Undercover Practice

When I'm out of town I have a couple of strategies for keeping up with my practice. My son has a small keyboard at his place generously supplied by his S.O. It's kinda funny because this keyboard has coins rattling around inside. Son & I, both consummate smart-asses of the first water, speculated his Girlfriend's family saw the list of sample tunes and, thinking the gaudy machine was a jukebox, inserted coins in an attempt to solicit purty music from it's innards. It doesn't take much to stimulate the fertile, if misanthropic, imagination of my family. You should hear the biographies my brother extemporizes about other drivers on the road who piss him off. These tales of debauchery rival those of de Sade's basest and most licentious characters.

But back to my surreptitious practice practices. Sometimes I yearn for the touch of an actual piano, so I cruise the various music stores in town and pretend to be an interested consumer--which in a way I am, just not at the moment. So I'll "test-drive" sundry pianos at one store, walk around a bit, leave, then perform my acts of musical espionage at another store. It usually only takes two or three of these sessions to satisfy my piano-jones. The salespeople usually ignore me; I suppose they're too busy playing guitar-hero for the benefit of giggling pubescent girls. More to my advantage; one of the few times shoddy service works in my favor.

So as I move like a phantom through the underbelly of music stores across the country honing my skills on floor-samples of every make and model, I'm amused at the thought of these throngs of keyboards eventually ending their careers in different households. After I played them. I left my mark on them. A little bit of me; my essence, infiltrating the musical conglomerate of America.

Ah crap--I just saw a salesgirl come in and scrub the keyboards down with a antibacterial wipe. There goes my legacy. Dammit.