God help me

I leave a message with the cantor who is apparently away on a compulsory cruise of sorts, and call the other possible tutor, Nikki. A few years earlier I had met her when picking Ben up a bit early from Sunday school and sat in the back of her adult hebrew class. I liked her immediately; smart, sweet and kind, with seemingly endless patience for the many different levels of students in the class, she seemed the perfect teacher. I remember thinking if I had the time or inclination I would love to be in that class. But I was neck deep in refreshing a thirty-year-old pharmacy degree while in the midst of a heady spree of writing freelance essays for the NY Times. As usual, Judaism took a back seat. In my mind, Judaism was more like yoga or meditation, I knew it probably would add a sereneness missing from my life, but I was always way too pumped up for anything serene. Judaism was mostly for Ben, just as for my mother, it had been for me.

A few days later Nikki comes to our house and begins the tutoring. She will be coming every Tuesday for a half-hour and assures me that we are way ahead of schedule and that Ben will be just fine. "I've never met a child who didn't do well on their day," she tells me calmly. She'll send over an MP3 of my trope and promises to give me the shortest Aliya possible for Ben's Lech Licha torah reading. I want to burrow my head in her busom, tell her I can't possibly do this, that I'd be too nervous and it would ruin the nine months leading up to the big day. But I can't fall apart. It's just a few lines I tell myself. Ben has so much to learn, we'll learn together. It will be a bonding experience. I can do this.

I think back to my latest bout of stage fright, when Rob had lost his job during the recent financial crisis. I figured I'd put all those years of classical piano lessons to financial use and perform in schools as Clara Schumann, 19th century virtuosa. I write the one-woman show, force myself to practice piano every day for 45 minutes-- Beethoven, Chopin, Robert Schumann, Brahms-- and low and behold I get myself booked. But what I didn't anticipate was that standing in front of 600 students in an assembly, plus teachers, plus principals and vice principals, would cause my blood to run ice cold. Not that my wildly erratic heart wouldn't kill me first. I got total dry-mouth standing up there, would need to constantly gulp water every few minutes. The nerves actually chopped off a whole quarter of a minute from the Minute

Waltz. I was a wreck. After three years, I finally quit. Not that anyone noticed I quit, I simply stopped booking myself. And it finally hit me. Though I like my share of attention, could be extroverted in a group say on New Year's Eve, deep down, as in really deep down, I prefer one on one. It took me many years to finally admit this, to non-judgementally accept it. The truth was, I was actually very shy. And at times, the shyness could be incapacitating. So standing up there on the bima, reading hebrew, actually singing hebrew, among all our friends, neighbors, and family, might just bring out my shyness in all it's brilliant, vibrant colors. It might, very well, make me throw up.