Post by Wizard on Dec 12, 2003 1:50:35 GMT -5
I'm writing my essays for admission to Stanford, and I thought you guys might want to read this one. It's too long by 1672 characters, so I'm sending in an abridged version. But it's a good enough story (I think, anyway) to keep your interest.
The songs that were supposed to play were "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid when I walked onstage, and "Barely Breathing," by Duncan Sheik, when I came out of the water.
I sent it in with a picture of me playing the piano as described in the below essay. The view, unfortunately, is with my crotch in the foreground.
And it's true. I didn't make this up. So...yeah.
Mr. GQ---the contest of nerd redemption! Each year, guys from all walks of school sign up for this event in hope of winning fame, glory, respect, and…girls, duh. It’s a very popular event, because the talents and costumes exhibited are always interesting, for their humor, creativity, and sheer awesomeness---in the “awe-inspiring” meaning, not as a synonym for “tubularness.”
Knowing all this, I walked home from the bus stop, my thoughts racing. What talent could I display? The show was open only to junior and senior contestants, and I was with the rest of my class in racking my brains for ideas. I had no special talents---I could play the piano, sure, or hit a volleyball pretty hard. But you can’t play volleyball on the stage (easily, anyway), and I wasn’t nearly good enough at the piano to have a chance of winning on that alone.
Out of ideas, I reached back into the past. I remembered that in my cousin’s years at my school, a guy on the water polo team had won by keeping his head in a full fish tank through two full playings of “Under the Sea,” from The Little Mermaid. I knew I couldn’t go that long, but perhaps I could combine it with…
My fate was sealed. I was going to play the piano while underwater.
I talked with my brother on how to place myself relative to the piano. We finally decided that the best way was to turn the bench sideways so that it was perpendicular to the piano, and then lie on the bench face-up, with my head at the piano end, but extending off the edge of the bench and under the keyboard. Then I would drop my head (fully decked out with noseplug and earplugs) back into a bucket full of warm water(propped up with blocks---buckets fail woefully to reach the height of piano benches), reach my hands up onto the keyboard (crossed, in order to duplicate the position my hands would take were I high and dry), and find middle C.
I’d found a New Age romantic song for the occasion---I figured it would be appropriate for the girl-chasing purpose of the whole thing. After cutting out parts and learning to play the remainder by finger, I began to work on speeding it up much faster than Jim Brickman ever intended. My mom was annoyed about the wet carpet under the piano, so I kept a pile of towels in the living room for my undersea practice sessions.
A month passed. We went to Utah for Winter Break, to visit family and friends. Large buckets, blocks, noseplugs, and earplus were all unavailable, so I had to content myself with simply playing upside-down and backwards, and put the submarine portion of the act on hold.
After our return following New Year’s Day, I realized that time was short. The contest was on January 17, and my playing time was still at 1:30, a full thirty seconds longer than I could hold my breath. Thirty seconds can be a very long time underwater.
I practiced every day, about an hour at a time. Finally, I got down to a minute and ten seconds. By then, however, my lungs had grown used to the punishment and could go for that long without exploding.
The final rehearsal came, and I worked out the kinks of what I wanted to happen when, and presented my instructions to the stage and sound crew. Therein lay my fatal flaw---I failed to spell it out until the crew knew their job in their sleep.
The 17th came. I was bouncing off the walls, I was so ready for that night. We (the contestants who’d made the final cut) were all dressed in tuxedoes, to advertise the show and a local company that had provided them for free. We’d each been given a number of tickets we had to sell, but as I was a Mormon, I had no trouble selling them to members of family and church. But I regretted it later when tickets ran out, and beautiful girls began accosting tuxedo-clad young men begging to buy a ticket. I smiled, talked, sympathized, and hoped they’d stay, but the message was clear---out of tickets, out of mind.
That night came, and the contestants nervously joked in the green room. It wasn’t every night that you performed a self-written act in front of the whole school, and the guys in that room knew it. Despite the jokes and the frantic changing (representing girl’s volleyball, I began the evening in spandex---but that’s another story), everyone’s voice held an undercurrent of nervousness. As an alphabetically high-ranking, assertively low-ranking junior, I was slated to be third out of eighteen contestants. We walked onto and off of the stage one by one while the MC’s read a short bio on us. As soon as I got off the stage, I darted around the back for the bathroom to change into my wetsuit, flippers, and goggles, a gimmick I’d added the night before. I waited for the second act to near completion, checked my noseplug and earplugs, and strode out onto the stage.
And found that nothing was how I needed it. The piano was aligned wrong, so the audience would be staring at my crotch. The blocks weren’t in place, so I had to stack them Lincoln-Log style while everyone waited impatiently. All this was to dead silence, because the sound crew wasn’t playing the CD I’d given them with instructions.
I hurriedly put everything in order (except the piano—I didn’t even want to try moving that around), spoke hurried apologies to the crowd into the mike, sat down, lay back, aligned my hands, and went under.
Have you ever tried to hold your breath when you’re breathing too fast? It’s like trying to hold up a car with just your lips and lungs(maybe I exaggerate---a couple motorcycles would be a close approximation). My stomach was as heavy as a singularity by then, and it probably was one, judging by how much time slowed while I was underwater.
I finally finished the piece, hurriedly played the ending chord, and came out of the water gasping. In my haste, I hit my head on the bottom of the keyboard. No one noticed, but that didn’t stop it from hurting. Dripping, I walked off the stage to scattered applause. Turned out no one had been sure that I was actually doing it. Most thought I’d rigged the piano electrically to play the song on cue, while others were convinced I had a scuba system in the bucket, or that the wetsuit was concealing a straw. Of course, there was no music then, either, again because of the sound crew. It ended up that the guy representing Choir won with an imitation of Frank Sinatra. What can you do?
