MY VIEW
Impressions of the week
RACHEL PEARSON

This week, there was a fire alarm in Schapiro, the building where I work monitoring piano practice rooms. I walked out of my little box-office when the alarm went off. Nobody seemed panicked. I walked down the long concrete hall where the practice rooms are. Some of the musicians had gone, but two pianists and one stalwart clarinet player had decided that it would be best to play on.

When I opened the door to the practice rooms, each musician in turn looked at me and said, "Oh, is that a fire alarm?" as if they had never heard one before, as if the deafening siren and flashing lights could be anything else.

"Yes," I said. "Maybe we should evacuate."

In the end, they all evacuated, but the building failed to burn down. The firetruck that lives across the street from my apartment came, and so did a bucket-truck from Harlem with a huge extendable ladder, and a rush of firemen piled into the building while students were still streaming out, clutching their sheet music to their chests.

I took up a perch across the street and watched, hoping to see flames shoot out a top window like you see in movies about New York. But after about 20 minutes, the firemen left, and we all went back into the building and began practicing the piano again.

T h e i n s a n e jazz musician N i c k w o r k s for has gone to Florida to have keyhole surgery on his back. On the day he went, he had Nick wash out two Starbucks coffee grinders he uses to grind up pills - wait -- this needs explanation: The musician is in chronic pain and is addicted to the pills he takes. He grinds the pills up and snorts them because, he says, he has trouble swallowing. Anyway, he had Nick wash out the grinders and put some actual coffee in them so there'd be no trouble with airport security. It's not clear why he packed them both -- I guess in case one broke.

While Nick was cleaning the pillgrinder, another assistant showed up after an hour-long commute from Brooklyn and went straight to the bathroom. The jazz musician couldn't believe he'd gone straight to the bathroom, so he stood outside the door and started cursing at him.

"Not even that worthless Noel goes to the bathroom right when he gets here!" the musician yelled.

And the Pomeranians went crazy, and Nick went on washing, and right then a Guatemalan boy showed up to deliver a case of clove cigarettes. What that boy thought was going on, we will never know.

Before he left, the musician gave Nick a handful of prescription amphetamines to take home, as a gift. Nick said, "Uh, I don't think I really need these."

The musician replied, "No, you have to take them. They're great!" There wasn't a lot Nick could do, so he brought them home. And now the musician is in Florida, and the pills, which are pink, are sitting on top of my CD case, getting dusty.

The only other news is that I have a cold and that Nick keeps calling me the Texan Nose Bomb. When I call home, my mother asks if I'm sick, and my dad asks what the heck I did last night to end up sounding like this.

Rachel Pearson, a graduate student in the master of fine arts program at Columbia University in New York City, is a graduate of Port Aransas High School and The University of Texas at Austin. She may be reached via e-mail at Ra-