Ok...this is a tale about a day---at age 15---when I went to a piano lesson. True story. If you ever needed a reason to do what we do---ie, art---days like this gave it to me. But warning: It starts in a blizzard...a real blizzard. I tried to capture the feeling of being in the middle of a Midwestern blizzard (they're killers): But it ends in uplift---so don't be discouraged... I'll comment later on. Thanks for your wonderful visits, they're much appreciated! I wish you all a fine and inspired weekend. Stay well! ------------------ ...I got off the train, sniping and cursing that I had to take another damned piano lesson when it was a weekend---a weekend---and I wanted to be with friends. Worse: It was early. And cold. In fact, it was very cold---one of those January mornings where Chicago turns into a gigantic deep-freeze. Yuck. The station was---well, the station: a huge slumbering beast on the outskirts of downtown---what you see in every big city---with cavernous ceilings, deafening echoes, and super-worn marble floors. These monsters---once posh and glorious---splayed themselves across blocks of our downtowns like big urban bears, not giving a damned about the droves of people who had to walk through them everyday, or the throngs on the street who had to walk around them (they were huuuuuge). I traipsed through these places every week, to go to my weekly piano lesson; and I swore that one day I'd never make it out in one piece. But today, there was a blizzard. Predicted for later. God I hoped so! You couldn't believe how bad our blizzards were. Whoosh, whoosh---I whooshed past throngs of people, weaving in and out of them like a race car driver, dying to get to the main entrance. If there was a blizzard, I wanted to get it over with. When I arrived at the lobby, it was this huge palatial cavern with so little light---and so much din---you'd have thought you'd entered Valhalla...and I saw what I'd dreaded all morning: The blizzard! I mean the blizzard. The front doors were slathered with ice, the street was a total white-out---from all the snow---and the glass was quaking and banging as the wind nearly knocked it out of its frames. "Jesus!" I thought: "This is serious!" People yanked and tugged at the poor doors, only to be blown back into the lobby... Something to understand about Chicago: While its winds are powerful to begin with, with high rises, the winds build up behind the facades, then hurl around their sides like massive beasts, and come crashing into anything unfortunate enough to be out in these cataclysms to begin with. These high rises turn our winter storms into an ice-filled hurricane. So, plunging into our downtown on blizzard-days was like plunging into a gigantic hell made of ice. What in the world I was doing here, I don't know. Was I out of my mind? Well...I tromped through the lobby, flew at the doors, and whoosh: In a blast, the arctic winds crashed into my face, sheets of snow blasted at us in heaves, and people around me---bracing for the big 'plunge'---were bent over like torpedos 'cause there was no other way to get through that storm without being pummeled half to death. I blasted through: I was outside. Do you remember what it was like to plunge into a tidal wave of gale-forced frigid wind? It rushes into your lungs, replaces whatever was there (poor lungs), and not only does it knock the breath out of you---I mean you literally expel a blast of air that you can't get back---but it freezes your insides in seconds. That's how it feels: Your face becomes a sheet of desiccated drywall where you're sure if you merely grimace, your cheeks will crack-off and fall to the sidewalk in shards. Then countless snow-pellets slapped my eyeballs---literally: They slapped and lashed my corneas like little whips. I couldn't see: My eyes stung too much. And think of it: To be forging ahead like a Navy destroyer, but not having a clue where you're going or what was in front of you: It was a tidal wave of white, white, white; and you struggled so hard to simply stand, you couldn't think about what was in front of you. You're plunging into an abyss---period---and and praying fiercely that you won't crash into a wall or a speeding city bus. So I assumed that torpedo stance (it accomplished nothing but it looked damned good); and, with my head jutting forward like a nuclear warhead, I plunged down the sidewalk like a missile from NORAD, while the wind cut through my parka, my scarf, my second scarf (yeah, I had 2), and then my sweater---and I gotta stop for this one, 'cause my sweater was a super thick beast that my grandmother made, which, according to the rules of Russian Old World Knitting, could double as a small living room w/ bed, duvet, blankets and a set of 6 pillows. (It was BIG.) I adored my grandmother---don't get me wrong---but if she knitted a quilt, it could cover a small town... Well, the wind cut through it: In fact, it cut through my skin, bones and DNA until it had no further to go. This was my "welcome to Chicago" moment: If anyone asked what Chicago was like in January: This was it. After 5 minutes---and I still had no idea where I was---I thought, "I think I'll hail a cab." Wrong! Cabs in this weather? There were no cabs in this weather! But before I could find one, my hat blew off. Nooooooo! I started composing a farewell to my family. See, it was another of my grandmother's creations, and this was an act of war: "You didn't have it ON right!" she'd cry. "If it was on any tighter," I'd cry, "my head would've exploded!" She wouldn't get it---I knew that. So I wrote a letter in my head, addressed from the Department of War: "Your treasured hat---which is now giving shelter to a small village in France---flew across the ocean in under 2 minutes, and landed in a European hamlet. It expired last night." (It was the only way to assuage my grandmother. If you said "it was blizzarding," she'd leave the room: You never complained about snow to old Russians...) But suddenly, a cab! Voila! And it was empty! I waved furiously: "Tax-eeeeeeee! Tax-eeeeeeee!" It heard me! I got in and plopped into the seat, snorting "fuck" about 20 times. "Strong words for a 15 year old!" said the driver. "You grow up fast in this weather!" I said. (No you don't. But it sounded good.) And this next thing I'm gonna say will make me sound like a grade-A asshole, but I'm gonna say it anyway: It was soooooo cool to watch pedestrians get blown around like toothpicks, while sitting in a cab! The cab was freezing---don't get me wrong---but I wasn't on that sidewalk! I should've been