The Talent Show Technical Difficulties
A free B2-level English story for language learners, readable online in 7 languages, with an option to listen via the free Storyteller app.
When her backing track fails onstage, Fern improvises her violin solo unaccompanied and turns a technical disaster into an accidental triumph.
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Fern had practiced her violin solo for the school talent show so many times that her family had started leaving the room. They left whenever she picked up the instrument. She wasn't nervous about the music itself. She was nervous about the backing track, which her friend Enzo had promised to handle from the sound booth.
"I've done this before," Enzo assured her backstage. "Twice, actually. It's basically foolproof."
It was not, in fact, foolproof. When Fern walked out and nodded for her cue, the gymnasium speakers didn't play her carefully rehearsed piano accompaniment. Instead, they produced three seconds of what sounded like a startled cat, followed by silence.
She stood there, bow raised, waiting for a fix that clearly wasn't coming. From the sound booth, she could see Enzo frantically clicking through folders, his face lit an unflattering blue by the laptop screen.
Rather than walk off, Fern made a decision that surprised even her. She started playing anyway, completely unaccompanied, and adjusted the tempo to something that might charitably be called dramatic.
The audience, unsure whether this was intentional, began to applaud the boldness of it, which only encouraged her further. Somewhere around measure twenty, the missing piano track finally roared back to life, three full measures behind where it should have been.
Fern had two options: stop and restart, humiliatingly, or simply catch up to the track as if this had been the plan all along. She chose the second option, sawing through a slightly frantic passage until the two parts, violin and piano, converged into something resembling the same song.
By the final note, she was breathing harder than the piece technically required. But the audience was on its feet, apparently under the impression that the chaos had been a deliberate artistic choice.
Backstage, Enzo looked physically relieved. "That," he said, "looked completely intentional. I'm taking full credit."
"You should be taking full blame," Fern said, though she was too pleased with herself to actually be angry. "But sure. Take the credit. I'll take the trophy."
