Don Asher's Shoot the Piano Player

The first thing I noticed when reading Don Asher's entertaining memoir Shoot the Piano Player is the author's vivid, verbose writing style. I also noticed that before any serious reflection begins, Asher mostly just describes the bars and music clubs he plays when he's sixteen and the people who run, work at, and frequent them. The places he describes in the memoir - “waterfront dives, backstreet saloons, and turnpike toilets” - ultimately lead him to the “preeminent cabarets and ballrooms of Boston and San Fransisco” (205).

The first place Asher describes is Tiny's, a strip joint. There, he goes into detail about Tiny, the man who runs the bar, and the “Glamazons,” strippers that Asher accompanies on piano when they are performing. Though Asher says that playing at Tiny's was “the happiest time” he's "ever known," playing music becomes complicated for him after the bar closes. The more experience Asher gains, the more he is aware of the compromises being made to his talent and creativity.

 After Tiny's, Asher works at Vincent's, a seedy bar that is frequented by mobsters. Again, Asher gives the reader a good sense of time and place; he describes his surroundings and characters like the owner of Vincent's, Guido, Guido' sister, singer Amy Avallone, and the shady patrons. Asher also uses music lingo, which is a nice touch. But during this section, Asher begins reflecting on playing music for a living and the compromises he has to make to keep his job. Though Asher has to adapt to his surroundings to remain employed, it stifles some of his creativity and talent, and he has to pander not only to his employer's needs, but the audience's as well, an audience that wants him to play the songs straight because his technical playing leaves them confused and an audience that gives him money to play certain songs over and over.

 It gets worse for Asher during the next section of the memoir. Asher moves to Boston and begins studying jazz piano in college. To support himself, he joins Rudy Yellin's Society Orchestra, a “stable” of musicians that play country clubs, weddings, parties, catering halls, and hotels. Many of the musicians he plays with are older and have already compromised. Though they are able players, and Asher picks up useful tips and advice from them, these musicians have settled playing the popular songs of the day with little variation and under humiliating circumstances for money because they have wives and kids to support. In addition, many of Rudy's band leaders “vie for engagements by outfitting their musicians in exotic costumes to fit an ethnic or thematic occasion” (213). These “theme parties,” in Asher's opinion, are “the closet thing the professional musician comes to prostitution” (213). The reader can feel how frustrating it is for Asher as he plays for Rudy and has to deal with careless management that supply him warped pianos with missing keys while performing in a series of ludicrous get-ups and costumes. He experiences all of this at a young age, and it leaves him dispirited. The innocence he had when he was performing at Tiny's is lost. He realizes that “there is less real music to the society-band business than people think” (213).

 By the time of the “Chinatown” party, Asher has had it with Rudy's. He writes, “I thought, Another year of Rudy, collie hats, and assorted monkey suits, of moisture-sodden, rotten-tomato pianos, and I'd be reduced to a shadow of a man, devoid of talent, invention, and testicles. Might as well sew up duck's rectums in a meat market, or trade off with that waiter...at least he wasn't whoring, merely putting in hours. He was doing his own thing” (218). Though the Chinatown scene is humorous, it is also dispiriting, pathetic, and humiliating. Asher is doing what he loves, but it's costing him his dignity, talent, and pride. Though Asher becomes cynical at a young age, it doesn't necessarily drain him of his passion for music. After leaving Rudy's, he goes to San Fransisco. Though Asher doesn't explicitly say where he ends up, hopefully he goes to San Fransisco to perform at one of the “preeminent cabarets and ballrooms” he mentioned at the beginning of the memoir and not at some toga party at a country club.

Vivian Gornick from "Fierce Attachments"

Right off the bat Gornick grabs the reader in her first sentence “ A year after my mother told Mrs. Drucker she was a whore...” You immediately get this idea of Gornick's mother, that she is this feisty, outspoken woman (to put it nicely). Though we don't get much of a background or straight forward description of her, the reader gets an idea of her mother through her dialogue in the story. Before reading this story, I had expected the excerpt to have some sort of meaningful idea on mother-daughter relationships, but Gornick focuses a lot on Nettie in this passage. Through her comparison to Greta Garbo, Gornick lets you know that Nettie is very “Hollywood”. There is this glamour and allure to this woman that sets her apart from the other people in the apartment building and fascinates Gornick. 

We are very quickly taken through Nettie's story with her husband's return, his abusive behavior, his death, and then focusing on the male visitors Nettie has at her apartment. Gornick then goes into the male visitors Nettie has at her apartment and the scene of her bursting into Nettie’s apartment, after which the story seemed to be cut off and the switch to Gornick and her mother walking through the streets seems abrupt. The last scene we see with Nettie however, when Vivian walks in on her and a man sitting at the kitchen table, Gornick describes the look Nettie gave her "She was calculating the impression this scene was making on me.." It would seem as though Nettie so apart of Gornick's family, that she had become concerned about the example she was setting for her, the way a parent would.

At first it felt like we had gotten different stories all mushed together into one passage, and I found myself wondering what is the connection here? Through the different stories she describes, the common thread I could see was her mother and how she acted throughout the chapter. Her mother seems to have this odd, complex relationship with Nettie, where she takes her under her wing and defends her yet I sensed that Gornack’s mother was intimidated of her in a way. There is a line in which they are describing the relationship between the two women after Rick’s death, “My mother could now sustain Nettie’s beauty without becoming unbalanced and Nettie could help herself to Mama’s respectability without being humbled” This connects back to the beginning of the story, when Nettie is praising Gornick’s mother for her domestic skills, and Gornick describes her mother as quietly envious of Nettie’s looks . Now that Nettie is widowed and vulnerable, there seems to come a balance in their relationship.

Where I felt connected most to Gornick is when she asking her mother begins telling her her what she thinks of the biography Vivian has given her. She describes herself getting angry and wanting to lash out at her mother over her opinion. I thought this frustration she describes with her mother and wanting to fight back against her domineering opinion was something that everyone has felt at some point or another with a parent or family member.

In a vulnerable moment at the end of  story, we get this revelation from Gornick’s mother, “I’m jealous,” my mother blurts out at me,”I’m jealous, she lived her life, I didn’t live mine” In this confession , it seemed to tie together everything about Gornick’s mother, in that although this woman put up a tough exterior, being able to battle through words, there was something missing from her own life. I think this is why there is this certain tension between her and Nettie and why she scoffs at the books Vivian gives her; they both remind her of what she doesn't have.

Overall I enjoyed the very straightforward style of the piece. I like that there was a lot of reflection from Gornick’s older self yet we are also put in her mindset as a young child and how she was observing things at the time of the story.