Bedtime for Bunny

Once I won a contest for songwriting.

I'm not joking. I was in the 3rd or 4th grade, and my piano teacher offered music composition classes during the summers. To get us out of the way, my mom always signed us up for these.

I remember being in music class at school, sitting 2 to a keyboard, and the teacher asked us to come up with a note or a short tune that sounded like an animal to us. I reached out and quickly hit a black key followed by the white key directly to the right of it, a half-step up. I repeated this a couple of notes higher, then again a little higher. I said it was like a bunny rabbit hopping.

In my summer composition class, I must have remembered my bunny sounds, because they ended up being the basis for the song I worked on. I called it "Bedtime for Bunny" and said it was about a mama bunny trying to calm down her hopping baby at bedtime. (The mama was played with the same type of tune, but going down a half-step instead of up, and in a lower octave.)

My piano teacher had fancy computer technology (for the time) just for these composition classes. We could play something on her keyboard (actually, I believe it was a harpsichord) and the computer picked it up and wrote it out for us. We could fiddle with the notes, the timing, the tempo, and the computer would play it back to us. To me, this was a really cool toy. What it meant, though, was that I finished the class with a composition, written by me, that I'd never actually played all the way through with my own two hands.

My teacher got permission from our mother to enter out compositions in a contest. Before we knew it, my sister and I had both won awards (I'm guessing there weren't many entries in this competition). I thought it was cool that I had won something. Then my mother told me that the winners had to play at a recital.

That's when it hit me. I had to get up in front of a crowd and play my song. A song I had supposedly written. A song I'd never really played.

I know I probably had moments of anxiety earlier in my 8 years of life, but this is the first one that I remember so clearly. I can still feel it the panic and fear. My mother tried to work with me, sitting at the piano to practice my song. The music sat in front of me, with my name printed on it, and I felt like a fraud. You can't have written a song if you can't play it!

My memory of the concert is in flashes. I remember the drive, I remember what the location looked like, I remember the immense relief when it was over. But I don't remember how I played. I know that I did. I even sort of remember the view of the audience from the piano. But I don't know how I played. Did I pull it together and play the song well? Did I flop, destroying my own composition? I truly don't know.

But I know that I didn't cry or scream or run away. I know that I didn't fake sick and skip the whole concert (something Leslie girls have done on an occcasion or seven). I know that I got up in front of the crowd, sat down at the piano, and played something. I guess that's all that mattered.