Article September 17, 2012 Issue

I hear music

Phyllis W. Zeno

“How the mighty hath fallen,”   I think as I wait in the outer office of one of New York’s top talent agencies. My amazing music career, which has been building over the past two years, is in shambles, gone as quickly as it had appeared. As a friend presents his script to an industrial show producer, I think back:

Music was always a part of my life, from the hymns my mother sang to us at bedtime, to the nights when my brother and I would creep to the top of the hall stairs and listen to our parents making music … Mother on the piano and Daddy on the mandolin. From an early age, I was banging out my own tunes on the piano. When I was 16, I wrote “Happy Landing,” the senior class musical at the girls’ school I attended, and suddenly I was BWOC—Big Woman on Campus. My show was even performed on the local television station. Was my head swelling just a little?

I majored in music at college and looked forward to a career as a Broadway musical playwright—a hope also held by my mother. “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord” (Psalms 98:4) was her theme song, and she expected me to make it mine. At the end of World War II,
I left college to marry a former submariner, and although I’d write a song or two for some local event, before too long I was raising three young children. When my husband was transferred to Ft. Wayne, Indiana, I put my music career on hold.