Virtuoso Me!

A tuneful West Texas story of the 1950s and 1960s

VIRTUOSO ME, ca.1966.

Few now remember one of the great violin virtuosos of the 20th century: Me.

There are no recordings (who says the world has run out of luck?). Few still alive had the chance to hear a performance in person (more luck!). And so spreading the fame of Virtuoso Me far and wide relies solely on word of mouth. Or, to be more accurate, “relied,” since the mouth spreading the fame – the mouth of my late devoted mother – closed forever almost 30 years ago. It’s a miracle, in a way, that even a whisper of the fame still echoes today. Listen closely; I’m sure you can hear it.

To say that my virtuosity ever spread “far and wide” may be something of a stretch. To be more accurate again, it only ever really made it as far as the circle of my mother’s Lubbock lady friends (never a wide circle) – rippling out over the West Texas/New Mexico region through the 1960s to relatives, as far removed as distant cousins (who inexplicably often became more distant as they heard the news – certainly so as they heard it the third or fourth time).

To have a devoted mother is to have a treasure more precious then gold. Let’s hear it for our devoted mothers. Lets hear it FROM our devoted mothers! (Oh, no! What have I loosed on the world?!)

Mine never tired of telling all who would pretend to listen – even those fleeing away – what Mr. Robinson, my music teacher, had said after my lesson one Friday in 1964: “You have a remarkable ability …”

How often I heard her relating it: “And Randy’s music teacher said to him, ‘You have a remarkable ability…’”

Though I don’t recall ever hearing her quote Mr. Robinson in full: “You have a remarkable ability to convince yourself a note is right, if you play it wrong often enough.” So not unqualified praise – but in Mother’s defense, he did say the words she attributed, and to have repeated him in full might have tried the attentiveness of even the most captivated listeners (or should that be, to be more accurate, “captive victims?”).

And further in her defense (how have we come to live in a world in which devoted mothers must be defended?), I did often contend for first chair in the Lubbock High School Orchestra – or sometimes for the second or third or some larger number, but who’s counting? – and through my last high school semester I even occupied the last chair (SECOND violins) in that venerable ensemble (or astonishing, that such an entity there even was back then) the Lubbock Symphony! Now if that’s not devoted mother trumpet worthy, what is?

Recently, I had occasion to mention that symphony precocity, now 60 years past, at a church hall coffee klatch. Don’t ask me what prompted it; perhaps Mother speaking through me, mystically. And what did I hear from an unknown voice behind me?: “I played in the Lubbock Symphony too.” Sure enough, the same year!

The odds against such a convergence seem astronomical: two alums of Lubbock Symphony, 1966, in the same place at the same time, six decades later and six hundred miles away! How many of us can there even be still living anywhere? And, damn, both of us without our instruments. It could have been such a musical reunion

In a great loss to the world (I’m sure my mother thought so), I gave up the violin for good (for bad, Mother would have said) one afternoon on a visit home, when, after years of not playing (let alone practicing), I took the case out from under my childhood bed, and took the violin out of the case, and yanked the broken strands of horsehair from the bow, and put the instrument under my chin, and raised my arm for a commanding stroke … and the A-string snapped with a virtuoso BOING.

I put it back in it’s case and took it that very afternoon to Harrod Music Store – as in William Harrod, founder/conductor of the Lubbock Symphony, who pretended to remember me. I made it a donation to his program finding instruments for less affluent young musicians. One virtuoso career ends so that another could begin – I’m sure.

Mother’s performance aspirations for me could not confine themselves to the violin only. The dance also beckoned. First, ballet. But tights and pirouettes may have seemed a jeté too grand in Lubbock in the 1950s, even for a budding little gay boy like her son (surely she had an inkling even then). So we settled on tap.

Oh, what was the name of the dance studio – on Avenue P, I seem to remember? – where Mother enrolled me at age – was it, six or seven? I have vague recollections of endless afterschool rehearsals of a tap version of a routine called “Ballin’ the Jack.” How often I thought of that (though without the “the”) and smiled, a couple of decades later, when I was dating a guy named Jack.

All the rehearsals paid off when I got my big break, when I got to take “Ballin’” to TV (yes, the rest of the class went too, but Mother assured me I stood out!), on Lubbock’s own version of Cowboy Bob (what was the name of Lubbock’s Cowboy Bob?), decked out in full cowboy drag – I distinctly remember hat, vest and chaps – and sequins and ribbons. Cowboys DO wear sequins – if they were “Ballin’” in Lubbock in 1955.

There are no videos, or even photos, to document that triumph. At least I hope there aren’t. But who am I kidding: if there were, I’d put them on Facebook in a flash! So no pics of me in that cowboy drag. Though wait! Maybe not exactly the same, but it must have looked something like this:

Cowboy Me, ca.1955.

Sadly, my dance career proved to be ephemeral too. As did my theatrical ventures. Or, to be a virtual slave to accuracy, venture – singular, in a Lubbock Theatre Center production of Auntie Mame, in which I debuted in the dual roles of Drunk Party Guest (I would do a good deal of rehearsing for this part in years to come), having lost out to some other Anglo for Ito, Japanese houseboy (it was a different time); and feisty Southern boy, Emory MacDougall, stealing the scene with my one line: “Hot damn! My sister's gonna bust a gut!”

Mother, a good enough Church of Christer, found this line a little jarring, and so did not press me to persevere with our theatre ambitions when LTC Mame’s final curtain fell.

To be accurate – the last time in this piece, I promise you – Mother did not press me to do any of this. She merely encouraged me when I got a new damn fool notion in my head that I must have been destined to be a star. That’s what devoted mothers do, and I remember her fondly for it.

But you know what I remember most fondly about her – even more fondly than her unswerving support of my clearly ill fated performance career – even more, if you can believe it, than the similarity of our hair styles now that I’ve reached her age (and style) in later years? What I remember most fondly about her, sometimes with a sentimental tear, is our laughing together. Laughing spontaneously at seemingly nothing. Laughing until we cried hilarious tears, and couldn’t catch our breaths for laughing.

I don’t write much about my mother. Writing about trauma is more tempting, and easier, than writing about nurture. But what a joy it is, all these decades later, to think about her and miss, almost most of all, our laughter. If she were still alive, I suspect we’d be laughing right now at these recollections of performer me. And you know what? I haven’t a single doubt that we’d be virtuosos of laughter doing it.

Lubbock Symphony Orchestra.