Can you hear the music?

I love all things musical except:

I do not like bluegrass music, Rap music or some forms of hard rock. Other than these 3,  I love music.

When I was in school I played a clarinet then later switched to playing drums. Before the Band Director,

Mrs.Fitzgerald, would  allow me to touch a real snare drum,   I spent every afternoon for an hour in

a cloak closet (as it was then called in our antique old red brick school) with drumsticks playing on a cardboard box. Yes, this is how I learned the rudiments of  playing drums. Note about Old Red Schoolhouse:
Built in 1915 and stopped using in 1990) and now a museum. The drums below are not the type I eventually played but some here in the store which are very much older than what I played.
After she was satisfied with my progress I was allowed to play a real drum. Oh how I loved that.

Let me tell you how it came about that  I switched from clarinet to drums. I started in a special group of students in our school who were allowed to begin playing an instrument in 4th grade. My parents took me to the meeting with the band director one evening and I was allowed to look at the instruments the musical supply company had there to choose from.  I immediately chose a French Horn but the man said, "No, you have a woodwind mouth so you must play a clarinet."  Whatever was that, I thought?   Anyway, after puckering a few times I allowed that he may be right and settled on buying the clarinet.

I played this through beginners band for 2 years then moved up to the Jr.High Band. There we were actually in 2 bands. Coming from a small school, the high school did not have enough members so they pushed the Jr.High Band into the high school band and WOW were we impressed. We got to go on all the out of town football trips, parades, whatever the high school band was involved in. As a 6th grader I was very impressed with this newly found freedom. So I had then played clarinet from grade 4 until grade 10 when I decided to quit band and play basketball instead. I did that but alas I was not tall enough at 5 ft 5 in tall to do so since there were many girls almost 6 ft tall in our school. I actually grew another inch after that but my dreams of playing basketball were crushed.
About that time our school had to take a musical aptitude test. I thought nothing of it until a few weeks later the band director asked for me to come to see her and told me I had to re-join her band. I said I was tired of playing the clarinet and she promised I could play anything in her band I wanted to so I agreed providing it was a drum. I found out then the reason for her actions is because the principal had told her I had scored the highest musical aptitude in the whole school. So he also told her she had to get me back into the band.
And this, my friends is how I got to play drums my last 2 years of high school.  I never played or studied music at all in college. End of my musical career.
Now, many many years later I am teaching myself to play piano. There is a piano teacher across the street from me but I want to do this myself. I had always since a child wanted to do this but did not get lessons when I was young. Two of my sisters did that!! I was very athletic as a child, riding horses, playing softball, volleyball,  and marching in the band. I ran in the forest whenever I had free time as a child and just did not want to be inside that much,  or if I was it was with my nose in a book.

So anyway, regardless of all that, I am teaching myself to play on my 1917 Piano which I inherited about 10 years ago and what got me interested again in learning.

Therefore this lead to another collection of mine:  piano babies. I seem to have some weakness for spotting things to collect. It is really an illness. But for the last 10 years I have collected piano babies, those small to large childlike images that during history decorated the top of pianos. I now have 5 but they are so much harder to find than when I began. This collection is not taking over my life as some of my previous collectibles have. I am taking it slow as to not alert my husband that the sickness has again taken me over.

So I decided to specialize in only German piano babies. Preferably Heubach. This is where I am today.

So if you see any of these alert me so I can take a look.
Still collecting,
Lois


"   Our lives are albums written through

    With good or ill--with false or  true--                                            
    And, as the blessed angels turn
    The pages of our years,
    God grant they read the good with smiles,
    And blot the bad with tears."
 from Seven Hundred Album Verses c 1884