hard slog for I guess both of us , and I was eventually completely disheartened with it all.

So the next week something unexpected happened as I was nearing the school with absolutely no enthusiasm for my lesson I had what I thought was a brainwave and I decided on the spot to wag the class and head over to the larder as I had the piano lesson money and my smokes in my pocket ,I would just play pinball for the lesson time that day instead.

So when I got home I pretended that I had been to my lesson like normal.

Over the next few months I tested out the envelope of wagging and I went to my class sometimes and to the Larder at other times .

Practicing like normal at home and I got away with it , and I hadn’t been found out , so after a few months I made a much more bold a decision and decided that there would be no more piano lessons for this wood duck , and I would play pinball and smoke every week from then on instead .

So to facilitate my deception at home I would continue to practice playing the music that I already knew , but I knew that this ultimately would be my undoing as my practice was always just going to be repeated and be exactly the same .

So then I would carefully study a new tune out of the ezi play Beatles music book and practice it seriously and eventually learn it well enough to add to my practice song list ,

Mum was none the wiser to my antics as my practice list steadily grew until one day over a year later , Mrs Moor actually rang my mum to ask if I was ever coming back to lessons as she had another student interested in taking my place .

Hmm

I think I had quite a bit of explaining to do to my parents, but in the end of the fallout , I no longer had to go to those lessons that I despised so much ,

but I had in that year actually managed to play so much pinball in that time , which was cool with me as l really loved it .

But as part of the consequences of my actions, I didn’t get to play pinball machines again for quite a long time ,

Eventually down the track I brought my own machines ,

I’m a bit better at them than I am at the piano , I guess it must have been all the practice