My One And Only Time On Stage

So there I was, in a theater packed with a thousand people, all eyes riveted on me as I stepped out onto the stage. I felt weak as a blade of grass and I could feel my heart beating in the middle of my forehead. My palms were wet and my shoes were filling with ass sweat. If I were wax I’d have melted away.

The stage was situated in a new multi-million dollar center being dedicated to the music director of one of the most prestigious colleges in the state. This gentleman, in addition to being responsible for his college’s musical excellence, also founded a nationally renowned jazz festival. He was being honored this evening, but he wasn’t in attendance; he’d passed away from cancer the year before.

So what was I doing there? I don’t sing or dance, and the only music I could play was half of Oh! Susanna on a harmonica. I was there because I’d been hired by the college’s faculty board to paint a portrait to honor the deceased. I’d entered a competition to paint the outgoing president of the college and didn’t get that job, so I was surprised when the Dean called to inform me that I’d been the unanimous choice selected to portray the late music director.

I couldn’t believe my luck; the president’s portrait would hang in the campus library crowded together with a dozen other paintings, whereas this portrait would hang on a wall by itself in the entry of the new music auditorium.

For reasons too complicated to explain there were only two photographs available for me to work from. One was thirty years old and showed the man in robust health, while the other was snapped a few months before he died, his face ravaged by cancer. My task was to combine the two into a pleasing image that honored and celebrated the beloved educator.

The portrait needed to be finished and framed in time for the auditorium’s dedication scheduled in one month. I worked hard, knowing my painting would face the critical gaze of the college board, which included the school’s art director. When the painting was far enough along I met with the board to show them my progress. I’d been through this process before and knew the ropes: the art director would need to validate his opinion by finding something wrong with my painting, so I intentionally made a small mistake for him to find in the subject’s eye.

Sure enough, the art director rose from his chair. He actually (I swear to God) held a thumb up to my portrait and said, “The left eye doesn’t track properly with the right.”

I pretended to study my canvas, and finally admitted, “You’re absolutely right. How could I have missed that?”

I’d brought my portable palette with me and I quickly painted out the white highlight in the left eye and repainted it a millimeter to the left, where the highlight belonged.

“Now it’s perfect,” the art director said, beaming.

Everyone was happy, except me when I was informed the Dean had decided to have me stand on the stage beside the draped portrait when it was unveiled at the ceremony. Back then I was painfully shy and tried to get out of being dragged onstage, but the Dean insisted.

And that’s how I came to be standing on that stage. I was perspiring in an auditorium with a thousand people, faculty and students of the late music director who’d flown in from all over the world. The dead man’s family was present, I was told, including his eighty-year-old mother who’d been flown in from Florida. At that moment it occurred to me that among all those people, I was the only one present who’d never laid eyes on the man I’d painted.

What if the painting didn’t look like the guy? What if I’d exposed too much of the cancer that had claimed him. A thousand doubts preyed on my mind, so much so that I barely noticed when the Dean finished his speech, mentioned my name and pulled away the cloth covering the portrait.

The silence was deafening. I fought the urge to run, not that I’d have gotten far since I couldn’t find my legs. Time seemed to fossilize. And then there was a shriek, more like a wail. The eighty-year-old mother was standing, and sobbing, and blowing kisses at me. The entire auditorium burst into applause. I’d succeeded. At a gathering after the unveiling I was clapped on the back by those who’d known the music director and told I’d captured him perfectly.

The next morning when I stepped on the bathroom scale (I foolishly did such things back then) I saw that I’d lost nearly five pounds, no doubt from all that sweating. I decided then and there that painting portraits for a living wasn’t for me. I didn’t think my heart could take it, not for a crummy few hundred bucks.

Have you ever had an uncomfortable on-stage moment?

The Most Beautiful Sound

A fellow blogger recently listed a few of her favorite things and one of the items, a classic TV sitcom, brought a smile to my face and made me remember one of the most beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard.

It was ’76 and Mrs. C. and I were on a bus riding from Patras to Athens, a journey that didn’t look long on a map but seemed endless on a bus with clucking chickens and grunting pigs. Mrs. C. and I were exhausted when we arrived in downtown Athens a few minutes before ten PM. We had yet to find a place to stay so I told Mrs. C. to keep her eyes on the other passengers so we could follow them to a hotel or pension after I collected our backpacks from the bus driver.

When I returned, she was hopping with excitement. “Look!” she said, her voice thick with excitement. My eyes followed the direction of her trembling finger and I caught my first glimpse of one of the marvels of the world all lit up, the Parthenon atop the Acropolis. We were so absorbed by the spectacle that we didn’t hear the bus pulling away. At exactly ten o’clock the Acropolis winked into darkness, as if someone had flipped off a switch. None of our fellow bus passengers were in sight. At that moment we realized we were the farthest we’d ever been from home, in nearly total darkness with no idea where to go.

