My piano teacher, Mrs. Josserand, always arrived at our house with a large black vinyl purse. This commodious purse was filled with all the equipment necessary for piano lessons – a fistful of No. 1 soft lead pencils that wrote blacker, smudgier lines than the No. 2 pencils we used at school, a half dozen Pink Pearl erasers in various sizes and stages of use, boxes of gold starts and handfuls of wadded up Kleenex, also in various stages of use. Mrs. Josserand used the Kleenex to wipe the perspiration from her brow, hand and arms. Houston was not yet an air conditioned city and she was given to generous amounts of perspiration. She was a short, round woman in her fifties, and on one extremely hot day, she stepped behind a chair and removed her girdle before beginning the lesson! Mrs. Josserand was an affectionate, exuberant teacher, and I loved her.
Part of each student’s equipment were six playing cards from an old worn out deck kept stacked at one end of the keyboard. Mrs. Josserand wrote directions at the top of each piece of music, “Hand Alone, Six Cards”. This meant that I was to practice the phrase with each hand until I could play it perfectly six times in a row, counting the times by moving a card from one end of the keyboard to the other. Each time I made a mistake all the cards were restacked and the count began again!
As I progressed, her instructions changed, and she used the Pink Pearl to erase them, scatting little bits of gray eraser rubber all over the piano. I practiced faithfully, memorizing the pieces I performed in the annual recitals at Carter Music Hall on Main Street. I took piano until I was sixteen. From Mrs. Josserand I developed great love of piano music and pianists. |
