Playing to heal

Young Chang

A boy who lives on the first floor of a quaint Costa Mesa apartment

complex knows that when visitors inquire about a piano-playing neighbor,

they’re asking about Judy Leighton -- the woman whose music floats off of

her second-floor balcony.

In what she calls her “corner for kids,” which is decorated with

stuffed Care Bears, Big Bird and a Winnie-the-Pooh lamp, Leighton teaches

children how to play the piano regardless of whether they can afford the

cost.

She’s taught for free, for very little pay, and often for no other

reason than to give children the joy she didn’t know early on.

“Red Sails in the Sunset” is still audible in her 56-year-old memory.

Her great-aunt played the tune when Leighton was just 6 years old. She

remembers wanting so badly to play, but the aunt didn’t know how to

teach.

“And my parents couldn’t afford lessons,” Leighton said.

Today she sits in her kids’ corner, where the breeze swoops in and

rustles her purple flowering plants, while she and Giovanni Vasquez play

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

She’ll play the left hand part and her 11-year-old student, one of

several she teaches, will play the right.

“I really like it because it brings me love,” Giovanni said, of

practicing the piano. “When I get sad, I play the piano and I feel really

good inside.”

Emotional and mental health are important to Leighton, who is also the

published author of “A Path to Light: How to Not Not Make Healthy

Choices.” The book describes therapeutic techniques discovered by

Leighton to release the pain of memories past.

She’d rather not get into what this specifically entailed -- there’s

no need, she says.

“People have told and told and told stories to let pain go but then it

comes back again,” Leighton said.

But she will share that in 1984, a very fast-moving arthritis crippled

her to the point that she couldn’t walk, drive, play the piano or even

write her name.

“I was deteriorating very rapidly, and they didn’t know if it was

fatal,” Leighton said. “Since I thought that I was facing death, I wanted

to create a method so I could die in peace.”

That’s when she came up with the stress-reduction methodology written

about in “Path to Light.”

And though playing the piano isn’t directly related to her healing

methods, Leighton says it’s a cure of its own.

She suffered reading comprehension problems until she reached her

mid-20s. Throughout college, she had to memorize facts and stories

because she couldn’t easily understand the words she read. Then she

learned to play the piano, at age 26.

“When you have emotional pain in your life, it’s hard to focus when

you’re reading something,” Leighton said. “Music helped me enormously, I

think, in developing my brain. Your brain does develop further when you

use both hands and fingers. I think it helped me so I could figure out a

method to heal myself.”

And to help her students, she’s loaned a couple electric pianos to two

of her nine biweekly visitors.

“It plays just like the sound of a regular piano,” Leighton said. “It

stands just like a regular upright piano.”

Tracy Mejia, 7, also took lessons from Leighton this week. The young

girl said her favorite songs are “Hush Little Baby” and “Nonsense Song.”

“When I grow up, I want to be a piano teacher,” she said. “Because I

like music.”

Leighton holds steadfast to her theory that music education for

children fosters everything from a cheerful attitude to improvement in

schoolwork.

“I was driven by the sound of beautiful music,” she said of when she

first played the piano. “It was a way for me to express deep feelings

because there’s a lot of emotion in music. And with my reading

comprehension problem, I didn’t know how to use words real well to

express feelings.”