I am all the things I loved in this lifetime.  Of course, I am a girl.

Seduction will be easy.  We have everything on our side; even gay men adore our power.  My dress... but that comes later.

I will be middle-class, yet educated, to higher hopes.  “She’ll go far,” says a doting grandmother and somewhat distant father. “Don’t spoil her”, but they do.  I have the finest teachers, encouragement is at my back.  I take a musical tour of Europe.  But I am giving myself away.

I will grow up in a time of... it doesn’t matter. The music matters.  In this, my present lifetime, I have dreamt of being the next Mozart or having a child who is.

My life comes to me from the stage, the screen, hearing Yehudi Menuhin the violinist, seeing Plisetskaya as Juliet, Von Karajan’s crippled hands conducting Ravel’s La Valse, Lang Lang swallowing up Rachmaninoff.

In my youth, a premonition tells me that I will reach a plateau where I will move audiences to tears, possessing the kind of artistry that leaves people limp with emotion, so moved that they are unable to stand or cheer.  They just sit where they are, tears falling to their laps, from exaltation.  (This happened to me in this life after seeing Nureyev dance at the original Metropolitan Opera House with Margot Fonteyn.)

I will conquer kings and presidents, take them away from their travails. I will play the piano for vast electronic audiences at Olympic gatherings.  I will numb the critics and infuriate others with a technique yet to be heard.

I will recompose the classical themes, make new and dazzling compositions to enthrall audiences and madden the critics, who have already compared me to Liszt.  Is she a genius or does she have the world’s most fabulous hands to ever touch the keys of a piano?  They won’t be able to stop writing about my heart stopping performances, my vulgar popularity.

But I am not vulgar.  I wear clothes designed by John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier.  Some people come to hear but others to see what I shall be wearing at this afternoon’s performance.

Men in high places deliver jewelry. It’s my life!  Sometimes I play for them in private chateaux and salons.  For some reason they are very generous to me.  For a while I live on the plus side of their egos, traveling the world.

I do settle down, perhaps in Australia with someone in communications and have two little girls.

One thing I am able to do that I can’t do in this lifetime is to memorize perfectly at first hearing.  I am probably not acting today because memorizing is such a torture to me.  The creative part can be like it is, on the vital edge, easily accessible, instantly knowable.
 
It’s my life.  This is my interpretation.

Who would you be in your next life?

What would you be?