—Again Claire, repeat it —Professor Porter asks me.
Taking a deep breath as I prepare myself, I put my fingers back on the notes of the piano, as I played my solo again, doing it in a somewhat slow and leisurely manner, just as the professor had asked me to do in my previous performance.
Outside the classroom windows, I could hear the rain rhythmically tapping on the windows, slightly distracting me from what I was doing with my hands on the keys. Preparing to be a soloist was not such a simple thing, and even before I knew I wanted to apply to be one, my ideas about the demands of the job were extremely wrong, as it turned out to be much more complicated than I had first thought.
Everyone expected my performance to be perfect, more than perfect to tell the truth. And although I practic
