What do your kids do when they get home from school? In Agoura, do they tune up the violin and play a few etudes? Do the Westlake kids pull out the sheet music to knock out a little Scarlatti at the piano? Or you, T.O., do your young things grab a bag of Mallomars and kick back with the PlayStation for a session of Xenogears or Chrono Cross?

I know I sound a little crass, but then, you should be used to that by now. What fine skills are we teaching our children in this beautiful part of the world? It’s sad but true that music education has gone the way of white gloves and etiquette, professional athletes who play for the fun of it and big, bad Oldsmobiles with shiny chrome bumpers.

I find it so odd that our generation—the Conejo car pool crew schlepping our prodigies to Brownies, T-ball, gymnastics, basketball, tennis, Little League and oodles of soccer games—has managed to ignore the importance of teaching our kids how to play the piano, violin, cello, flute or anything that doesn’t plug-in.

We’ve lost the art of teaching the arts. And I’m afraid our kids are the ones who have really lost.

Well, maybe not.

“The melody is in the right hand, not the left, gosh darnit!”

I’ve cleaned that up a bit, but that was my mother’s lessthangentle reminder as she listened to me practice the piano in the morning. Harping expletives, her face was aglow, slathered with Elizabeth Arden’s Orange Skin Cream, which doubled as a facial treatment and an iridescent factory adhesive.

And by the way, I didn’t know that any melody resided in my right hand or my left hand.

Like the beat of a metronome, Mom clomped through the kitchen in her pink quilted slippers matching her pink quilted bathrobe with bulbous rhinestone buttons at the waist. Dad and I picked it out at I. Magnin for her for Christmas 1959, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. To her credit, she wore it every day until I graduated from high school and tortured me every morning, dripping in pink and glittering from the kitchen.

Hovering over the stove, flipping eggs and bacon, she overlooked the sizzling and tuned into everything I played.

“Don’t just play the notes, make it sing !”

Okay, Mom. We’ll make it sing. Lah-dee-dah. I’ll loosen up here. I knew she was standing at the ready, like the Gestapo at the Berlin Wall. Achtung!

Despite Mom’s morningplastered bad hair and the DayGlo skin, the dear thing would listen to every note. Every note.

“It’s legato not staccato , Paderewski!”

She liked to call me Paderewski, which I never understood since he was a man who was also a very talented pianist. And I was neither.

As an accomplished musician herself, who studied with the famous Henri Deering in New York, Mom’s trained ears picked up every slip, slide, mishap and clunker—and she was not shy about letting me know that I was screwing up every wonderful note written by Mozart and Bach.

The kitchen door would fly open.

“You’re playing like you’re going to a fire. Slow down !”

Boom! The door would close. Okay, Mr. Mozart, let’s take it from the top. And where was I? Nice . . . and . . . sloooooooooowly. Hmmm . . . melody in the right hand not the left. Let’s see, how do I do that?

Boom! The door would fly open again. Shoot, I haven’t even finished the first bar!

“Breakfast is ready !”

Phew. So now you know why I took up ballet.

Next week: oil painting. You can reach Elizabeth Kirby at kirby@theacorn.com.