Kidder led me to a backroom corridor, where she had positioned a couple of chairs. She wanted to share a preperformance ritual with me. I had accumulated so many performance rituals by this point: the photograph, the totem, the belly breathing, the beta-blocker. Oh wait! I forgot to take my beta-blocker. I should have taken it at least an hour ago; now, it was only twenty minutes to showtime, not nearly enough time for it to kick in. What if my hands turned wet and clammy? What if my foot shook so badly that I couldn’t control the pedals? What if I was poisoned by adrenaline? I ran back to the recital room, where I’d left my handbag with Rich, rooted around, found the prescription bottle, and gulped down one of the little pills. Just another ritual, I told myself, returning to the corridor where Kidder was waiting. Following her lead, I crossed my left ankle over my right knee, placed my right hand on my ankle and my left hand under the ball of my left foot. Five long breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth. Then I did the same on the opposite side. I made a tent with my fingertips and smoothed my forehead, like wiping away the wrinkles. Max leaned against the wall and watched. Now twenty-seven, he had wrestled with his own bouts of stage fright. In his first year of conservatory in Toronto, he was so undone by anxiety that even his violin lessons became exercises in fear. He took solace in knowing that several of his teachers and coaches over the years had their own problems with stage fright. One was so cocky about his abilities that he hardly read over his solo before a rehearsal with a major orchestra. When on one occasion he flubbed his part, he felt so mortified that he was never again able to play in public without a beta-blocker. What was the harm in a beta-blocker?
I breathed deep belly breaths, and now, with the door to the recital room open just a crack, I heard the announcement of my name and the applause of the audience. It was time. “People don’t enjoy watching someone playing like they’re being led to the gallows,” Greene had admonished. I walked through the door, Max behind me, Kidder, my page-turner, behind him. And there was my teacher, Ellen Chen, in the second row, next to my friend Mary. They were both beaming. I bowed and smiled at the audience. Maybe I should have taken a longer bow? Would I never stop second-guessing myself? Yes, but wasn’t it Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, who said that coming out onstage and bowing was the hardest part of his job? Stop! I commanded myself. Shut up.
I sat at the piano and looked at Max, whose violin was raised and ready. I stared down at the lettering on the fall board of the piano—a Knabe. Just below eye level. I waited. I centered. There was no hurry. It was like that long, sustained moment when you’re at the top of the roller coaster after the slow climb up the tracks, and you wait for the gravitational pull that sweeps you down with all that energy and danger. I can do anything I set my mind to, I told myself one last time. I took a deep breath. Fasten your seat belts, I wanted to shout.
I gave a sharp nod at Max and we launched into the Haydn. It was at once fluid and easy. Halfway through, I skipped a bar. Max understood instantly and jumped ahead to meet me. Such a maestro, I thought, and felt an outpouring of love and gratitude for my middle son. It was so comforting to accompany him, to play in the background and let him sing. The second movement was a soft adagio. I felt myself relaxing into the music, which was so plaintive, so clear, so goddamn lovely. Was that a little mistake I’d made? I wasn’t sure and I didn’t care. I sang the notes in my head as I played, and when, too soon, it was over, all I wanted was to hear the music again. I think I yearned to hear it more than I yearned to play it. When the applause began, I felt stunned, the way you feel after awakening from an unexpected nap. Max and I hadn’t planned how we would take our bows, but we naturally linked arms and bowed clumsily.
