Note that neither of theez guyz (GG and Porter) are puano players! Oh nosiree. I cannot remember what “piece” they were playing that night but they are both pretty much one-trick ponies when it comes to playing da puano. I love them ANYWAY and whatever they were playing they were HILARIOUS!

Yes, the puano is red. My mother-in-law The Beautiful Sally painted it red. Red was HER COLOR! It is a player puano. The mechanism used to work when we adopted it (when my in-laws moved to Crazy Old Florida) but it doesn’t any more. I would like to hire a pro to refurbish and another pro to tune it but I live with a big-time DIY-er and it ain’t happening. Anyway, I haven’t played it in years.

I at least have years of training and serious practice behind me (many years ago). I was like three and I would be at my grandparents’ or aunt/uncle’s house(es) in Sault Ste. Siberia on holidays and I would be banging on their puanos like nobody’s business. I was NOT Mozart and I was NOT making music but I’ve never really met a musical instrument that I couldn’t QUICKLY master, at least in rudimentary terms. (Except the clarinet but we’ll talk about that some other time🐽 And flute has been one of the loves of my life but we’ll go there some other day too.)

My parents were not wealthy and a puano was a stretch for us. Nevertheless, my parents always encouraged any musical (and other) pursuits my brother and I had and I think I was in about third grade when The Commander finally came up with a puano.

My local cousins had all taken lessons and they used the Leila Fletcher series. I have always been a self-starter and I began with book 1 and got myself all the way up to about book 4. I couldn’t work out how to count dotted quarter note rhythms at first but my cuz Uber Kayak Woman set me straight on that during one of her family’s visits from Alaska or wherever they were at the time. (10-year-old successfully teaching 10-year-old.)

About that time, The Commander said something like, “You are going to take puano lessons.” I wasn’t crazy about that idea but she set me up with my local cousins’ teacher Mrs. Diecke and I quickly learned that having a private teacher was a GOOD thing.

Well, having a private teacher is a good thing unless your puano teacher tries to make a, you know, move on you, like happened to me my sophomore year in college. We’ve talked about that before and I GREW A PAIR at that point and have never really been seriously sexually harassed since.

The “puano”? That’s what my older beach urchin called pianos for a while when she was an early talker. Banana was buana and sometimes when I was doing something on whatever computer I had at the time, she would tell me “Mama, stop doing the puano.”

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