The MoTab Expands

12:29 PM Posted In , , , Edit This 3 Comments »
...as does the list of celebrities that I am personally acquainted with. This just in from the Newsroom: "The Mormon Tabernacle Choir announced today that Ryan T. Murphy has been named associate music director. Murphy will assume the associate music director position formerly occupied by Mack J. Wilberg, who was appointed music director in March 2008." (You can find the full article here) Ryan "T-bone" Murphy was my piano teacher for a brief stint in 2003-2004, when I decided to take lessons back up after a brief hiatus. Piano is a love-hate relationship in our family... my previous teacher had required an hour and a half a day of practicing. Do the math? That's over 10 hours a week. Add to that puberty and an active social life, and there were blow-ups all the time at my house over the clavier. My mom had a rule that when we started High School we could choose to quit piano, and I did it without blinking an eye. By senior year, however, I missed lessons which forced me to practice and improve, so we asked the new guy in town to be my teacher (and Caroline's too... I think our old teacher may have been pregnant?)
Ryan was an awesome piano teacher. He was really good natured, and very relaxed. I didn't work as hard for him as I had for Cara, probably because I wasn't afraid of him, but I really enjoyed taking lessons from him. Ryan's also incredibly talented at the piano and the organ. My dad and I had the privilege of a daddy-daughter date to see him play the organ with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. That's dope.
Back to Ryan being good-natured: my sister Caroline is "full of life" and "a spitfire." At least that's how adults describe her vivacity. So Caroline also took piano lessons from Ryan, and she would have been 8 at the time. Well, as many piano teachers do, we had these notebooks that would have all of our assignments for the week written in them. Caroline, for some reason, decided to make her notebook a correspondence log, and would write Ryan little notes that he would find before her lessons began the next week. Here's the first (and probably funniest) of the serious of hate-mail Caroline wrote to Ryan:

Basically, Caroline had the same love-hate relationship with piano that the rest of us did, and tried to enlist Ryan's help in getting out of it. "I want you to tell my mom that I should stop playing peano!" After some increasingly violent scribbles in the book, (including Caroline actually writing "I hate you" over and over again in circles on one page) my mom let Caroline off the hook. She just couldn't take it anymore... she was so embarrassed when Ryan showed her the notes in the book! But the rest of us loved it, including our good-natured teacher. Congratulations, Mormon Tabernacle Choir... you've picked a winner! Good luck Ryan!

3 comments:

Chrissie said...

HAHAHA...Caroline's letter...hilarious

meagan said...

Awesome.

I recognize that mood. Once, I was in it while I was supposed to be practicing and I grabbed my pencil and wrote, "I hate piano!!!" with my eraser on our baby grand. To my everlasting shame, you can still read it. 12+ years later...

Mormon Soprano said...

Loved this post - so funny! I'm looking forward to getting to know Ryan