Category Archives: Diary

Kittens!

So Wednesday night at orchestra, we were working through the second movement of Mendelssohn’s first symphony, and the entire orchestra was having trouble (in different places ) with the sixteenth note legato passages. These things are evil, particularly for cellos (and clarinets, apparently, although for different reasons). Your fingers have to stretch in really bizarre patterns, and no matter how we try to work out alternate fingerings, the pattern remains bizarre (in different permutations, but bizarre nonetheless). Bizarre fingerings while attempting to sound light and smooth and soft and sort of like gentle wind on a sunny day is nigh-impossible. The third or fourth go-round of this passage left our stand-in conductor attempting to reach for encouraging words while still sounding disappointed. From the very back of the cello section came the very dry comment, barely audible, of, “Mendelssohn played the piano.”

It’s true. He was a pianist. And he was evidently thinking pianistically when he wrote these long sixteenth note passages and scattered them liberally through the Andante of his first symphony.

Wretched pianists. Check out the physics of four strings sometime, and understand why we can’t play stuff that’s a cinch on the piano, with its nice shiny black and white keys all in a line with only an inch shift forward or back to hit an accidental, in nasty key signatures with three flats.

Bitter. I know. But!

Today, it doesn’t matter any more. I take comfort knowing that this morning, our family grows.

Oh, come on. You didn’t honestly believe that after nursing kittens, especially the tiniest one who wasn’t gaining weight and worried us all for a while and required extra-special love and attention, I’d manage to get away kittenless?

I hardened my heart. I did. We argued for and against. My husband was no help at all. My parents’ acquisition of their new kitten didn’t help, either.

Nix on any more cats, indeed. You all saw this coming.

On Creating

So there�s gloating going on over at Ceridwen�s Cauldron, too. I really need to break this down, for my own sanity.

You have a vision. You design your vision on paper. You struggle with dropping far-fetched elements, or elements that would just be too difficult (as cool as they would be!). You research methods and materials, then purchase materials. You begin the process of bringing your vision into the tangible world. There are obstacles, challenges, mis-read directions, the discovery that the process you theorised would work in fact would defy physics. Methods are re-evaluated. Shortcuts are taken. Certain steps are lingered over. When a step is completed successfully, there is joy, pride, excitement. When the entire project is done, those emotions are directly proportional to the amount of time spent from conception to delivery, anguish felt during the process, challenges triumphantly defied. There�s a physical proof of your talent in bringing vision to reality.

Hallowe�en costumes aren�t about impressing people (okay, I grant that there�s a bit of thrill when people behold your work), they�re about having fun during the creation process; and since both Ceri and I are costume addicts, creating a new costume calls for more time and energy than the average person usually thinks is sane. Ceri and I aren�t building things up by gloating; we�re simply celebrating a couple of months of work, of fun, and now we�re anticipating even more fun when we get to share all that work with others and generally have fun at a party with friends.

Kind of like planning a wedding, now that I think about it. Except without the irritations of caterers and finalising food.

Champagne � okay, sparkling cider � should definitely be involved at this party, I think. It’s a celebration, after all.

Miles To Go Before I Sleep

Note to self: if you decide to have two layers in a costume, you have to hem two layers.

Sigh.

Three days ’til the party. I’m 98% done. Just have that wretched second hem to do. Thank the gods that Ceri came over yesterday and helped by pinning the first hem in place for me. I have to practice that Handel today (yes, I know, I had all week to do it, and predictably, I did not), and I’d like to get the basic four-seams-and-I’m-done completed on my husband’s vest, too.

I went back to the sinus medication this morning. The light on-pseudoephedrine feeling is preferable to the heavy, I-can’t-even-think-let-alone-function feeling of having my sinus cavities clogged up.

Onward, ever onward…

83296210

Yawn. I need a weekend after my weekend. Not that I was rushed; I just went from appointment to appointment to appointment from Friday night all the way to this morning.

I saw my osteopath for the first time in a couple of months today. When I emerged from my warm flat to walk over to the sports clinic, the world was quite dark, and a few cars even had dustings of snow caught in the crevices between windows and frames (that dreaded S-word!). When I left again over an hour later, I could just see a line of pink through the clouds to the south-east, but wow, was I relaxed. We truly don’t understand how our bio-mechanic operating system gets off-kilter and requires more energy to run efficiently until we’ve been tuned up.

