Recital Fun Facts

Some fun facts about pandemic piano lessons in the Ten Thousand Stars Studio:

I taught 503 online piano lessons.

(The kids discovered that they could no longer use the excuse “I played this better at home,” because they were, in fact, at home.)

I sent 387 daily lesson schedule texts that began “Good morning pianists!” and wrote 108 studio emails.

We held 47 Zoom performance classes.

I received 124 practice videos of students’ assignments.

We graduated 4 seniors.

We lost 2 studio cats and adopted 2 studio kittens.

We used 13 rolls of paper towels, 7 bottles of hand sanitizer and 9 containers of soap.

I have wiped down my piano 10,000 times.

Sigh.

I think it was somewhere around the 417th Zoom lesson and the 88th practice video that I got the brilliant idea.

Someone, I said to Matt, someday, could do something cool with all these videos.

Even as I said that, I was pretty sure that “someone” wasn’t me.

Enter Eliana.

Eliana is a former student who we sent off to get a music degree four years ago and who came out with all kinds of skills. She spent the summer interning in marketing at the Santa Fe Opera. One day last summer we were having lunch when I brought up my brilliant idea.

“Oh, yeah, Amy,” Eliana said, “you could totally do that.” She was very enthusiastic.

“I will need technology lessons,” I said. “Will you teach me?”

“Totally,” she replied.

It is possible that in the last month that Eliana became less enthusiastic about this project when it became clear that I had loads of ideas, plenty of opinions, and no skills whatsoever. Which is, no way around it, a bad combination. But in the end, it was probably a healthy reversal of roles after 10 years of me asking her: So, kid, how did you practice this?

Last Saturday night was the First Studio Recital since November 2019. Sigh. Time blurs.

The first performance that night? The Pandemic Recital Video. (Hint: watch to the very, very end.)

God Bless Eliana who totally made this video.