Me, My Dad, and Isaac Hayes
We played the same song
When I was seven, my parents gave me a toy piano for Christmas as a gag gift. I say gag because we had two wonderful pianos in the house. I had already been tinkling around on one of them for years, imitating TV show theme songs, and famous pieces like Beethoven’s Fifth.
My dad was a cellist in the Baltimore Symphony. And seven was the age at which I was to start cello lessons. I refused and said I’d only play piano. I guess they thought that if I wanted to play piano, they’d make me look like Schroeder in Peanuts — maybe have our dog, Itchy, dance on top. (He was named after Ilyich Tchaikovsky)
The toy piano had about twenty-five shiny keys that felt like chicklets. The sound was horrible. Dinky, plinky, cheap. The top was particle board covered by a piece of junky wood-patterned wallpaper that had already started to peel at the edges by New Year's Day. Soon after I got it, the piano made its way to the attic storage area with the Christmas decorations, surrounded by walls of pink insulation.
But when I was thirteen, after six years of piano lesson drudgery, I found it up there, pulled it out and started playing it. The sound was so terrible it was funny. Somehow the absurdity of playing the toy piano was appealing.
