Let's Eat Paste

I have a bad habit. I guess it's really just more of a habit, it's not so bad. I like to buy instruments that I don't know how to play, just because I think they're cool and I like having the instruments around. It's part of my neverending quest to be mediocre at many different things. It also explains the banjo, accordians, mandolin, and other instruments that are littered throughout my home. I'm terrible at playing all of them.


Here's the latest, it arrived a couple days ago from Texas. It's a late 60's Wurlitzer electric piano, an EP-200 to be exact. It's not a synthesizer, it has a real piano mechanism inside. Instead of hitting a string, it hits a little metal bar, and there's a pickup that amplifies that vibrating bar, kind of like an electric guitar pickup. It can be quietly heard even when it's not plugged in. It has a really cool jazzy sort of sound to it. Or at least it would if someone played cool and jazzy things on it. It needs quite a bit of work to get it fully functional.


As a little kid, I loved dinking around on the piano and playing things by ear, figuring out melodies and whatnot. My debut was at AWANA when I was five. AWANA is kind of like Boy Scouts except you memorize Bible verses and play games instead of learning to tie knots and start fires, and also there are girls. So there was a talent show, and at the end they asked if anyone had any other talents to share in front of everyone. I have no recollection of this, but apparently I stood up very quickly and announced that I was going to play Joy to the World on the piano. And I got up and did it, single note style as I had learned to play by ear at home. It's easy because the first line is just descending note by note for an octave, all white keys, C-B-A-G-F-E-D-C. It's weird hearing people tell me that story, because I've always thought I was naturally an introvert. Maybe the problem was that I hadn't heard of the Myers Briggs test, so I didn't know how to act like an INTP yet.

I'm also told that when I was five or six years old, I almost convinced my Sunday School teacher that I was adopted. So apparently, I was a show-off and a liar.


When I was nine or ten, I was told that I had to take piano lessons for two years no matter what, but after that I could quit. Even while I kind of enjoyed playing the piano, I hated the lessons. My mom got my sister and I these cool piano books that had a bunch of popular songs like Eye of the Tiger or a bunch of TV show theme songs like Cheers or Hill Street Blues. My favorite was the theme to Young and the Restless because it always got a laugh. The piano teacher was very rigid and traditional, and I suspect she didn't want me playing such drivel. She totally sucked the joy out of those songs by making me play it precisely as written which just didn't quite sound like the actual songs.


My worst piano lesson memory didn't involve the piano at all. I usually rode my bike to the teacher's house, which involved riding across the schoolyard at Laura Dodge Elementary. One winter day I was riding past the playground and there were some older kids up to no good. As I passed they started chucking snowballs at me and I almost fell off the bike (a sweet blue Murray BMX bike with yellow pads). I was so shaken up by the time I got to the teacher's house that I couldn't do a piano lesson and just had her call my mom to come pick me up. I think I secretly liked having an excuse (although the trauma was very real at the time) not to have to take the lesson. I bet the boys wouldn't have thrown snowballs at me if I had stopped and explained that I was an orphaned piano prodigy, then they wouldn't have hassled me.

And that's how come I bought an electric piano.