I was seven the first time I played in front of people, and nobody told me it was going to happen. My guitar teacher had organised a showcase for the music school, the kind of afternoon where all the parents come and sit on folding chairs and watch their children play. He told the parents. He did not tell mine, and he did not really tell me either, or if he did I understood it as a normal lesson. So I walked in that afternoon the way I walked in every week, with my guitar on my back, expecting to sit down across from him and work through the songs we had been practising.
Instead I walked into a room full of people. Rows of chairs, coats over the backs of them, a small stage at the front. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, so I did the only thing that made sense to a seven year old who had come for a lesson. I sat down and waited for the lesson to start. At some point my teacher came over and told me it was my turn, and that I should go up and play the songs I knew.
I was nervous in the way you only are before you know enough to be properly scared. I went up and played the round of songs I had rehearsed, the ones I could have played with my eyes closed because I had played them in his little room a hundred times. When I finished there was a real applause, the kind that fills a room, and afterwards people came up to talk to me. I did not know what to do with any of it. It felt strange to be looked at like that, and stranger still that it had happened by accident.
I went home and told my parents. They were not delighted. They were upset, a little furious even, that there had been a showcase and they had missed it, that nobody had told them their son was going to play his first show that afternoon. And I was disappointed too, once I understood what had happened, because the one thing you want when you are seven and you played well is for your parents to have seen it.
But there it was. My first show, played by mistake, to a room of other people's parents. I have played a lot of shows since then, ones I planned for months and ones that fell apart, and almost none of them have stayed with me as clearly as that afternoon I thought was a normal Tuesday.
Love,
Marten