La fin s'approche...

...and there you have it. An entire season has apparently passed without me updating this thing.
On the other hand, I had nothing legitimate to write about until last night, when I finally accomplished a lifelong goal: I snuck into the VIP room of a swanky club by impersonating somebody else.
A group of posh Italians were in said VIP room for a birthday party. A French friend who was with me gave me a useful tip: whenever there's a large group of Italians, there's surely a "Giorgio" somewhere in there. Thus the strategy when I approached the bouncer:

Bouncer: Yes?
Me: (with exaggerated, fake Italian accent and rolled "r"s) Yes, I'm a friend of Giorgio.
Bouncer: Giorgio? Giorgio who?
Me: Giorgio, uh...Lugano. Mr. Lugano.

I read a book in fifth grade in which one of the characters was a teacher named Mr. Lugano. Why this was the first thing to emerge from my subconscious, I will never know.

Bouncer: Giorgio Lugano?
Me: Yes, he's in here somewhere.
Bouncer: Okay, go ahead.

Sweet. It was everything I could have dreamed of: free vodka and leathery Italian women dancing on tables as the intoxicated crowd hooted "Bene! Bene!". I drunkenly kept whispering the phrase "cool as a cucumber" to myself, although in retrospect, I have no idea what the hell that meant.
In conclusion, I felt special for the first time since 1998, when I won a pair of movie tickets in our school raffle. I lost them within a week.

Apparently my exams are approaching alarmingly quickly. I'd like to do what some people do before sports games and place bets on which exams I will pass:

ANALYSIS: FAIL. The French harmony system is both different from, and inferior to, the system that everyone else uses. We never learned it, and the teacher never really bothered to teach it to us.

SIGHTREADING: FAIL. There's something about improvising cadences in different keys on the final exam. Our teacher has never been sober enough to go over this with us. I'm buying the textbook next week, but I'll have to do some heroic cramming to learn everything in two weeks.

SOLFEGE: PASS. That's a pretty optimistic prediction, but I'm really not any lousier than the other students in my class. And they can't fail all of us! Right?

CHAMBER MUSIC: PASS. I own Debussy's "Petite Suite" and the Brahms waltzes. If the jury thinks otherwise, I'll burn the building down.

MUSIC HISTORY: PASS. Has anyone, as long as music conservatories have been around, ever failed a music history exam?

Then, there's the exams I care about. The piano juries.
This works in two phases. On the 29th, I play a Chopin etude, a prelude and fugue, and some dumb contemporary piece. Half of the students will then meet their demise.
The half that rest will play the rest of their program at the end of June. Half of those students will then meet their demise.

This depends solely on my nerves. My nervousness flairs up sporadically and can be the difference between a shimmering rendition of "Jeux d'Eau" (see Atlanta 2007) or a shite rendition of "Jeux d'Eau" (see Italy 2007). Thus my predictions:

If I do not get nervous: PASS
If I do get nervous: UNKNOWN
If I take a huge whiff of ether and down a bottle of poppers before playing: FAIL


Here's hoping for a bit of luck in these exciting times.