The songs that were supposed to play were "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid when I walked onstage, and "Barely Breathing," by Duncan Sheik, when I came out of the water.
I sent it in with a picture of me playing the piano as described in the below essay. The view, unfortunately, is with my crotch in the foreground.
And it's true. I didn't make this up. So...yeah.
Mr. GQ
Mr. GQ---the contest of nerd redemption! Each year, guys from all walks of school sign up for this event in hope of winning fame, glory, respect, and…girls, duh. It’s a very popular event, because the talents and costumes exhibited are always interesting, for their humor, creativity, and sheer awesomeness---in the “awe-inspiring” meaning, not as a synonym for “tubularness.”
Knowing all this, I walked home from the bus stop, my thoughts racing. What talent could I display? The show was open only to junior and senior contestants, and I was with the rest of my class in racking my brains for ideas. I had no special talents---I could play the piano, sure, or hit a volleyball pretty hard. But you can’t play volleyball on the stage (easily, anyway), and I wasn’t nearly good enough at the piano to have a chance of winning on that alone.
Out of ideas, I reached back into the past. I remembered that in my cousin’s years at my school, a guy on the water polo team had won by keeping his head in a full fish tank through two full playings of “Under the Sea,” from The Little Mermaid. I knew I couldn’t go that long, but perhaps I could combine it with…
My fate was sealed. I was going to play the piano while underwater.
I talked with my brother on how to place myself relative to the piano. We finally decided that the best way was to turn the bench sideways so that it was perpendicular to the piano, and then lie on the bench face-up, with my head at the piano end, but extending off the edge of the bench and under the keyboard. Then I would drop my head (fully decked out with noseplug and earplugs) back into a bucket full of warm water(propped up with blocks---buckets fail woefully to reach the height of piano benches), reach my hands up onto the keyboard (crossed, in order to duplicate the position my hands would take were I high and dry), and find middle C.
I’d found a New Age romantic song for the occasion---I figured it would be appropriate for the girl-chasing purpose of the whole thing. After cutting out parts and learning to play the remainder by finger, I began to work on speeding it up much faster than Jim Brickman ever intended. My mom was annoyed about the wet carpet under the piano, so I kept a pile of towels in the living room for my undersea practice sessions.
A month passed. We went to Utah for Winter Break, to visit family and friends. Large buckets, blocks, noseplugs, and earplus were all unavailable, so I had to content myself with simply playing upside-down and backwards, and put the submarine portion of the act on hold.
After our return following New Year’s Day, I realized that time was short. The contest was on January 17, and my playing time was still at 1:30, a full thirty seconds longer than I could hold my breath. Thirty seconds can be a very long time underwater.
I practiced every day, about an hour at a time. Finally, I got down to a minute and ten seconds. By then, however, my lungs had grown used to the punishment and could go for that long without exploding.
The final rehearsal came, and I worked out the kinks of what I wanted to happen when, and presented my instructions to the stage and sound crew. Therein lay my fatal flaw---I failed to spell it out until the crew knew their job in their sleep.
The 17th came. I was bouncing off the walls, I was so ready for that night. We (the contestants who’d made the final cut) were all dressed in tuxedoes, to advertise the show and a local company that had provided them for free. We’d each been given a number of tickets we had to sell, but as I was a Mormon, I had no trouble selling them to members of family and church. But I regretted it later when tickets ran out, and beautiful girls began accosting tuxedo-clad young men begging to buy a ticket. I smiled, talked, sympathized, and hoped they’d stay, but the message was clear---out of tickets, out of mind.
That night came, and the contestants nervously joked in the green room. It wasn’t every night that you performed a self-written act in front of the whole school, and the guys in that room knew it. Despite the jokes and the frantic changing (representing girl’s volleyball, I began the evening in spandex---but that’s another story), everyone’s voice held an undercurrent of nervousness. As an alphabetically high-ranking, assertively low-ranking junior, I was slated to be third out of eighteen contestants. We walked onto and off of the stage one by one while the MC’s read a short bio on us. As soon as I got off the stage, I darted around the back for the bathroom to change into my wetsuit, flippers, and goggles, a gimmick I’d added the night before. I waited for the second act to near completion, checked my noseplug and earplugs, and strode out onto the stage.
And found that nothing was how I needed it. The piano was aligned wrong, so the audience would be staring at my crotch. The blocks weren’t in place, so I had to stack them Lincoln-Log style while everyone waited impatiently. All this was to dead silence, because the sound crew wasn’t playing the CD I’d given them with instructions.
I hurriedly put everything in order (except the piano—I didn’t even want to try moving that around), spoke hurried apologies to the crowd into the mike, sat down, lay back, aligned my hands, and went under.
Have you ever tried to hold your breath when you’re breathing too fast? It’s like trying to hold up a car with just your lips and lungs(maybe I exaggerate---a couple motorcycles would be a close approximation). My stomach was as heavy as a singularity by then, and it probably was one, judging by how much time slowed while I was underwater.
I finally finished the piece, hurriedly played the ending chord, and came out of the water gasping. In my haste, I hit my head on the bottom of the keyboard. No one noticed, but that didn’t stop it from hurting. Dripping, I walked off the stage to scattered applause. Turned out no one had been sure that I was actually doing it. Most thought I’d rigged the piano electrically to play the song on cue, while others were convinced I had a scuba system in the bucket, or that the wetsuit was concealing a straw. Of course, there was no music then, either, again because of the sound crew. It ended up that the guy representing Choir won with an imitation of Frank Sinatra. What can you do?