compassionate---the poor blokes were buffeted about like balls in a pinball machine---but all I could think was, "I used to be one of them, but now I'm not!" And those people were really blown---I mean into doorways, walls, you name it. Some even carried umbrellas! (Omg. Hadn't they learned that in Chicago, you don't carry umbrellas? You don't even pronounce the word 'umbrellas': Umbrellas in Chicago---in a storm---are like kleenex in a tropical typhoon: They'll be splinters in a matter of seconds.) But worse: I looked at the sidewalks, and imagined---this is embarrassing---that I bounded out of a hot shower finding myself stark naked in this knife-filled blizzard, standing barefoot on that frigid sidewalk, and wondering 1) why the hell I dreamt this in the first place, 2) whether I'd last 30 seconds in those windchills, and 3) hoping that the sight of my naked body in a blizzard wouldn't scare away most of the city's residents, not to mention most of its animals...I don't often share that dream, but I actually had it. And I'm hoping some of you are thinking, "yep: I've had those too." (Come on, someone had to have that dream when you were younger...right? Help me out here...) * * * We were in the bowels of the Loop now---the real downtown: dark, dingy, way-cloistered and caked with soot. We arrived at my destination---a 30 story crumbling old beast-of-a-building, sitting like a behemoth all blackened and ornery---and yet filled with music rooms, dance studios, art rooms, acting studios and ramshackle half-lit offices. (And a few businesses that went out of business before the Civil War.) Once inside, the warm air gushed down my lungs like cascades of hot fudge---I'm serious: You could feel it oozing down your lungs like the most delicious, thick and oh-so warm coating...it was other-worldly. I sauntered to a bench, sat, and tried to calm myself. Then: I climbed the stairs. They had elevators, mind you, but they were old and took forever; they had those old criss-cross metal doors that took 2 people to yank, and let out the most hideous screeeeeeeeee when you moved them; and you had to endure countless bumps and jerks as their cars lumbered up the shaft at the speed of a snail. No: We all took the stairs! Besides, who could resist those stairs? Buildings in this part of town had deep valleys in each step---indentations from decades of people walking up them---and the stairwells smelled of mildew and rotted wood; and produced echoes like the stairwells in 1940s murder mysteries. You expected some film noir thief in a fedora to come lumbering up the stairs at 3 in the morning...clip, clop, clip, clop... But then, the sounds I'd waited for from the beginning---the transformation: Scores of pianos were playing at once, the melody-lines mingling in the shadows like angels; along with violins and cellos and oboes---all of them played by advanced musicians (this building was for serious students). Then the rat-a-tats and pillowy thuds from dancers' feet leaping and jumping across the floors ("the boards"), or the "One! Two and Three!" from studios where they taught Broadway dancing, along with the grunts and sudden bursts of air from dancers making monumental moves, creating contours and flourishes that, on stage, came straight from the heavens---belying the immense discipline and pain required to make these moves in the first place. I felt more and more blessed as I walked, the stairs' burdens melting away in this shower of artists' shouts, and punctuated by "People: More passion! More passion!" And "We're not here to stare at our navels!" (Actors and dancers preparing for a musical...) And while I thawed---which was agonizing because when your skin thaws out after being frozen for 20 minutes, it unearths a stabbing pain (ay ay!)---I winced, but didn't care: All those sonatas and jazz riffs and beats and cries of ecstasy, and thudding feet, and cries for "more!" and "yes!" and "excellence!" and "leap for joy!"---they all swirled through the halls like a huge auditory swim-show, filling floor after floor with what for us was sheer ambrosia...all as I ran up those stairs, dying to get to my teacher. And I began, as I had every time I came here, to soak up the glory of a place devoted to nothing but creation, peopled by musicians, dancers, actors and artists: a messy, thronging, cacophonous and utterly exquisite gathering...and I thought, "it's happened once again: I come to this place after a blizzard...and I'm home!" Epilogue I knocked on my teacher's door; she opened it: She was a piercing Russian woman with eyes of fire and a gaze of enormous compassion. She saw me standing there, icicles still dripping out of my hair and looking like I'd just trekked across 400 miles of the Yukon. And she said: "Chudyes-nah! Eteh chudyes-nah!" (Wonderful! It's wonderful!---in Russian.) "You made it!" she cried: "Come in! No waste! Fast, fast---" (she pulled me in): "Come! We're here to study music---yes?" She grabbed me: "Yes??? Come, get warm! Beethoven awaits!" Then she pulled out the stool, handed me a hot chocolate (the spices---ay ay ay!), I sat at that old gleaming ebony Steinway, covered in Russian lace and doilies and mounds of old music and letters, she put a wool blanket over my shoulders, opened my Beethoven Sonatas to (gulp) the Appassionata (no!!!), a wickedly difficult work filled with explosions and cliffs of passion; and said: "This is your reward!" (Yikes!) "For you! Yes?" I shook and prayed to the gods, eyeing that all-too-familiar bust of Beethoven glowering at me like Moses about to get the commandments, and I whispered: "Now?" "Yes! And don't be so nervous: You'll make mistakes---trust me!" (Ya think??? What was your first clue???) I made mistakes. I was wayyyyyy sloppy. I stumbled over Beethoven's whirlwinds, shouting "sorry!" and "forgive me!" But I was ecstatic that I was playing this mountain-of-a-sonata, and under her tutelage---all surrounded by floors full of yearning artists! The blizzard sounded miles away now---you could hear it moan mournfully through the walls and windows---while my teacher's studio, strewn with Russian shawls and exquisite goblets and matryoshka dolls and god-knows-what, became the entire universe to me. This place had worked its magic: The call of being creative, surrounded by the mania and magic of countless souls making beauty---it conquered everything. The blizzard? A mere breeze...I threw off the blanket, dug into the music, and wanted to cry, so the whole world would hear me: "Thank you!". That was the transformation... ------------------