By Jeremy Thomas
Laila Henderson got up with a lot on her mind on a warm April morning in 2024. She went through her daily routine of brushing her teeth and putting on contacts in a little more of a rush than her normal slow-going self would have. It was the next big adventure in her world of notes and tunes: piano guild auditions.
Traffic was bad, and the 17-year-old was on a tight schedule. When she got to the small house sitting over the reservoir, she did a practice run on the piano, playing the third movement of a Haydn sonata and Claude Debussy’s “Arabesque,” but as soon as it was time to be recorded, her nerves started to run hot. She began to mess up on parts that she was normally proficient at playing. It took multiple tries until she finally got it right.
Yet as soon as she finished, time was up, and in more of a rush than she already was, she hurried out—just in time to see another student already at the door. Then it was time for the hardest part of the process: the wait.
Since second grade, piano has been a big part of Henderson’s childhood. A year after she started playing, she began to play Christmas recitals in the Flowood area. During her 9th-grade year, she joined the Brandon High School show choir and continued until 10th grade. “Originally, I wanted to join band, but I thought I couldn’t because I didn’t play in middle school,” Henderson says.
Despite this early anxiety, her dreams of joining the band came true, as she recently began playing the saxophone for the BHS band. A recommendation from her show-choir teacher allowed her to join the high-school band despite not playing in middle school, yet even with success came challenges. When taking classes to learn the saxophone, Henderson took the initiative to start classes and practice songs, while her teacher went with a more sideline approach. “I basically taught myself, ” the Mississippi native says. This lasted for the entire summer, but it paid off since she was eventually admitted to the band.
Academically, Henderson has focused on her dream of becoming a chemical engineer and joined her school’s science olympiad team. With band taking up most of her time, she is not as prolific as she wants to be on the team. Henderson wants to take a step back from band and re-adjust her schedule to also give time to other important things like studying and getting a stable job. A returning Youth Media Project student-mentor after first joining the program in 2023, Henderson came to YMP both years to express herself with creative nonfiction writing, make connections and have a summer job in order to buy a car.
As time goes on, Henderson wants to learn to play even more instruments, but for now she’ll have to content herself with achieving her first milestone: getting into piano guild, even after the rush.