I spent Sunday in Kingston at the local COGECO cable TV station, in production meetings and rehearsals for the live True Story of Dracula broadcast the Midnight Players are doing on October 31st. I love the slogan our producer came up with: Radio As You’ve Never Seen It Before! The whole premise of the show is that we’re doing a 1930s broadcast in front of a studio audience. If you’ve ever seen the film Radioland Murders, then you know exactly what we’re trying to reproduce. Radio features used to be performed live in front of an audience: performance theatre with scripts, nominal costuming and sets. For The True Story of Dracula we’re doing the same sort of thing. I’ve done radio shows in studios, radio shows at a mike for recordings, and radio shows with no broadcast at all in front of an audience, but working with cameras and a standing mike is new for me. Watching the rehearsal rushes yesterday, I can see that there’s a whole different dynamic required; a TV camera asks that the actor make eye contact, or at least not have their eyes glued to a script, for visual interest’s sake. This means, of course, that the script has to be pretty much memorised, so you can interact. Which leads me to wonder why we’re even using scripts at all, since if you’re holding a piece of paper with words on it, even if you know those words backwards and forwards, your eyes will instinctively glance downwards and try to capture the phrase, get tangled up in all the lines, and as a result you stumble. Mankind doesn’t trust itself very much; we tend to second-guess ourselves and create more problems than we’d have had if we’d stuck with our first instincts.

It’s going to be a blast, I know. While I’ve worked with cameras before, on films and interviews and such, I’ve never been involved with live broadcasts. I’ve done eighteen years of live theatre, though, so to see the two blended will be fascinating. JDH took some digital photos of the first rehearsal, so when we get those up I’ll link them so you can get an idea of what was happening (now that I’ve figured out my Sympatico storage space!). You’ll just have to imagine the set and costumes that will be there on the 31st. (JDH, by the way, filmed a fantastic mocumentary section on the life and times of our ol’ pal Vlad, looking slightly scruffy and professor-like as he told creepy stories in the basement of a chilly old deserted school. Complete with rather large millipedes and slamming doors, none of which were faked.)

And before the 31st, I have that Hallowe’en party that I need to finish my costume for. Ceri is coming over on Tuesday to help me hem metres and metres of fabric (bless her), and I have an hour of quick stitching for my husband’s costume (which he developed all on his own, and he’s doing the bulk of the work; I swore I’d not do anyone else’s costume again for years, but an hour of donated time on my part is fair, I think); then — ’tis done! I’m going to get even more wear out of it than I expected — I have another party to attend at the beginning of November, which is just fine with me: the more mileage, the better!

Just Ten More

I promised myself I would work for two hours this morning. Ideally, four would have been nice, but I told myself after the first quarter-hour that two would be the limit. You see…

My back is hurting again. A lot of this has to do with computer work, and two seven-hour drives in the past weekend; I haven’t been back to my osteopath in two months due to this not-working thing (and besides, I felt so much better… so like any other human being I stopped the (admittedly expensive) treatment.) My eyes hurt, and my back hurts, and I have the attention span of a flea. I know I have to get a couple of hours of cello work in this afternoon as well, since we’re doing sectional rehearsals tonight and I’m going to be horribly embarrassed, as I always am, since there are some quite nasty passages that come out of nowhere in the Mendelssohn, and the Handel is a nightmare. I’m seriously considering skipping it, except that we only have seven rehearsals before our December memorial concert. Deliberately missing a rehearsal would be, well, irresponsible. Even though my eyes and my back hurt, and rehearsal will only make them worse.

Ten more minutes to go. Just ten more minutes. Then I’ll stop.

I just feel all grumbly. I want to curl up with a book and a cat, and some Bach. I want to have a heating pad on my back, and a teapot beside me. I want the world to go away.

Visual Pun Alert

Weather
————
Me

Okay, it’s lame. I really am feeling under the weather, though. Yesterday I didn’t pay much attention to my body, mostly because my husband stumbled in around noon with a migraine and went to bed with a cup of tea. I was more concerned about him. By the evening, though, I had horrible stomach pain, and thank all the gods that my co-professor agreed to take our Monday night class, because I, too, began developing a migraine. By the time I arrived in the classroom all I could think about were the evil twin stabs of pain in abdomen and eyes. I went home to a bath and bed and was asleep by eight. Bless you, Scarlet. You are a goddess.

