12 February, 1996 00:57:43 AM So much to do these days. It's 1 in the morning, and I think it's time for a trip to the deli so I can get a can of Hormel Chili (with beans) and some toilet paper. Or toilet tissue (pronounced tisssss-yew, without the sh sound). Practiced most of the day, and putzed around on the computer. That recital of mine is taking shape. I had thought that it was on April the 28th, and that the 28th was a Saturday. But in fact, it's on April 20th. Which is a Saturday. I thought the 20th was a Friday. Now that I know what day the concert will be, I should make a few calls to be sure I know what time it will happen, and for that matter I ought to be certain I know which concert hall it's in. I would still think that the concert was on the 28th (and that the 28th was a Saturday), but on Friday night I was at Carnegie Hall and the person I was with had a Lincoln Center brochure. I grabbed the brochure and looked through the April listings until I found my name; for a few moments, after not seeing my name listed on the 28th (and seeing that the 28th is a Sunday), I thought that maybe I'd imagined this whole thing, and that I was not scheduled to play there at all; or that my recital had already happened and I missed it, or that I was supposed to be on the stage right then and there at Carnegie Hall and not sitting in the audience jabbering like a jaybird about my busy busy day. I will always appreciate the fact that I own my own piano, and will always consider it the greatest luxury of my life here in New York. This is because I lived here for almost 3 years before ever having access to a usable piano of my own. For 2 years, in between interviews for jobs I never got, I spent my afternoons in the Yamaha Showroom on West 57th Street. That showroom no longer exists, but it was near 7th Avenue between Carnegie Hall and the Russian Tea Room. It was not a sales room, just a showroom where anyone was free to walk in and sample their pianos; they had every type of piano Yamaha made, from giant concert grands to electronic Clavinova keyboards. I spent most of my time on the Clavinovas -- electronic keyboards which feel and sound remarkably like a "real" acoustic piano. I would never try to convince anyone that they could replace for the real thing, because they could not, but I think Clavinovas are quite remarkable for what they are. The nice thing about that showroom was that you could come in and play on their instruments for as long as you wanted. I wore the headphones which were supplied, so no one could ever hear me. They could see me, though, and people stood there and watched me play the way they sometimes stand outside my apartment now and listen to me practice; no matter how much I play piano myself I can never get over how strange it is to watch someone's hands go over the keys. It really is almost erotic; I find the choreography of a musician's hands, when watched without the benefit of hearing what they're playing, gives undefinable insights into those things about their sound which would otherwise elude me. The thing that's always mystified me about piano stores and sales facilities is how the salespeople treat the place like a library. No one is ever allowed to actually play the pianos without consulting the salesperson, and even then you might have to get "executive approval," and then you can only try out the piano with a team of sales representatives standing around you like secret service agents, following you from one piano to the next, listening to what you're playing so they can determine whether or not you are good enough that you could possibly be serious about purchasing one of their fine, fine pianos. "This piano's been played by Liberace," the salesman shouted while I tried out a piano at the Baldwin showroom on West 58th Street a few years ago. I stopped playing, and said "Is that right?" "Yup. Liberace, Chick Corea, and Leonard Bernstein." "Leonard Bernstein played this thing?" I laughed and pointed at the piano, an extremely modest console upright - it may have even been a spinet - which did not look like something worthy of Bernstein. "Oh, you bet he did! And so did Billy Joel!" I'm sure that if the guy said Bernstein played the thing, then Bernstein probably played the thing; but why do piano salespeople always include such comments in their sales pitches? "Billy Joel?" Billy Joel? I imagined myself buying a car, and wondered how this salesperson's line of logic would translate. Saying that Billy Joel had played this piano was like an automobile salesperson saying that Mario Andretti had driven this car at Daytona. But then I was not looking for a piano that would function as a piece of furniture or a conversation piece (which is why most pianos are purchased). I had a recital coming up, and had no access whatsoever to a piano of any sort. Nor do I mean to criticize anyone who buys a $70,000 Bosendorfer and puts it in the drawing room like some kind of trophy, never to be unlocked or played except for chattery cocktail parties and howling Christmas carol soirées at the hearth. It may seem like an outrageous misappropriation of wealth, but I am certain that serious aquarium maintainers blanch at the abundance of amateur hobbyists who purchase elaborate aquarium setups for hundreds and thousands of dollars, only to give up on the whole past time after a few irritable weeks. Personally, I want to get a serious ant farm. Big huge one with moles in it. Anyway, the day I bought this piano that I have now, I was telling the salesman the whole story about how I used to practice at the Yamaha showroom around the corner. I thought he would just think it was funny, but instead of feigning amusement he incorporated my situation into his sales pitch, saying that I should not tolerate such indignity, that a pianist like me deserves the real thing. I don't know that it was really lacking in dignity, though. Practicing on a Clavinova is one thing, but I really and truly had nowhere else to practice, and I could practice at that showroom as long as I wanted, or until someone else wanted to try the keyboard out. Concentrating on anything meaningful was not easy, with all the activity and the spectators. No one could hear me, but once I had a conversation with someone who had been watching me play and who wanted to hear what was happening in those headphones. So I took off the headphones and gave them to her, making myself completely unable to hear what I was playing. I've never forgetten how strange that felt, knowing what I was playing and that someone was hearing it, but not knowing myself how it sounded, hearing instead the sounds of 57th Street and two unhappy-looking tourists bickering about whether to take a cab or a bus. This was in 1991, when I thought that everyone in this city was up to something, and not just hanging out waiting for the day to end. I thought she was on patrol for Yamaha, on some kind of reconnaissance mission to see what kind of pianists came into the showroom. When she removed the headphones after a minute or two and left the building, I figured I had either said something offensive with my playing, ruining the mystery of the silent musician; or she had gotten to the point in her information-retrieval mission where she had to go somewhere and write down what she had learned before losing it all to information overload. That was probably it, I decided. She had to rush off to a Yamaha Board of Directors meeting with her report from the field, and if I just stayed there in the showroom for a little longer and waited for her to file her report of a thrilling pianist practicing in silence in their very own showroom, I would be wisked from the showroom and onto the stage of Carnegie Hall by some high-ranking Yamaha executives in suits and flashy dresses, there'd be press releases and flash bulbs and ticket scalpers... And I'd give an entire concert in which I played on a Yamaha Clavinova (with no headphones) and no one could hear me. Not even me. The reviews would be fabulous. It would be like the Emperor's New Clothes. Harold Schoenberg would review the concert by printing several completely blank columns in the New York Times. Anyway, it's now after 2, and I still need to go out for that Hormel Chili (with beans) and toilet paper. Garry Kasparov spent the afternoon defending the human race against a 32-node IBM RS/6000 SP. I spent it learning some stupid waltzes and rinsing my mouth out with saltwater, trying to get rid of a canker sore.