So, in this one, I'm going to go up and play a piano recital on the stage in my elementary-school auditorium. When I get there, the most demanding of my piano teachers, Josef Verba, is there, handing me the music and pushing me on stage. The piano they've given me has no legs, but I spend a long time trying to prop it up somehow so that I won't have to kneel on the floor, and I have to carefully spread out the skirt that hangs from the sides of this peculiar instrument. Needless to say, it is very frustrating that no one is willing to help manage the bloody thing.

I spread out the sheets on the floor beside me and begin to play; immediately I see that it's both simple and unfamiliar: all quarter notes and eighth notes, in C, but I don't recognize a single thing. It dawns on me that even if I could sight-read it, I'd sound terribly stupid. I spend about fifteen minutes pecking out one note at a time, flipping through the pages and finding no organization to them. Then I storm off stage.

Verba is enraged, but he and my mother duck out of the venue and into a rough-and-ready seafood shop. My mother orders crab.

I go in angry at them for not helping me set up the piano and for not giving me the music ahead of time. They're focused on their crab, but when I finally get my mother's attention, she says, "Why, Ezra? Why music? Why not theatre!? You loved it, you know you did. . ."