Audio_05_03_2024_20_32_44

Take Your Daughter to Work Day Take Your Daughter to Work Day, The Anointing Written and read aloud by Emma Tatenbaum Fine My violin teacher, when I was 12 years old, took me to sit in the pit with her at Goodspeed Opera House. She had no children, and as many teachers of various disciplines have, she took a liking to me. But I didn't practice much, wasn't great at the violin, therefore, and was generally confounded by her respect for me, which is telling of my value system as a 12-year-old. If you weren't talented, my thinking went, why would a teacher like you? We played Bartok duets together, with me on the easier part, and I couldn't believe I was playing alongside an esteemed artist from the Hartford Symphony. When I didn't understand a rhythm, I would dance it out. I found her to be non-judgmental, plain-spoken, and generally fearless, attributes that called to me as I incrementally lost hold of my known self, slipping deeper into the mental tangle of teenagehood. Jane was a full-time working violinist. She played classical music and music theater at the highest level that the arts had to offer in the greater Hartford area, and this was slightly before, or just as, the art scene in Hartford began to lose funding. I had the good fortune to capture the spectacular death rattles of the golden age of Hartford's ballet company and symphony, and so, from the age of 11 onward, I understood that art was a thing everyone loved, but that no one was quite willing to pay for. Jane was an avid runner. She was a teacher. She was a prolific musician from a musical family. She had a handsome but semi-haggard look to her. In a man, it might be called rugged, but in her face, it could best be called poorly rested. Jane had what seemed to me to be a perpetual yeast infection.