Sorry-Grateful Celebration

Anything is possible when you're young. You're unaware, unknowing, unburdened. You're all Un and all in, ready to give anything a go. When I was 14 I visited the Sam Ash store on 48th street and bought a book of sheet music: All Sondheim. If I could play the Bach my piano teacher was serving up, I could master these pieces, which with my level of musical experience, looked accessible to me. I definitely bought something more embarrassing while there, a collection of songs by Asia, or maybe Kansas, hoping to appeal to some of the boys in my life then, but the Sondheim was for me. The lyrics of "The Miller's Son" spoke to my 520 year old spirit. I would take this book home, master the songs, and be the hit of the next school variety show (a daydream, since our school never did variety shows, we only put on drab choral productions).

Instead of mastering anything, I hamfisted my way through rapid key changes, chords that never seemed to resolve,  and unexpected turns of phrase. I tortured my parents with my voice full of teen misery belting out "Somebody crowd me with love/somebody force me to care." The feeling in the lyrics, humor married to sadness, all of Sondheim's acrobatic wordplay, the celebration of complicated relationships, of living, challenged me. I wanted to be able to sing the songs with experience. Play them with an agile mind and hands. Maybe even eat them. Why not? I felt consumed by them.

Sondheim was a mentor I never met. His songs carried me through my teens, and when I was a young adult, driving back and forth between college and home, I'd listen as the light switch of poetry flicked on and off and on again as I played "Someone in a Tree," or "What More Do I Need?" (hear the lovely pneumatic drill!) over and over. Those cassettes wore thin and twisted, and eventually melted in the car. I felt I was an artist then. I felt I was musical.  I felt I had potential as I bounced back and forth between school and the upright piano of home, where I returned to open up that sheet music and feel the exhilaration of language, rhythm, internal rhyme, and the complicated narratives of living.

Last night Twitter was alive with Sondheim memories, and Dan read me a few of the letters he wrote back to fans. I regret not having written him a letter. Why didn't I? I just gobbled up his music, and marveled at his brilliance, and took everything for granted, and everything I could from him as a teacher, and I never thanked him. 

My piano is out of tune now. This morning in the dark I pulled All Sondheim out of the piano bench, and opened it up to find the binding all botched, the pages shuffled so the lyrics of "Another Hundred People" mash up with "Send in the Clowns" to read this celebration:

Some come to stare/some to stay/

something for everyone/ a comedy tonight!