The 10th Man: Pulling Out All The Stops

When I was a teenager, I had a different sort of part-time job. I was a church organist.

Actually, it was the best job ever because I was something of a piano prodigy as a child. Around age 12, my parents and I had to make a conscious decision about whether I was going to pursue a career in music. I decided not to, which has greatly reduced the amount of Ramen noodles I have eaten over the years.

At age 13, I decided I wanted to play the organ. I took lessons from the organist in the big Catholic church downtown. What an incredible instrument!

Playing the organ is a lot harder than it looks. In case you hadn’t noticed, there is a whole keyboard at your feet—yes, you play with both your hands and your feet. And since you can’t possibly learn all the hymns, you have to be really good at sight-reading three lines of music at once. It takes a great deal of coordination. Plus, you have two or more “manuals” (keyboards) and dozens of stops, which activate the different sounds in the organ. This is where the phrase “pulling out all the stops” comes from.

So I got a job as the organist at the Unitarian church down the street. For the first and only time of my life, I was a member of a union—the American Guild of Organists. I received my union-protected minimum wage of $50 per service, which is a great deal of money if you’re 16 years old in 1990.

$50 a week definitely put gas in my car. And there was a girl in the congregation that I dated a couple of times.

I felt sorry for my poor schlep classmates who were bagging groceries for $4/hour. They had to work 12 hours to make what I made in one.

I felt pretty smug.  The high point was when I transcribed the theme from “A Clockwork Orange” and played it as the prelude for one of the church services. You can see where the subversive streak comes from.

I Got Skills

So why did I make more than 12 times what my high school classmates made?

Because my skills were worth 12 times as much.