Weighed down by our backpacks, we wandered the streets of Athens. Street signs were no help; the language didn’t resemble any of the romance languages we were familiar with (Mrs. C. was marginally competent in French) and the words appeared ridiculously long with an absurd amount of Xs in them. I became alarmed when the streets narrowed and men came out of dark cubicles to stare—not at me but at Mrs. C. She was the only female in sight.

We picked up speed but it hardly mattered since we didn’t have a clue where we were going. Shadows in corners were starting to play on my imagination, as if I required further convincing that I needed to get my wife off the street. And then, wafting through the darkness, we heard the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard, the music of my childhood, a paean to home and safety, more uplifting than Mozart—the musical theme of I Love Lucy. We followed the glorious sound to a dark hotel, pulled open the door and stepped inside.

The room was lit only by the glow of a television. A dozen Greeks were sitting around the TV, pounding their thighs and laughing at Lucy’s rubber face. The dialogue was in English, with Greek translation below. Ricky was saying, “Lucy…Lucy…Lucy! Now that you’ve pulled your sheets together you need to lie between your blankets!” It was hard to imagine how Ricky’s Spanglish could be translated into Greek, but apparently it wasn't a problem.

I dropped my backpack to draw the proprietor’s attention and dozens of eyes, lit by the eerie blue of the TV, turned in our direction. My voice probably cracked when I said, “We’re looking for a room. Do you have any available?”

A man came forward, reached for a key on a wall and handed it to me. He pointed at stairs. I thanked him and he went back to the TV. I think Lucy had a loving cup stuck on her head.

We climbed five flights of stairs in the dark and found a door with a lock that fit our

key. Inside was a moderately clean room with a comfortable-looking bed. We dropped on it in exhaustion.

The next morning as Ms. C. lay in bed I opened my eyes to dazzling Greek light flooding through glass doors leading to a small balcony. I rubbed my eyes, ambled to the balcony and saw a forest of TV antennas. I glanced higher, and rising above the antennas was the Parthenon, the goal of our journey. As I stared at this architectural wonder I could hear my wife’s gentle breathing over on the bed, but it was the sounds of I Love Lucy playing in my head.

A Lesson From Dad

When I graduated from high school I needed a car to drive to college. My older brother had faced this dilemma before and had demanded my parents buy him a car. My mother laughed and told him to get a job and buy his own car, which he eventually did.

So when my turn came I chose a different strategy. When asked about college I told my folks, “I don’t think I’ll go to college.”

My mother was appalled. “I thought you were planning on going to the local community college and then transferring to UCLA.” Although neither of my parents went to college, both grew up in big families that prized education.

I had only one hand to play and needed to play it well. “If I went to college,” I said to my parents, “I’d need a car. And you guys have already given me so much that I couldn’t possibly ask you for something so expensive. So I think I’ll just stay home, get a job at McDonald’s and live with you guys.”

There wasn’t any more discussion about it, but a few weeks later there was a car waiting for me in the driveway, a fairly new ‘68 blue Volkswagen Beetle. Without my knowledge, Dad had purchased it at a police auction and, being a professional mechanic, had replaced the damaged engine with a new one. My plan had worked; I’d succeeded where my older brother hadn’t. I was handed a practically new car.

I enrolled at the local community college. The campus was nearly twenty miles away but the distance wasn’t a problem thanks to my blue bug. I was desperate to leave home but two years would pass quickly. Soon enough I’d be off to Los Angeles, the land of my fantasies, few of which had anything to do with college.

Of course I still lived at home during this time, and my dad would frequently ask me if

I was taking good care of my car. I assured him I was. A lie, of course. It’s a sad fact that young people seldom take care of anything obtained without effort. Had I worked to earn my car, like my brother did, I’d have cherished it, maybe even washed it and rotated the tires, had I taken time to learn how. But I wasn’t a good car owner. I filled the beetle with gas and expected it to run perfectly.

One Saturday after visiting friends, I drove home and saw Dad hosing down the driveway. When I parked at the curb and climbed out of my car he said, “You’ve been adding water to the radiator every few weeks, haven’t you?”

I looked my father in the eye and said, “Of course.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said.

I snuck out of the house minutes later when Dad moved his watering to the back yard. I drove furiously to the nearest gas station where I yelled at the attendant, “I’ve had this car for four months and I’ve never put water in the radiator! What should I do?”

“You should learn more about your car,” he said. “Volkswagen Bugs are air-cooled. They don’t have radiators.”

“They don’t?” I asked with relief.

“They don’t,” he said.

When I drove home Dad was curling the hose and putting it away. He was a man of few words. His smile said it all.