Now it was just me and the piano. I had intended to start with the Bach Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, but there was something about Bach that made me feel exposed. I changed the order of the music and began with Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau. I took another deep breath, let it out slowly, and reached for my center. Was that it? I waited and searched for that evanescent sense of core. Yes, there it was. I breathed into it and began—a music of dreams, a feeling of fluidity beneath my fingers, of reflections rippling in the water and moving within the keys. I thought, perhaps, there was a glitch in a crescendo of arpeggios, but it was soon far behind me, like a branch in white-water rapids. Deep in the rhythm of it, I told myself to just sing. The runs were softer, faster, more liquid, than any I could remember having played before. A thought broke through the ripples: I’m doing very well, I wonder what people think of me? I swatted it away like a gnat. And then, almost as soon as it had begun, it, too, was over. Between pieces, I could hear the hum of a happy audience, which sounded to my ears like the hum of diners at a restaurant. I was having fun. Starting the Brahms rhapsody, I felt under a spell, watching my fingers moving over the keys. I seemed to drift like a balloonist above the room until there were no more notes to play and I came down for a landing, wishing I could keep going. As the applause began, I had an urge to raise a hand and tell my audience, Wait, I can play more. I looked over at my husband and realized that he was tearing up. I smiled at my teacher, who was grinning. A five-year-old girl laid her head on her grandmother’s shoulder and said loudly, “This is just like Young Einstein.” I was elated. I had never played so well.
Chapter 14
FINALE
It was June 30, 2013, and I was lying on the only available floor space in the green room, a Sunday school office in the basement of Christ Lutheran Church, just a few miles from my house. I stared up at the shelves crammed with Bibles, children’s activity books, and boxes of colored pencils, reminding myself to breathe and center. Directly overhead, a growing hum of voices filled my ears like the slow roar of the earthquake that ran through my house in 1989, announcing itself like the New York subway. There had even been a long suspended moment during which I wondered stupidly what the subway was doing under my house on the California coast. It was a flimsy house back then; we called it the Jolly Roger because of the shredded canvas awnings that flapped around on the decks. By the time I realized what was happening—not just an earthquake, but the promised Big One—the ground was shaking and I was screaming for my children, running down the hall, flung bodily from wall to wall. The exhilaration of survival stayed with me for days afterward. Now I anticipated that my performance, for which I’d been preparing the past year, would also exhilarate. I was pretty confident that I would survive.
A week after the library recital in May, my teacher had flown to Shanghai to see her husband. During her absence, she arranged for me to perform for two of her colleagues. One was a retired Argentinian pianist in long floral robes named Celia Mendez; the other was Ellen’s own duet partner, Tom Burns. I played through my entire repertoire for each of them, and they gave me hours of undivided attention. I left their studios, my head spinning with suggestions, criticisms, and interpretations regarding tempo, articulation, pedaling, and the length of my fermatas, or pauses. I drove two hours to Berkeley for yet another lesson with Gwendolyn Mok, the concert pianist who had urged me to go for excellence instead of perfection. A demanding pedagogue, Mok was known for her wit and her insights, which could be acerbic. A friend of mine, knowing how thin-skinned I could be about the piano, questioned whether I really needed to subject myself to Mok’s scrutiny.
The answer was yes. I was feeling a lot more assured about my playing, and I wanted to know what she thought. She had recently recorded a collection of Brahms’s piano music and had strong ideas about how he should be approached. After I played through the Romanze in F Major, she pointed to the inner voicings—not the soprano line I’d been drawing out, but the alto and tenor lines, which, she believed, symbolized the secret love of Brahms and Clara Schumann. “And don’t brace your shoulders,” she cautioned as I furiously took notes. “When you play an octave, you stick your boobs out. That’s not going to help.” I had to find the hydraulics in my hands, flatten them like pancakes, and then
raise them, elevator style, like an old Citroën automobile.
I was still making sense of everything she and the others had told me when Ellen returned to California. She had cut short her stay in China to fly back and hear me one last time before my concert. She never got jet lag, she said, dismissing my hesitation about scheduling a lesson a few hours after her touchdown in San Jose. She would be ready to go after a brief nap. All she asked for was a wake-up call on my way over “the hill.” I remembered to call her at the summit. The phone rang and rang until finally she picked up, her voice cracked with sleep and not all that pleased to hear me. “Is there any way we can reschedule?” she asked. I had just passed the last turnoff on Highway 17, and there wouldn’t be another one until I reached the base of the mountain, not far from her house. My concert was four days away. “Oh, just come over,” she capitulated. “Drive slow. I’ll make some strong coffee.”
