![one night stand game true friends with six strings attached one night stand game true friends with six strings attached](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/51rlvARa1PL._SL1136_.jpg)
Though my big sister was now standing with the rest of the orchestra, proudly clutching the neck of her rented three- quarter- size violin, I paid no attention to her. He had narrow black eyes and a thin mustache perched over an unsmiling mouth that seemed cast in plaster into a rigid, straight line. His face was fierce, even more frightening than I had imagined. The scary man slowly lowered his arms and turned around. Their instruments remained motionless in the air, their bows still poised on the strings, their eyes unblinking as they looked fearfully toward the man. As they did, he stretched out his arms and held them wide. Then he made one last furious swing with his pointy stick and the orchestra- almost in unison, save a few stragglers- struck the last chord. The man’s arms waved faster and more wildly, as if he were straining to extract each note by brute force. They were playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” He was conducting the East Brunswick Beginner String Orchestra. In front of him sat several dozen kids- big kids, these were, at least nine or ten years old- each fumbling with a musical instrument and each looking up at him in abject horror. One hand had a death grip on a pointy stick that he waved frantically to and fro. He was gesticulating even more maniacally now, looking as if he might careen right off the raised wooden platform where he loomed, impossibly large and menacing. Onstage, the terrifying man still had his back turned to us.
![one night stand game true friends with six strings attached one night stand game true friends with six strings attached](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/download-8.png)
Next to me, my mother shot me a look that silently commanded: “Be still!” My feet didn’t quite touch the concrete floor beneath the fold- down seats. I shrank into my seat, squirming in my hand- me-down party dress and the ugly Mary Janes that pinched my toes. He looked like the villains I had seen in my big sisters’ comic books: any moment now he would burst out of his civilized shell, shredding the clothes that restrained him, and terrorize the high school auditorium. Shoulders hunched, he was flailing his arms wildly, straining the seams of his black suit jacket so ferociously that I feared it might rip right apart. The meanest man I ever met came into my life when I was five years old. Read an excerpt from the book, view a slideshow of Kupchynsky family photographs, and listen to music clips from the audio book soundtrack of Strings Attached.