Virtuoso

I was visiting with my sister Beth this past weekend, and she shared with me a story that I am still laughing about.  When she was in high school, she was in band and she played the saxophone.  She admitted that she could hardly play a note, and she played "air sax" 99.9 percent of the time.  She showed us the intricate finger moves she would make, and she really does look like an expert.  She said her mouth-piece was broken for over a year and she didn't bother telling anyone she needed it fixed because what did she care?  She wasn't really playing it anyway.  Occasionally the band director would make sure all the instruments were in tune by going down the line and having everyone play a G.  Beth knew G, but she said because of the broken mouth-piece she had to push so hard that she would get dizzy.  However, she could play a G well enough to keep  from being found out.

Unfortunately, she did get found out.  At a competition once the director (who was kind of a witch) was walking through the aisles and she looked at Beth's sax and said, "What's this?!" and swished her conductor's baton in the bell and fished out two shoulder pads that my mom had made Beth wear under her shirt (it was the eighties).  Beth didn't want to wear shoulder pads, so instead of fighting about it with my mom, she just put them on and then when she got to the competition she took them out and shoved them in her sax.