A Crooked Kind of Perfect

Zoe Elias is 10 years old, and she has a dream of being a celebrated piano player and playing Carnegie Hall. She loves the elegance of the instrument and the people who come to hear it be played; she also likes the atmosphere of mystique felt in the audience as they await a piano’s music. The moment when the pianist begins to play is beautiful to Zoe. Zoe sees the piano as loved internationally by the “glamorous” people of the world and wishes it were the instrument she played.

In reality, Zoe plays a wooden organ called “The Perfectone D-60” (3). She has nothing else to say about it.

Zoe admires a pianist named Vladimir Horowitz and considers him the best. She saw a show about him once on PBS and found out that he was a child prodigy; he was 17 when he held his first professional show and played Carnegie Hall just a few years later. Zoe’s goal is to do the exact same thing, and she tells herself she has until she turns 17 to be good enough.