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IM WedesaySetemer26 2012 / TeSateen
Wednsda, Sptemer 6, 012//Te taeen B
I mugged my grandma's mugger
PERSONAL STATEMENT!by Erin Kirkland
was a child piano prodigy
PERSONAL STATEMENT by Jennifer Xu
4N
-4
'Yu know how some people say they've had a life-defin-
ing moment? A flash of revelation where the world
makes sense and they've found the meaning of life once
and for all?
Well, this isn't it. But I promise it's just as entertaining, if
not more.
Let me set the scene for you: June 12, 2001. Slightly after 10
a.m. Central European Time. Rome, Italy. My parents, grand-
mother and I had just endured a total of 10 hours in the air (not
including a layover) before arriving at our final destination,
Roma, where we were prepared for a two-week trip immersed
in the finest Italian culture.
After grabbing our luggage, we walked to the rental car
concourse so we could leave the airport and drag our tired
bodies into a hotel to get some much-needed sleep. As my par-
ents walked up to the Hertz desk, they left strict instructions
for my grandmother and 9-year-old me to keep an eye on our
mounds of luggage.
It was a long wait. From my spot on the floor behind our
large charcoal suitcase, I saw my 78-year-old grandmother's
eyelids flutter to a close as she leaned into the waiting area's
couch. She made limp attempts to guard her purse, which was
loosely clingingto her right side.
I felt my own eyelids start to droop but was soon distracted
by the two characters that had entered the concourse with a
swoosh of the automatic doors.
They were dressed head to toe inblack (or at least a washed-
too-many-times black). If their intent was to blend into the
fluorescent fanny-pack-and-visor world of European tourists,
they had failed significantly.
I wish for the sake of my story that they weren't stereotypi-
cal crooks, Italian caricatures of Mary and Harry in "Home
Alone." But they were.
One was tall and lanky with olive-oil skin. The other was
ILLUSTRATION BY MEGAN MULH-
short, stumpy and squat. Both looked as though they hadn't
showered in days (I would find out later this was a defining
feature of many Europeans, not just its crooks).
The two scanned the room until their eyes landed on my
sleeping grandmother and me, the youngster peering behind
the skyscrapers of luggage. They'd selected their targets.
Looking back, I can't blame them. Not because of our devilish
good looks, but because we were the most vulnerable ones in
the room.
Systematically, the two parted ways. Mr. Stumpy grabbed
a pair of wrinkled tickets out of his front pocket and
approached my grandmother, talking in cluttered Italian. My
grandmother tried responding in her own version of broken
Italian, getting increasingly flustered with each exchange.
Mr. Lanky, on the other hand, began to circle around the
scene like a hawk eyeing its prey. With each ring around the
rosie, he got closer and closer, fiddling with an unlit cigarette
between his fore and middle fingers.
And then it happened.
With my grandmother distracted by his partner, Mr. Lanky
swooped in, grabbed my grandmother's purse and briskly
walked toward the automatic doors. The short one, as if no
one had seen the two enter together, threw up his hands, mut-
tered something to the extent of "would you believe that?!,"
put the tickets back in his pocket and walked away from the
scene.
And what about little 9-year-old me? Well, I ran after the
crook who had my grandmother's purse.
Either he was a surprisingly slow thief or I was fast for my
age, but I was soon able to catch up to him near the automatic
doors. I tapped him on the back.
There was no doubt that he was alarmed. His eyes grew
wide, his jaw almost hitting the ground. After a few seconds,
he managed to mutter, "Oh, is this yours?"
"Yes," I replied, yanking the purse out of his hands and
walking back to my grandmother.
My parents, who had been at the rental desk the entire time,
turned around to find me triumphantly wielding my grand-
mother's recovered purse and my flustered grandmother
struggling to describe the event.
To this day, I don't know what came over me. Maybe it
was from a childhood spent pretending I was Harriet the
Spy, reading about Nancy Drew's wit and courage, or hid-
ing behind the bushes in my front yard with a magnifying
glass, hoping that I would spot some sort of neighborhood
crime.
Not that my reality entirely converged with these fictional
universes. In my idols' detective stories, the heroine's actions
were always celebrated and marveled at by the public. But my
heroic actions? Not so much.
Acting as the concerned and anxious parents I know and
love, my mom and dad scolded me on how dangerous the situ-
ation was. Apparently a 9 year old wasn't supposed to chase
after crooks.
But what I later learned was that my grandmother kept
her blood pressure medicine in her purse and could go no
longer than 12 hours without it. So, our trip would have been
quickly cut short if I hadn't been crazy enough to run after
Mr. Lanky.
But thanks to my considerable sleuthing talents (or just
sheer stupidity), we spent the rest of the trip tracing our fam-
ily roots throughout the farming villages on the outskirts
and hills of Rome, seeing the church where my great-grand-
parents were married and later meeting up with my brothers
in Florence. I may or may not have eaten gelato twice a day.
Erin Kirkland is an LSA junior and the co-managing photo
editor for The Michigan Daily.
n elementary and middle school, I was a child piano prodigy.
