Meme 3

I played the B-flat clarinet for school bands from grades five through twelve and took private lessons for the latter half of that span from a woman named Barbara Duman who lived over in Reston, just a mile from where Perry Farrell brought Lollapalooza the first two years of its incarnation. Mrs Duman lived in a treesy townhome of moss-green wood. Her backyard, fenced, flanked a medianed byway that ran behind her subdivision.

It was via this byway, this fenced backyard, that the student was meant to enter the home:

1. Park, or be dropped off by one's parents.
2. Lift the jankety gatelatch and push one's way through.
3. Find, in the snow, the paving stones leading across no kind of backyard terrace for boys and girls or pets to play on.
4. Slide the glass door open, enter, slide the glass door closed.
5. Sit and listen for the previous private lesson to finish.
6. Ask oneself, honestly, whether the currently instructed student is better than one.
7. Ask oneself, more honestly, why this doesn't concern one.

Siouxsie and the Banshees played that first festival. Ice-T. The Rollins Band. Fishbone. Across the road, Pet-a-Pet Park.

Mrs Duman had a husband named Gene who played and taught the tuba, though never while Mrs Duman taught or played the clarinet. Tubaists got the worst parts of every symphony and the best part of the Dumans', its sunny upstairs and all the aging modern furniture. Clarinetists got the basement that had become over the decades a repository for the classical 78's man and wife had already begun replacing with digital formats (kept upstairs). Eroica, Williams's Symphony No. 6, Lincolnshire Posy, Schumann's chamber music. All of it in hard-bound booklets as thick as two Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin boxed sets.

It was what one read while one waited for one's instruction, the spines of these old records. Broken in places. Dusty and musted. All the world's old, lonely music; it'd take eons to sit through. Bernstein conducts Mahler's second symphony for more than 83 minutes. Camper Van Beethoven gets from "Opening Theme" to "Come On Darkness" in under 48.

It's possible to make a life of music, and a career. Barbara Duman's on Facebook, still giving lessons. It's possible to lose one's embouchure.

It's possible to live two years of one's life one town away from your idols and never hear a word they have to say.