With the school year in high gear, can concert season be far behind? I remember school concert burnout well. Yes, of course I was tickled by and proud of my budding little performers. But after years of sitting on creaky auditorium chairs, I began to wonder how many more times I could sit through another command performance where one parent would invariably turn to me and say something like, “I know I am a bit prejudiced here, but don’t they sound really, really good?” without replying “No, they really, really do not.”

The low point of my parental performance career came when one of my budding music phenoms was to play in a third grade recorder concert. Not having gotten the hand of decoding the musical notes just yet, she cheerily informed me that she’d be faking (i.e. not actually playing) during the performance. As an uncomfortable partner in this command performance, I had to sit in the audience and listen to the collective screeching of the instruments and watch my musical prodigy just pretend to play.

The irony? Today she’s pursuing a musical career. Fortunately, the recorder is not her instrument.