A City Between the Lines

3.15-5.30 State Library

Walking to my perch which sits before the sunbakers and students on the State Library lawn, I see the Sun Girl. I’ve known her for a while. She’s at work and while she’s talking with someone, I give her a tap on the shoulder and walk the other way, laughing at her confusion. When she looks around and realises it’s me, the confusion melts from her face and is replaced with a warm smile as she waves a hello. ‘I was just telling someone that I was hoping for a busker to come down and play for us’. It’s good knowing the audience is in on my side while I’m setting up!

I’ve got a pretty big gig I’m nervous about tonight. Live to air, I’m going to be playing the piano. Typical of me, I’ve had to make things more difficult and I’ve chosen to play one of the toughest pieces. However, doing otherwise would feel like a cop out. I’ve chosen Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.  Not the first or second movement, but the diabolically difficult third. I figure if I busk today and just get used to people watching and get a bit of encouragement, it won’t be a big deal. It seems like a far more conducive approach compared to sitting around all day fretting over getting everything perfect like I used to when I sat piano exams. Come to think of it, today feels a lot like an exam. I haven’t had that feeling for years. Difference between now and then is that now I’m learning to perceive butterflies in the stomach and a pounding heart as excitement rather than fear of the threat of failure. Besides, if I do fail it’s not like anyone’s dead or whatever. It’s just an experience.

I start off with another song I’m going to play on radio, ‘The Girl With the Flaxen Hair’. So far so good, but noone really pays attention. It’s background music as far as their concerned. Time to launch into the third movement. I look up and I can see virtually the entire lawn paying attention. Passers by stop what they’re doing and form a small crowd. Only a month ago, this sort of attention, no matter how positive would have induced shakes and mistakes. I’m used to having an audience now, and nothing feels better. I finish and I’m met with almost the entire lawn applauding the song. That’s it. I can do this show tonight.

I launch into the next song and the all too familiar smell of weed wafts across the lawn. If I still smoked, it’d be the perfect day for lying back on the grass in the sun and enjoying a bit of mindless inactivity whilst a classical pianist plays in the background. I’m amazed someone had the temerity to blaze up in the middle of the day, in the middle of the city. It’s not even 4.20 yet!

While I’m playing, I notice a girl’s been watching. Out of everyone, she’s first to clap at the end of each song and people follow suit. Eventually, she gets up to drop some coins, but she’s generous enough to drop a blue note. I thank her for it, but she thanks me instead by saying that my playing really moved her and that she felt close to tears at some points. She had a housemate that played piano, but never the sort of stuff I was playing. It’s weird taking that on. I’m not sure what to say to people when they tell me these sorts of things, so I stick with a prosaic ‘I’m glad you liked it. Thanks a lot’. 

Another girl comes up to me and says ‘I used to have a housemate who snored all the time and I’d put the headphones on and fall asleep listening to the Moonlight Sonata. Thanks for that’. Then another. ‘I’m from Ecuador and it reminded me of when I used to play. I wish I hadn’t given up’. ‘Well, I quit for about four years. I started late too, around thirteen, fourteen’, I respond. I always make a point of mentioning this, or telling people that I had really bad stage fright since I don’t want people getting it in their head that what I’m doing is exclusive only to those who haven’t ever given up or experienced stage fright. It becomes a daunting thing when you look at someone doing something difficult and can’t envisage them struggling to get to that level, so it seems out of reach. The Ecuadorian smiles and shakes her head. ‘I stopped twenty years ago, around the age you started. I’m looking for a piano though, I’m wanting to buy one. Maybe I will start again’.

Then another, this time it’s an Italian girl. We talk for a bit and I do my best with my broken Italian. She tells me she’s just come from the Barossa Valley and she’s touring Australia and sofa surfing until the money runs out. She’s particularly interested in classical, since she plays the viola professionally. I ask her what she’s doing travelling in Australia and she tells me something I’ve heard often before. ‘In Italy, you can have all the degrees, but there’s not much work’, she sighs with her Italian drawl. I’m struck by a few things about today. First, all but one of the people I’ve spoken to have been either sharehousing or sofa surfing. I wonder what this says about the way things have changed since my parents days when it seemed everyone was paying off a mortgage back then. Secondly, apart from one guy who asked if I’d provide music for a film, everyone I spoke to was female. Usually, you speak to a broad cross section of people and it’s usually pretty balanced, but not today.

It takes one more woman to approach me and to watch what she does over the next fifteen minutes to wonder if perhaps there was a reason for this. Towards the end of my set, I’d noticed a demonstration getting started. Everyone was wearing red and pink and were holding placards demanding rights for sex workers. The woman asks me how long I’m going to play for. She needs to know, because she’s going to deliver a speech that’s important to her and would like it if I would turn my amp down. Though she’s tall and comes across as confident, there’s something about the way she’s smoking her cigarette which betrays a certain anxiety I can’t put my finger on, but is all too familiar. Ten minutes later, she’s ready to deliver her speech and I start packing up instead of turning down, since I was due to get home for the radio show anyway.

The amplifier they’re using is inadequate for conveying the gravity of the things she speaks of. I can’t make out everything she says, but there’s an almost adolescent quality to her voice even though she looks like she’s close to forty. When I can hear what she is saying, she is speaking about the rights of the sex worker and protections they are denied. It gets to a point where I can’t hear anything else but what she says. ‘I have been a victim of violence and rape both as a sex worker and a woman’. In front of everyone on that lawn, she has transcended and revealed herself in a way very few others would. As much as I find it nerve wracking playing piano in front of everyone, and as much as I’ve been told I’m meant to be exposing a part of my soul through these performances,she has gone way beyond anything most performers could imagine expressing. All my inhibitions and fears revolving around judgement are rendered null. The threat of making a mistake on the piano is nothing in light of what she has been threatened with. To the woman I saw speak with such dignity and poise, whether or not you come across what I’ve written, you have my utmost respect.

Contrary to the vulnerability and weakness some have sought to define women with, I saw strength expressed in it’s purest and most feminine form.