Might as Well Laugh About It Now Read Online Free PDF Page B

fingernails. Smart woman.
    That’s the extent of my six-string virtuosity.
    I couldn’t even turn sideways to hide my minimal playing skills without being caught on camera. My brothers thought it would be cool to film this concert from all directions: all 360 degrees. As men, they don’t realize that this idea is every woman’s worst nightmare. It’s like being trapped in a department store dressing room with magnifying mirrors covering every wall. When your image is on a twenty-five-foot megatron screen, one-half inch of arm flab can look like a sail in the America’s Cup.
    We were in London, at a sold-out concert at the O2 arena. Twenty-five thousand fans had come to celebrate the Osmonds’ fiftieth anniversary in show business. (I haven’t been around quite that long yet. Donny has, though!)
    A few weeks before, when we were rehearsing in Utah, I asked my brother Wayne for some quick pointers on the guitar because he actually does know how to play. He was also the main reason I didn’t get to play as a teenager.
    My parents invested the money we first made performing as children back into practical skills that we could use onstage. They hired great choreographers, voice teachers, and music arrangers. When it came to teaching us to play instruments, my parents devised a system that would be money-savvy and also simplify our daily calendars. They sent each of us to take lessons on a different instrument, and then we would come home and teach our instrument to everyone else. Wayne got to study guitar. Jay played drums. Alan learned the saxophone. Donny specialized in keyboards. My poor brother Merrill was responsible for learning to play the banjo. This did not score him points with teenage girls, whose only association with the banjo was The Beverly Hillbillies theme song. Merrill’s pain only increased when we toured Japan and learned that “banjo” sounded very close to “benjo,” the Japanese word for toilet. After that, every time he would practice his banjo, at least one of us felt compelled to stroll by and make a flushing sound.
    I thought Merrill had it pretty bad, until it was my turn to learn an instrument. I chose the guitar. Guitars were the “it” instrument for girls. Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon had led the way in the sixties. Nancy Wil son of Heart made the guitar look like great fashion in the seventies. Even Betty, the blonde on The Archies cartoon series, could cook. When I told my mother that I wanted to play the guitar, she put her arm around my shoulders. “We already have a guitar player, which is Wayne. We need someone to play the marimba. And that can be you.”
    For a moment or two, I thought Mother using the word “can” left the door open for discussion on the issue, until I saw the faraway look on her face. I knew she was visualizing the possibilities for our Vegas Christmastime show. She was imagining a marquee on the famous Las Vegas Strip that read:
MARIE OSMOND—PLAYS THE MARIMBA—COME HEAR
SLEIGH RIDE! NOT JUST TWO MALLETS, BUT FOUR!
    There was no shortage of reasons I did not want to learn to play this cumbersome Latin American folk instrument.
    For those of you who are not up to speed on your popular Latin American percussion, the marimba is in the idiophone family of instruments. Yes, idiophone. Not a good self-esteem builder for a young girl. How close to the word “idiot” can you get? And the siblings in the idiophone family are the xylophone and wood blocks (used for horse hoof sounds). We all know how often teenage girls like to impress boys by replicating the sound of a trotting Clydesdale. Please! A marimba was not cool. I would rather play the toilet like Merrill.
    Despite all of my legitimate reasons why the marimba was not for me, my mother could not be swayed from her vision. Days later, I was standing next to a woman who played the best marimba in all of Las Vegas. She was the top teacher in the area and my mother, in her excitement, had signed me up for