Mrs. Dager
Ah yes, a pocket dictionary of musical terminology from my infamous piano-teacher Mrs. Dager, who used to blow her nose with great flourish, and then stuff the soggy hanky into the cleavage of her dress.
I don’t remember it, but how could I possibly when my memory is so bad. I don’t remember the recent fabrications of my noisy brother from Boston, and have the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to remember a huge toilet-paper roll atop the Scott Headquarters (research-center/whatever) across from the airport (MayZ remembers that toilet-paper roll too), that was apparently removed by the time the pups passed.
I also have the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to remember that Foulk Road was spelled with an “A” when we moved to Oak Lane Manor in late 1957. (“Here comes that Hughes-kid. Quick; call the janitor! He needs to go outside and change the ‘A’ to an ‘O’ in the name of the school.”)
Mrs. Dager’s greatest joy was to get Elz and me to cry, which wasn’t hard to do, given the impossible Clemente arpeggios she’d challenge us with.
She dearly wanted me to become a Billy Graham pianist, rolling grandly up and down the keys with great flourish. But I was hornswoggled by Jerry Lee Lewis.
I’m sure Mrs. Dager is dead by now, probably buried among Revolutionaries in the ancient Haddonfield Cemetery, circled by woods overlooking Camden County Park, and the Kings Highway hill out of the Cooper Crick defile.
I reconnoitered that cemetery once; it had stones from the 1600s and 1700s.
“Arpeggios” defined: a difficult sequence of 16th- or 32nd-notes leaping all over the piano keyboard, elegantly designed to make little children taking piano-lessons cry — as championed by Muzio Clemente and F. Marie Dager, grand organist and music directress at Erlton Community Baptist Church.
Probably because of Mrs. Dager, and Houghton, I still appreciate classical music. (Mrs. Dager got up-front tickets for Elz and me to attend a Philadelphia Orchestra concert with Eugene Ormandy. —They played Dvorak’s “New World” symphony and Sebelius' “Finlandia.” [That music played in my head for years.])
I don’t remember it, but how could I possibly when my memory is so bad. I don’t remember the recent fabrications of my noisy brother from Boston, and have the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to remember a huge toilet-paper roll atop the Scott Headquarters (research-center/whatever) across from the airport (MayZ remembers that toilet-paper roll too), that was apparently removed by the time the pups passed.
I also have the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to remember that Foulk Road was spelled with an “A” when we moved to Oak Lane Manor in late 1957. (“Here comes that Hughes-kid. Quick; call the janitor! He needs to go outside and change the ‘A’ to an ‘O’ in the name of the school.”)
Mrs. Dager’s greatest joy was to get Elz and me to cry, which wasn’t hard to do, given the impossible Clemente arpeggios she’d challenge us with.
She dearly wanted me to become a Billy Graham pianist, rolling grandly up and down the keys with great flourish. But I was hornswoggled by Jerry Lee Lewis.
I’m sure Mrs. Dager is dead by now, probably buried among Revolutionaries in the ancient Haddonfield Cemetery, circled by woods overlooking Camden County Park, and the Kings Highway hill out of the Cooper Crick defile.
I reconnoitered that cemetery once; it had stones from the 1600s and 1700s.
“Arpeggios” defined: a difficult sequence of 16th- or 32nd-notes leaping all over the piano keyboard, elegantly designed to make little children taking piano-lessons cry — as championed by Muzio Clemente and F. Marie Dager, grand organist and music directress at Erlton Community Baptist Church.
Probably because of Mrs. Dager, and Houghton, I still appreciate classical music. (Mrs. Dager got up-front tickets for Elz and me to attend a Philadelphia Orchestra concert with Eugene Ormandy. —They played Dvorak’s “New World” symphony and Sebelius' “Finlandia.” [That music played in my head for years.])
posted by BobbaLew at 6:15 PM
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