Blue Dress

Well, first of all I don’t want to wear a dress, but my mom said I had to and she is backed up by my piano teacher, Miss Body (pronounced Bow-dee) who says that young ladies must wear appropriate clothes for performances. In this case, the performance is the Spring Musicale, at which I will be the youngest student, in third grade and having taken lessons for only six weeks. Apparently, appropriate clothing for this auspicious occasion is a dress. We students also have to curtsey – or rather, learn to curtsey and then practice doing a curtsey in front of one another – this is as important as the music we are playing, you see. And then finally we must DO a curtsey and you can’t do one if you’re not wearing a dress. So I’m backed into a corner. There is no getting out of this. “But what about the boys? They don’t have to. . .” I am shushed immediately by my mother and my teacher. “Boys are different. They have to bow.” As if the world should know this is a boy thing. Their expressions imply the obvious: boys get to wear pants and are exempt from curtseying. And that is that.

This is NOT FAIR.

My mother is triumphant escorting me through the Sears Young Miss department. In moments we have three dresses for me to try on and I hate two of them with the energy of a million suns. The blue one is also awful but I probably would not die if I had to wear it for one night. It is navy blue with white stripey things along the sleeves. This is called piping and that makes about as much sense to me as girls having to curtsey and boys getting off scot-free.

My mother likes the yellow dress, which I think looks like an escaped sunflower. She also likes the green one, which is literally the color of snot. I picture myself playing the piano in either one of these dresses and my despair makes me consider screaming right there in the store. I get the blue piping dress and insist on getting a pair of saddle shoes as a sort of compromise. My mother relents and it is a small triumph for me to get out of wearing patent leather Mary Janes, which look almost as stupid as the yellow sunflower dress.

We go to the scene of the Spring Musicale, which is a recital hall at the local college. There is an enormous piano on the stage, its lid all the way up, looking very majestic. I feel paralyzed in my blue dress, which has turned out to be scratchy and tight and I can’t walk freely. The dresses I have been forced to wear to school are the kind you can play kickball in. Playing piano in a scratchy blue dress is an entirely new playing field, but the beautiful piano onstage helps me to forget about what I have to wear to play it.

Since I am the youngest kid, I am first on the program, the warm-up act to the sophisticated high school students who will play movements of Beethoven sonatas. My piece is called In the Canoe and it is a series of rolling arpeggios. The audience claps as I step up to the stage and dangle my feet from the piano bench. I play all 124 seconds of the piece flawlessly, and when everyone applauds again, I am thrilled by it. I almost forget to do the curtsey, but I see Miss Body gesturing to me, as if she wants me to come toward her. I inch as close to the edge of the stage as I can and I curtsey in that navy blue piped dress that wants to strangle me. My brand new saddle shoes are very slippery and as I emerge from my spectacular curtsey, I slide right off the stage and fall three feet into a little heap on the floor.

A crowd forms around me. “Are you alright, are you hurt?” the adults are reaching for me, figuring out if I can stand or not. The high school kids are bent over laughing and the student after me is up at the piano, saying, “Should I just start?” And then she does, while I pick myself up and sit primly in the front row between two high school girls, one of whom says, “You played great but your fall was way better,” and they laugh behind their Spring Musicale programs.

I listen to the impressive piano feats of my fellow students while being itched to death by the blue dress. I want to play like they do. Well, except for that junior high girl who forgot her piece and wailed off the stage. I felt the same way in the Sears Young Miss department. I feel for her.

Something comes alive inside me. There’s power here, playing music for a room full of people. I like it. I liked evoking a canoe in the river with the cascade of notes I memorized. I loved filling the room with music from that beautiful piano. I loved the applause just for me.

As it turns out, it wasn’t about the dress after all.