I was, of course, nervous about this huge leap into adulthood, so I prepared a detailed strategy for my first day of class. It was mostly inspired by bad TV shows. I would dress as inconspicuously as possible so people wouldn’t notice me, and that way I could do recon to figure out my place in the world. Like going undercover in 21 Jump Street. I would draw NO attention to myself, so no one would see how young or how awkward I was, and eventually, I’d just EXIST, unquestioned. Assimilated, like the Borg. Then, after I’d met everyone and fallen in love with qualified men, I’d get a cute outfit, do my hair, and arrive at school completely made over. The guys would fall at my feet, but the one who was nicest to me when I was plain and boring would have my heart, like that episode of Beverly Hills, 90210. Or Boy Meets World? One of those. Who cares, none of it happened like that, anyway.
First day of class, I wore a huge pair of pleated jeans and a T-shirt that was a men’s large and a bigger sweater over it, like a late ’80s hip-hop star. Totally inconspicuous. I began college by lurking in corners, acting like the kind of kid people say, “But she was so quiet!” after a school shooting. But by noon, no one had approached me to talk. So far, so good!
Everyone who was enrolled in college orchestra had to audition on the first day of the semester so the conductor could figure out how good you were and what seat to assign you for the season. It was The Hunger Games for music majors. The conductor, I’ll call him Mr. Murray, was a young upstart who looked like Matthew McConaughey with Farrah Fawcett hair. It tousled around when he worked in the hottest way, waving like American golden wheat. Everyone had a crush on him, and I’m sure he could have slept with every woman in the building (me included), but he was a newlywed with an extremely hot wife who wore a black leather jacket and drove a motorcycle. He didn’t need the awkward foreplay of orchestra geeks.
My plan for the audition was to lowball my performance so the other students wouldn’t look at me for any reason, but as I entered the room, Mr. Murray said, “It will be nice having you in the orchestra this year. Mr. Frittelli has told me a lot about you.”
Sheer panic. Commence inner-anxiety monologue: Mr. Frittelli told him about me? That means he told him I was good! And if I’m bad, Mr. Frittelli will look bad. But I don’t want to be TOO good, or the other kids won’t like me. But if I suck, they might take away my scholarship . . . B-U-T . . . I freaked out inside, torn between fitting in with my peers and being a praise monkey teacher pleaser.
I looked deep into Mr. Murray’s cornflower-blue eyes, tried to gather my wits, and in the end, there was no choice. The hot adult wanted me to be good. So I played my heart out.
When the roster got posted that afternoon, I had been placed in the number two First Violin seat. Right in front of the conductor’s podium. The Park Place of orchestral real estate, right out of the gate. Crap.
As I looked at the board, I heard a grad student say behind me, “Who the hell is Felicia Day?!” and I slunk away, swimming in my huge acid-washed pants. It was going to be harder to navigate this whole schooling thing than Saved by the Bell had ever taught me.
In the following weeks, I tried to keep a low profile, hiding in the back of classes and practicing in the most out-of-the-way dungeon-like practice rooms, but I could tell everyone was curious about me. I looked ten years old, got placed in front of all the seniors and grad students, and I knew they were all thinking, How good is this kid?
I caught a few of them eavesdropping outside my practice room door, and rather than make friends, I’d glare through the tiny glass window and stop playing to mark up my music in a real fake-spacework kinda way. The idea that I could open up to them never occurred to me. I wasn’t used to humans enough to have organic social impulses.
But as the weeks went by, anxiety started eating me up. I knew I couldn’t hide forever. They would hear me, and judge me. I wondered if it was too late to quit college and go back home to hang out with my brother and play Legos. It all came to a head when I performed in Professor Frittelli’s Master Class, a monthly class where a few people would play and get critiqued so everyone could learn from it. Public shaming, the great pedagogical tool, right? Answer: No. I felt strange and isolated from everyone as it was, so in my brain, “Master Class” was emblazoned as:
I had no practical concept of my skills in relation to the other students. I was raised in such a vacuum, I could only gauge myself against recordings of famous dead people. In comparison to the greatest dead violinist in the world, Jascha Heifetz, I was horrible, so my preparatory mantra became, Please don’t listen. Seriously, don’t. Oh God, they’re going to listen, aren’t they?!
I’ve always thought it’s harder to perform in front of five of your friends than five hundred strangers, and this was a perfect example. It was a small room, everyone stared at me as I got up to play, I took twenty times too long to tune my instrument, nodded to the pianist to start, and proceeded to have a panic attack that melted my brain stem into pudding.