FullReads

Usually you don’t have to wait very long. These people are beggars for punishment and like to start early. It is customary to lead off the program with a selection on the piano by a distinguished lady graduate of somebody-with-an-Italian-name’s school of piano expression. Under no circumstances is it expected that this lady will play anything that you can understand or that I could understand. It would be contrary to the ethics of her calling and deeply repugnant to her artistic temperament to play a tune that would sound well on a phonograph record. This would never do. She comes forward, stripped for battle, and bows and peels off her gloves and fiddles with the piano-stool until she gets it adjusted to suit her, and then she sits down, prepared to render an immortal work composed by one of the old masters who was intoxicated at the time.

She starts gently. She throws her head far back and closes her eyes dreamily, and hits the keys a soft, dainty little lick–tippy-tap! Then leaving a call with the night clerk for eight o’clock in the morning, she seems to drift off into a peaceful slumber, but awakens on the moment and hurrying all the way up to the other end of Main Street she slams the bass keys a couple of hard blows–bumetty-bum! And so it goes for quite a long spell after that: Tippy-tap!–off to the country for a week-end party, Friday to Monday; bumetty-bum!–six months elapse between the third and fourth acts; tippetty-tip!–two years later; dear me, how the old place has changed! Biffetty-biff! Gracious, how time flies, for here it is summer again and the flowers are all in bloom! You sink farther and farther into your chair and debate with yourself whether you ought to run like a coward or stay and die like a hero. One of your legs goes to sleep and the rest of you envies the leg. You can feel your whiskers growing, and you begin to itch in two hundred separate places, but can’t scratch.

The strangest thing about it is that those round you appear to be enjoying it. Incredible though it seems, they are apparently finding pleasure in this. You can tell that they are enjoying themselves because they begin to act as real music-lovers always act under such circumstances–some put their heads on one side and wall up their eyes in a kind of dying-calf attitude and listen so hard you can hear them listening, and some bend over toward their nearest neighbors and murmur their rapture. It is all right for them to murmur, but if you so much as scrooge your feet, or utter a low, despairing moan or anything, they all turn and glare at you reproachfully and go “Sh!” like a collection of steam-heating fixtures. Depend on them to keep you in your place!

And three or four of the trombonists pull the slides away out and let go full steam right in my face, with a blast that blows my hair out by the roots, and all hands join in and make so much noise that you can’t hear the music. And I enjoy it more than words can tell!

On the other hand, grand opera does not appeal to me. I can enthuse over the robin’s song in the spring, and the sound of the summer wind rippling through the ripened wheat is not without its attractions for me; but when I hear people going into convulsions of joy over Signor Massacre’s immortal opera of Medulla Oblongata I feel that I am out of my element and I start back-pedaling. Lucy D. Lammermore may have been a lovely person, but to hear a lot of foreigners singing about her for three hours on a stretch does not appeal to me. I have a better use for my little two dollars. For that amount I can go to a good minstrel show and sit in a box.