Withering Glance: Instruments of torture

Rick Nelson and Claude Peck dispense unasked-for advice about clothing, etiquette, culture, relationships, grooming and more.

CP: Given my calamitous lack of musical talent, I sometimes marvel at how many instruments I studied as a youth. Lessons, practice, nothing. You?

RN: Nada. I have a faint and embarrassing memory of something called a flutophone, which I suspect was Palmer Lake Elementary School's remedial-reading version of music education.

CP: Consider yourself fortunate. I have so many non-fond memories of my young life in music. There was guilt if I didn't practice, agony if I did, a decided lack of forward progress, fingertips calloused by the steel strings of a cheap guitar. Piano, however, was the worst.

RN: Hey, at least you can impress strangers with a whirl through "Für Elise." I can't even hum it.

CP: What about your youthful career in the musical theater? Did you not sing and dance?

RN: Unfortunately, I sing like a rusty hinge. Thank goodness "Our Town" is a straight play, or I never would have been cast. When the good people of Grovers Corners sing "Blest Be the Tie That Binds" in the third act, the director would always shoot me a panicked look. But back to you. I'm picturing a support-hose-wearing piano teacher who smells of Brach's peppermints, and Mother Peck getting on you to run your scales.

RN: My hopelessness at any kind of eye-hand coordination pretty much eliminated dreams of reading music and joining an orchestra. Which also explains why I steered clear of football, baseball or any athletic endeavor that required handling and/or propelling an object. You can imagine my popularity in gym class.

CP: That's why I figured you might have retreated to a soundproof practice room with your starter violin and some Barber études. Were your siblings likewise nonmusical youngsters?

RN: Pretty much, unless you count singing in the car on road trips. Yes, that's the kind of saps we were. I suppose that the Peck siblings formed a quartet and spent idyllic Sunday afternoons tearing through the Mozart canon. I bet there's a Kodak moment somewhere of young Claude in short pants, seated at the family Steinway.

CP: Dream on. We had a rented upright, perpetually out of tune, that was shipped back to the store as soon as it was discovered that there wasn't a budding Martha Argerich among us.

RN: Wait, I just remembered. My brother played drums. Quite well. And fortunately after I'd gone to college.

RN: It could have been worse. You could have played the tuba.

E-mail: witheringglance @startribune.com