She hadn’t heard me play for nearly a month, and I began with the rhapsody. I knew I had had a breakthrough these last few weeks, but I wasn’t prepared for Ellen’s response. She set down her coffee, stared at me, and passed her hands across her heart. “You are at a whole other level,” she declared. I played Reflets dans l’eau, and when I finished, she shook her head. “You have had a transformation.” It happened with each piece I played, and when I was done she stood up and seemed to search for what she wanted to say. “You are a different pianist from the last time I heard you.”
Now, lying on the floor of the Sunday School office, my chartreuse dress smoothed beneath me, I told myself I had every reason for confidence. I had chosen each piece on my program because I loved it. The program was ambitious, an hour’s worth of music, nearly twice what I played at the library, and I intended to communicate my love for this music, perhaps to make converts of people who wouldn’t otherwise hear it, like my friends who listened mostly to Bob Marley and Jimmy Buffett. I wanted to keep Bach and Brahms alive. In the late 1960s, in the heat of my infatuation with Glenn Gould, I’d worn out the grooves listening to his recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, studying the cover, gazing into those brooding, leonine eyes—never guessing that the reason behind his repudiation of live performance was most likely stage fright. Now here I was, about to perform the Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, one of my favorites from the Well-Tempered Clavier.
“Are you ready, Mom?” Max asked. I raised myself up off the floor. I was as ready as I would ever be. He led the way up a flight of stairs into the octagonal sanctuary. It wasn’t far from a noisy interchange on Highway 1, but the sanctuary was an oasis of quiet and the bank of stained-glass windows cast the soft light of a forest canopy. I’d spent a couple of hours in the room over the previous week, familiarizing myself with the Yamaha grand piano, moseying around the pews, getting comfortable in the space. Entering it now, I moved past a crowd of faces that appeared to me as unfocused as a drive-by blur. These were my children, my family, and my friends, some of whom had come from the East Coast, the Rocky Mountains, Hawaii, and Canada. I picked out my sister, Syma, who more than almost anyone understood what this occasion meant to me. I tried to make out my friend Amy, who had flown in from Montana, but my eyes clouded over. It was time to take a bow, and I made it quick. I sat down at the piano, made eye contact with Max, and jumped into the Haydn. I forgot to center. I forgot to let in—what had Landis Gwynn called it?—the sacredness. I just played. And for a while it was okay. Then I lost it. My breath hung in the air. My fingers screeched to a halt. My heart was in my mouth. What a cliché. But it wasn’t just my heart. All my vital organs had moved up and lay at the base of my throat. Remember, no matter what happens, keep on going! Don’t stop! Lynn Kidder, my page-turner, my Virgil, laid her fingers on the page and I was back.
With Haydn over, Max walked off and I heard Don Greene’s command. Never again—not in your sleep, not in your thoughts—are you to sit down at the piano without centering. Alone, I centered. Feel it. See it. Hear it. I heard the first few bars of the Bach prelude and knew how I would play them. Landis, my former teacher, had cautioned me to take it slower than I was accustomed, but as I began the prelude I paid no mind to prudence. I had a passion for this piece, which struck me as simultaneously rational and emotional, Apollonian and Dionysian. It demanded utter control, yet it was a wild piece with a tension that advanced and uncoiled until it reached the point where all hell broke loose. After so many months of practicing and deconstructing its mysteries, I had the technique to play it as I heard it, and my intent was to turn loose its ferocity. Now I felt my fingers run through the familiar patterns and had the image of a tightrope. But I wasn’t walking a tightrope; I was running it. I came to the pause, the silence before the fast and furious presto. My eyes flickered across the page, which looked more like a swarm of ants than the music I so thoroughly knew. It was a Hansel and Gretel moment—I was lost—but then, yes, I spotted the crumbs leading back to the path. I finished with a false sense of gusto and continued on to the fugue. A feeling of dispiritedness moved through me: disappointment; a taste of bile. I paused for a long moment before starting the rhapsody, then exhaled so loudly that I thought I heard an echo. The acoustics of the room were excellent.