You know those little kids on YouTube who play concertos
with orchestras, their fingers sliding deftly over the ivories
even though their feet canbarely reach the pedals? That was me.
I grew obsessed with watching the U.S. Olympic gymnastics
team in London this summer. But every move, I came to dis-
cover, was calculated. A wrist flick, a twitch of the ponytail,
a cheesy smile carved in place - these things drilled and re-
drilled until solemnly committed to muscle memory.
Piano competitions are kind of like that. As artistic as the
music industry purports to be, my musical years were all about
brittle vigilance. Once a year, I was allowed to learn four songs
hand-selected by my piano teacher - a concerto, a baroque
piece, a classical sonata and something from the romantic or
contemporary era - and practice them until each slur had been
smoothed, every grace note lithely flicked.
Drill, rinse, repeat. Five hours a day was necessary, six hours
preferable.
Competing in music competitions can completely warp your
sense of reality. You spend a lot of time with your Tiger Parents
on the road, driving past cow pastures and obscure grain mills
in the Midwest to play on an out-of-tune piano in the hope that
three strangers will deem you the no.1 musician of the Baldwin
National Music Teachers' Association. If you win, the award
money is not even worth the gas used to get there.
You start to think that dropping 40 grand for a grand piano
is a "steal." You own a lot of frilly velvet dresses that you rotate
out when competition season starts to swing into gear. You form
silent rivalries with other similarly dressed pianists and engage
in blistering conspiratorial discussions that may or may not be
reciprocated by your nemeses.
We had an ecosystem of people we regularly saw at these com-
petitions. The hierarchy (June, first place; Jennifer, second place;
Steven, third place) was pretty rigid, slightly shuffling if a partic-
ular batch of judges preferred one interpretative style to another.
It was a small group but not a particularly tight-knit one. My
parents and I would come home from a competition and spend
hours dissecting footage of the event. "Oh look, June's foot
slipped off the pedal," we'd crow, winding and rewinding the
tape until the magnetic strip gave out. Sometimes, one person
would vault out of the group and land onto a higher piano level,
only to find another cluster of like-talented individuals with
which to grapple for awards.
None of us were particularly interested in going into music
professionally. Atbest, we would end up like our piano teachers.
At worst, we would end up like our piano teachers.
Those years instilled in me a disproportionate sense of self-
worth. I had one teacher who liked to segregate her students
into "musical" and "not musical" categories when they began
taking lessons from her. The "musical" ones got to go to com-
petitions, attend master-classes, meet famous visitors. The "not
musical" ones were relegated to the back of the room and sur-
faced once a year to play at the annual Halloween festival. At
these recitals, we'd been instructed to scrunch up our noses at
those not gifted enough to have perfect pitch or a handspan that
could stretch above an octave. Musical apartheid.
I cried a lot back then. I cried when I was practicing, twisting
my fingers into unrecognizable shapes as I tried to get the right
combination of phrasing and dynamics. I cried at competitions
- a little before, a lot after. The judges have a sadistic way of
announcing the winners a half hour after the last person of the
day plays, so if after hours of waiting and listening, the award
you end up receiving is the dreaded honorable mention, all you
can do is publicly congratulate the winner, pack up your things,
skulk away and yes, cry.
I should say there were some good things. Winning was awe-
some, of course. And there were moments of true, Dali-esque
surrealism. In 6th grade, I went to Russia to study at the Rim-
MEGAN MULHOLLAND
sky-Korsakov Saint Petersburg State Conservatory. On our first
day, all the students were invited to a grand concert featuring
the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Toward the beginning of
the performance, jet lag came over me and I fell asleep. When
I woke, I cried, devastated that I had missed hearing my idol,
Vladimir Ashkenazy, play live. The next morning, I attended a
master-class and played a simple Chopin nocturne. From the
back of the room, a man clapped. "You are very talented," he
said. It was Vladimir Ashkenazy.
I continued piano lessons throughout my senior year of high
school, but eventually, I fell out of the competitive piano cir-
cuit. To curious well-wishers, I tell them I "lost interest," but
the reality of the situation was I didn't have enough talent.
Somewhere, somehow, a new breed of competitors had sur-
faced, people who had earnest conversations about Horowitz
vs. Rubinstein, preludes and fugues. They dreamed of going to
Juilliard or Eastman or Curtis, the notion of becoming a home-
less musician romantic rather than odious to them.
Most of our group was good enough to get into places like
those. Some applied, got in but ultimately didn't go. The issue
was, I don't think any of us got into it for love of music. We liked
getting feedback, and we liked getting awards. One of my best
memories from those years was triumphantly grinning after
a win at the all-state Concerto Competition. My dress was
burgundy red and my shoes had thick black Velcro strips that
itched when I touched the soft pedal. But, I cannot for the life
of me remember what song I played.
I don't play piano anymore. I don't even listen to music much.
I go back and forth between whether this experience has devel-
oped me into a driven, proactive person or has totally stunted
my ability for personal growth. It's likely both.
Jennifer Xu is an LSA senior and the magazine editor for The
Michigan Daily.