12:45 a.m. - 2006-07-25
You Can't Say Summer Doldrums Without DRUMS
The worst part of summer is mercifully behind us. Of course I'm talking about doll sale weekend, when Kia and everyone at the children's museum have to work sixteen hours a day in a crowded and un-air-conditioned warehouse, selling irregular and overrun dolls and doll parts to doll aficianados to raise money to keep the museum going. The annual ordeal leaves Kia overworked and exhausted, yet she seems to handle it better than me. I think Kia's overworked periods bring me a combination of sympathetic fatigue and horrible guilt, because she's the one spending long hot days dealing with doll fanatics and I'm the one hanging around the house reading magazines.
But I haven't JUST been reading magazines. Last week (to name just one of SEVERAL things I've had going on, mind you) I was principal percussionist in orchestra, for the annual outdoor opera concert (and by the way, why does summer seem to be so packed full of these annual events? It's like every year is the same predictable deathmarch, lurching from the fourth of July to Concerts in Some Park to Barbeque Week to Gazebo Days to whatever the fuck. I mean, how about a little SPONTANEITY once in a while?). This mostly entailed dividing up the percussion parts and deciding what to leave out because they never hire enough of us to cover everything, although last year they only hired two of us and this time we had three, so it wasn't so bad. One of the pieces we did was Verdi's overture to I Vespri Siciliani. It didn't seem familiar until we read it at the first rehearsal, whereupon I realized I had played it before during my last year of high school at Interlochen. It was a pivotal experience for me, being the first time I had had a conductor get on my case really hard. Both this last time and the time in high school I played the snare drum part, which is very soft and exposed at the beginning, and difficult to play evenly and not too loud. It was difficult last week; in high school I was really struggling with it. In rehearsal, the (high school) conductor kept stopping the orchestra to berate me for this or that in his thick and indeterminate accent, one time launching into a tirade that went kind of like:"You play like...it ees ze, how you say, you have ze...vhat you say, ze HANGOVER, and you have ze SHAKES, and this ees vhat you are playing like," and so forth. Also, he had an obvious Napolean complex, being maybe three feet tall. And really ugly. Repellent in every way, really. Also, he was probably right about my playing the part not all that well. And, I'm pretty sure he ate live puppy dogs for dinner every night.
So, I don't really remember much else about my first time with I Vespri Siciliani. I don't remember the concert at all, or even how I reacted to the troll's tirades. It was probably a character-building experience, leaving me better equipped to deal with certain kinds of pressure. But last week, when all these memories came flooding back in the midst of a similar but less fraught situation almost twenty years later all I could think was, "Why the fuck did I keep doing this?"
Of course, the answer is "Why the fuck does anybody do anything?" which is a terrible answer, and in fact just another question, which just goes to prove that a little self-examination can be a vexing experience.