Months before, Ellen had assured me that one day this would be my signature piece. I loved it for its sheer physicality: its two-octave leaps, the repeated crossings of the left hand over the right, and the sonorous heavy chords. It was like wrestling a grizzly bear. It was the most majestic piece I had ever played. The emotion it unleashed was practically excruciating; Brahms’s yearning and perseverance seemed to cry out from every note. I forgot the audience and aligned myself with its fierceness and introspection. By the time I moved on to Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, the music took over. Feel it. See it. Hear it. The prelude was otherworldly, a reprieve from the intensity of Brahms. The music was falling into place, and I hardly had to do anything except follow it.
It was only after my encore—a tango by the Argentinian Astor Piazzolla—that I allowed myself to look around the room, settling on faces, including that of my oldest son, Ben, seated in the front row with his partner, Amanda. They had flown in from Maui for my big day, but—befogged by Brahms—I hadn’t noticed them until that moment. Handing me a bouquet of white roses, Ben gave me a hug, and I can vaguely remember the roomful of people on their feet. My eyes combed the room, as if maybe, in my heart of hearts, I expected to spot my mother, a younger version of the one I’d last known, sitting tall and erect, chin jutted, clearly proud of me, forgiving of my mistakes—while also fully cognizant of how many I had made.
Ellen and Sara after the recital (Ted Lorraine)
Back at the house, I celebrated my sixtieth birthday with a party, but I felt bereft. Now what? For days, I brooded about whether I had fallen short of my goal. I was reluctant to listen to the recording of the concert, afraid of what I would hear. I remembered how I once used to avoid checking my bank balance, certain I would find it in the red. But when I finally broke down and listened to my concert, I was surprised. I heard some lapses, yes. But I also heard expressiveness. I heard assertiveness. I heard a voice. What I heard was me, Sara: I was not a professional, and I was hardly perfect. But I was striving for excellence, and sometimes I attained it.
My father had once told me that the best way to understand something about myself was to try to change it. (In my memory, he was alluding to my bad habit of biting my nails. It drove him crazy.) He was obsessed with the idea of change, probably because he was so resistant to change himself. He lectured us kids about it constantly—usually to impress upon us the intractability of personality. He relished the Jesuit maxim “Give me the boy until he is seven and I will show you the man”—though in my father’s opinion, the magic age was more like two. But he was an inconsistent man, so he also told us that the best way to try to understand something is to try to change it. I would take those words to heart, though it was years before I discovered that my stubborn dad was quoting Kurt Lewin, the social psychologist
famous for his theories on the human potential for change.
Lewin’s model was based on three stages: “unfreezing, changing, and freezing.” The first stage, “unfreezing,” begins with the recognition that a change is required. (In my case, it was time for me to face my demons.) Once a person accepts that imperative, she has to overcome her inertia (I had to declare my intent, find the right teacher, ratchet up my practicing) and dismantle her previous “mind-set” (my conviction that I was not a performer, that maybe I wasn’t even a real pianist). The second stage is where “change” actually occurs. It’s not a single event; it’s a period of transition, a process that generates confusion and even chaos. (I perform, make mistakes, feel chagrined, but learn to survive and accept imperfection.) In the third stage, known as “freezing” or “refreezing,” the change is crystallized and becomes the new norm. The journey has come to an end. (I can settle in and congratulate myself on a job well done. I’m a performer now.)
Which is where I part ways with Lewin. Conquering stage fright isn’t like planting a flag on the moon. The journey doesn’t end so definitively. In important ways, it doesn’t end at all. For me, the act of getting up and playing before an audience is something I’ll wrestle with for as long as I play the piano.
Playing Scared Page 20