Take Your Daughter to Work Day

The anointing

Collage by KatyMcClellan.Substack.com

My violin teacher, when I was 12 years old, took me to sit in the pit with her at Goodspeed Opera House. She had no children and, as many teachers (of various disciplines) have, she took a liking to me.

But… I didn't practice much, wasn’t great at the violin, therefore, and was generally confounded by her respect for me, which is telling of my value system as a 12 year old. If you weren’t talented, my thinking went, why would a teacher like you? 

We played Bartók duets together, with me on the easier part, and I couldn’t believe I was playing alongside an esteemed artist from the Hartford Symphony. When I didn’t understand a rhythm, I would dance it out. I found her to be nonjudgmental, plainspoken, and generally fearless, attributes that called to me as I incrementally lost hold of my known self, slipping deeper into the mental tangle of teenagehood. 

Jane was a full-time, working violinist. She played classical music and music theatre at the highest level that the arts had to offer in the Greater Hartford area and this was slightly before, or just as, the arts scene in Hartford began to lose funding. I had the good fortune to capture the spectacular death rattles of the golden age of Hartford’s ballet company and symphony and so, from the age of 11 onward, I understood that art was a thing everyone *loved*, but that no one was *quite* willing to pay for. 

Jane was an avid runner, she was a teacher, she was a prolific musician from a musical family. She had a handsome, but semi-haggard look to her. In a man it might be called, ‘rugged,’ but in her face it could best be called, ‘poorly-rested.’

Jane had, what seemed to me to be, a perpetual yeast infection. She was the most successful, full-time, working artist I knew as a preteen, and I might have, but couldn’t have, heeded her eternal yeast infection as a sign, a red flag of the artist's path. She never told me about the yeast infection, but it was evident in her frequent, infernal crotch-scratching during my lessons, which she tried, in futility, to hide. The infection was so persistent and intractable that my friends, having heard about it from me, would inquire: “You have violin today?” They'd say, “Has Jane treated her yeast infection yet?” 

I felt intuitively, without having words for it, that Jane needed a nap and a hug and 500 dollars. My respect for her ran deep: A kind of celebrity to me, even though her apartment and her aspect were patently unglamorous. I felt she was, to the best of her ability, in control of her choices and that she was awake to her own vitality and potential. At 12, I hadn’t yet read enough self-help to name all this, but I sensed it and sought the warmth of the particular light she cast.

Jane, for reasons known to her, respected me as well, in spite of or maybe because of my lack of seriousness about the violin. She said one late afternoon, in my weekly lesson amid her brown living room, “Come sit next to me in the Goodspeed Opera House pit. You can see what the show looks like from there.”

And I went with her one evening. I was nervous, but knew I should not pass up this rare and unique offer.

She introduced me glowingly to everyone backstage, every actor, and told them, with great pride, that I'd be sitting with her in the pit that evening. 

She was eager to show me, her truly mediocre student, off to her colleagues. I was shy and cowed by all of it. The actors were polite and nonplussed by my presence and by their looming ‘places’ call. In her greetings, Jane paid special attention to one man, an actor dressed as an old-timey magician, and told him I’d be sitting next to her. 

As the show began, I sat nestled below the stage in the slim violin section, the overture loud and close, sound waves enveloping me — my view of the stage partially obstructed by bows and trumpets. 

There was nothing I had to do but fit neatly there and bear witness. 

It was reminiscent, I now realize, of “take your daughter to work day,” one of the quirky 90s phenomena that millennials now stumble back upon, asking, “Did that really happen?” Unlike “normal” “take your daughter to work day,” in my case spent drawing with Crayola markers at a soporific insurance company and grabbing Hershey’s Hugs from glass dishes atop cubicle walls, this “take your daughter to work day” was loud, thrilling, percussive and precise. 

I don't recall the show itself at all, but there was at some moment a card trick performed onstage.

The old-timey magician man shuffled and let fly a deck of cards so that they bounced gamely off of Jane's violin bridge and rained directly on me, falling with great meaning, like prophecy, on my nose. Jane was smiling hard as she played, sneaking a sidelong glance at my upturned face as cards fluttered down on us. I saw in that moment that she had dreamed up the whole night just for this: to see playing cards snow down on me from the hallowed stage. To make me a part of the magic now, with my open, delighted smile. 

And all this, I marveled, even though I wasn’t good at the violin. 

It was a pleasure to be confounded.