w w w w w i w v w W= w w w 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.