The Game

Those of you who also follow me on Twitter might have picked up from my desperate tweets (Somebody please make these fifth-graders stop farting!) that I’ve been spending a lot of my last couple of weeks playing piano for kids.

I’ve never claimed to be an especially great pianist. I can’t improvise. I’m not one of those musicians who can sit down and play anything by ear, though I might be able to plunk out the melody with an index finger and a whole lot of fumbling. I can’t transpose a piece from D to A-flat major, the way some of my friends can. But I can sit down in front of a piece of music and sight-read it well, and I’m fantastic at listening to a solo instrumentalist and following their musical instincts. Plus I don’t miss a whole lot of notes. Particularly on those occasions I’m present-minded enough actually to glance at the key signature at the beginning of the piece.

Certainly my skills are good enough to accompany a bunch of ten-year-old monkeys playing a three-part rendition of “We Will Rock You” written entirely in big fat quarter notes. Though inevitably there will be some little Suzuki savant who will want to play some spritely concerto that involves accidentals and sixteenth notes and other roadblocks that actually require me to pay attention.

I know a lot of music teachers in various school systems—all of them big ol’ lesbians. (Which is not so much a comment on their personal size, as on the sheer bulk of their lesbianism.) I’m not trying to imply that every female choral, orchestral, and band teacher in my metropolitan area happens to exhibit Sapphic tendencies . . . well, yeah, that’s totally what I’m saying. When Christmas and this time of year roll around, though, my piano-playing skills happen to be in demand. Those two periods are the height of the concert seasons, of the solo and ensemble festivals, and of the dreaded regionals, which are usually infinitely less exciting than they seem on Glee. So I get hired a lot.

The pay’s pretty good. But other than the noise and the smell of post-lunch farts and of gym socks and that vaguely horsey odor of the prepubescent, and other than the prospect of having to play the Boccherini Minuetto eleventy-billion times, the main reason I sometimes dread going into the schools where one of my friends is teaching is because I know I’m going to have to play The Game.

Ah, The Game. That’s the short version of an amusement my teacher friends leave with the unspoken title of Guess Which Of My Students Will Someday Be A Future Full-Fledged Card-Carrying Homosexual American Citizen? I first heard of it years ago, when the teachers would compare notes over dinner or drinks, like this:

BAND TEACHER 1: That little short kid with the dark hair who wore the blue T-shirt. . . .
BAND TEACHER 2: Dale? Oh, you think so? Yeah, I could see it. But if so, he’ll be the closeted type with a twink boyfriend on the side and four kids in the minivan.
1: And that one with the curls. . . .
2: Justin? No way!
1: No, not Justin. The one with the blond curls.
2: Oh, Adam? Well duh! Totally! And let me tell you, that Bible-thumping mother of his is going to freak out when he comes popping out of the closet.

I didn’t believe in The Game for a long time. In fact, at first I refused to play it when Marian, one of my teacher friends, cornered me after one of her choir rehearsals. Scarcely had I finished playing the last bars of “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie” than she shooed her charges from the classroom and beetled over. “So?” she asked.

“So what?” I wanted to know.

“So!” she said, impatient with my obliviousness. “Which ones?”

“Which ones what?” I was baffled.

“Which ones are going to be fam-i-ly?” she growled, sotto voce. “Play The Game!”

It was then that I remembered The Stupid Game. “Ohhhh,” I said, finally understanding. I looked around the room at the graceless homunculi loping in from the hall. “Marian, they’re ten,” I pointed out.

“Trust me,” she said, standing up to take control of the classroom once again. “You can tell. You. Can. Tell. You can pooh-pooh it now, but ask any teacher. All I need is a few minutes in any classroom and I can tell you exactly who, in eight years time, is going to be adding me on Facebook and will have a profile that reads ‘I am: A Man/Interested in: Men. You look at the next class. Then we’ll compare notes.”

Throughout the rest of the morning I studied the class when I wasn’t playing the piano, knowing that I was going to be grilled later on. Sure enough, the moment that the students began to file back to their homerooms, Marian shot over. “Well?” she asked.

“The little boy with that cowlick?” I replied, uncertainly.

“NO,” she said, in the same acid tone Anne Robinson employs when she tells someone that he is the Weakest Link—goodbye! “WRONG.”

“Jesus Christ, woman,” I said, peeling myself from the cinderblock wall against which she’d blasted me.
 
“Try again!”

I sighed. “These children are barely self-conscious yet. They’re bundles of impulse and reaction, still testing the world around them with hypotheses they can hardly express. That anything—anything—can be predicted about their futures and their potential is a fallacy in and of itself. Therefore—“

“Shut your fat trap and try again,” she growled.

“Fine. How about the little girl who was over on the left?” I asked weakly, pointing to the approximate area where she’d stood. Marian shook her head, needing more to go on. “She had on a white sweater? The one with the really, really short hair?” The girl in question had sported little more than a fine buzzed down on her head that made her look as if she were a nascent political protestor. She looked like Sinead O’Connor about to rip the Pope’s photo in half. If she wasn’t being raised by lesbian parents, there was at least a highly-militant mother somewhere in the background. "She looked all punk-y."

"Emily?" she asked, astonished. I shrugged. I didn't know the girl's name. “Oh sweetie.” Marian looked at me with pity in her eyes, then patted my leg with unsuppressed condescension. “Emily just got back to school last week. She's our little cancer survivor.”

Last night I was sitting in a stinking, stuffy gymnasium doubling as an auditorium, where an 88-piece orchestra of fifth-graders hopped up on, and farting from, their dinners bounced nervously in their chairs while their families waited for the concert to start. My teacher friend, who’d managed single-handedly to tune all the instruments while coping with the thousand student questions that pop up at these things, was busily trying to string a microphone cord between chairs so she could get the concert going.

Nearby, a kid sporting a violin tucked his instrument beneath his arm and ran his fingers through his Justin Bieber hair. “Hey JONAH!” he yelled out to a friend in the cello section. “Did you see the LADY GAGA VIDEO for ‘Judas’? It came out today!” His friend shouted out something I couldn’t hear through the hubbub. “I know, it was SUPPOSED to debut on Entertainment Weekly tonight but it leaked on YouTube earlier! I've watched it like, a hundred and seventy-four times after school. The dancing is SICK. I know, right? They're like...!” Then, still clutching his violin, he pulled out some of the moves that Gaga’s considerably buffer and less formally-dressed dancers typically execute. He looked a little like a hip-hop fiddler on the roof, but I have to hand it to the kid, he had all kinds of fabulous going on. “And she's like, I'm in love with Judas, Joooo-das! You just know Britney’s going to SPIT GLITTER!”

My teacher friend was regarding me steadily, with her eyebrows raised. “That one,” I said to her, discreetly pointing.

Her hand over the mic, she pulled her mouth into a wry moue. “Ya think?”

“And that, ladies and gentlemen,” I said, making a pantomime of spitting on my hands and rubbing them together, “is how you play The Game.”

“Oh, sweetie.” She patted me on the back and adopted a baby-talk voice. “Helen Keller could’ve picked out that one. From thirty miles away. But you are awfully cute.”

“Whatever,” I grumbled.

She might have made me feel as if I’d only just managed to hit an extremely large inflatable beach ball with an equally outside child’s bat, but at least I was still in The Game.