I’m still unhappy this morning, but at least the headache is gone. Bed is my friend. So is laptop. Good bed. Good laptop.

I finally developed some film that had been sitting in our camera for an unknown amount of time, and discovered about fourteen photos from last Hallowe’en. If it had been Hallowe’en costumes it would have been more interesting, but it’s all store decor: bales of hay, gourds, corn stalks and so forth. They’re terrific, but not what I was expecting. I had no idea what I was expecting, but hay was definitely not it. Ironically, the remaining four or five photos from the roll are of this year’s Hallowe’en costume, that precious record I absolutely had to have should the next step fail, in order to prove to future generations that yes, it was lovely before I tempted fate by taking it apart again.

The very last photo is of me, playing my cello. As far as I know, a single photo exists of me playing my cello, taken at my only public recital at McGill about five years ago. There are three other cellists with me, playing an ensemble piece as the finale. Yes, there have been orchestra photos taken from our last two concerts in which my head is visible, but you can’t see me playing the instrument. There does exist a sketch, done by my ex-fiance as I played Handel for hours in an empty church with a flutist, and I love it, but it isn’t a full-length sketch; just the upper third. I’ve always wanted to see what I really look like with my cello, from the floor all the way up. This photograph does just that, and I love it too. I’m going to slip it behind all my music on my music stand so I can peek at it when I get discouraged.

The fact that it’s taken a year to finish a twenty-four exposure roll says to me that we’ve moved beyond the need to capture certain visual moments on film. We knew we were losing interest in photographing things when we realised that we were taking our camera on all our trips, but leaving it in the suitcase when we went out. Taking it along simply didn’t occur to us. Then, of course, the battery died, and it’s taken about six months to replace it – more proof we don’t think of the camera that often. I believe that we’ve reached a point where if we see something beautiful, we’ll pause to appreciate it, and then carry the memory of it in our hearts. Photos are a pale, pale reproduction of something that had colour and life, and I’ve been so disappointed by pictures I’ve taken that don’t look at all like the beauty I beheld with my own eyes. In addition to the disappointment, I find that if I carry a camera around, I look at my environment in a very different fashion. With a camera in your hands, you instinctively look for pictures and evaluate what you see in terms of a snap, and end up not enjoying where you are or what you’re doing as much as you could without it. Now, if you’re a photojournalist, that’s fine, or if you go somewhere with the express intention to photograph, then sure, that’s different too. I also understand the anonymity granted by a camera, as something to occupy your mind and hands.

However, for me, cameras have a time and a place. As a record of some sort, of what people were in attendance at an event, or what people were wearing (I’m a costume junkie, remember?), or the layout of a objects or a building… all those I can understand. Pictures jog the memory. There are excellent photographers, too, who have mastered the art of using eyes and camera simultaneously, who I’m sure don’t feel any loss to the experience for seeing it through a lens. I, on the other hand, can’t do it. I also understand photography as an artistic act. The camera can be used with the intent of creating art, being a tool like a pencil or a paintbrush. Again, though, it’s not for me, although I dearly love looking at the artistic photography produced by friends like Rob and Hobbes.

For me, a camera gets in the way of the experience. Glass and metal and light-sensitive film serving as the communication device between my heart and life? I’ll pass.

Good Days

I had a fantastic day yesterday. That’s about it. Four hours of playing in the store, dinner with Ceri, a smash-bang-wow workshop, a request for a private workshop for a group on the South Shore, then drinks with friends.

On the way to the pub we stopped in at Renaud Bray and I picked up those inks, because I was paid for my full-time work last week and for last night’s workshop (private instruction is so much more lucrative than retail!) and I thought that I deserved a little treat for surviving the past two lean weeks. I now have those darling little oval pots of cuivre, marron, and spring green. Yay! We got home last night and the first thing I did was get out my dip pen, sit on the floor and make lines all over a sheet of blank parchment paper to see what it looked like. I’ll be paying Hydro off in full later today with a chunk of my earnings, but before that, the inks were a lovely little gift to myself. (Note to self: ink (both black and colour) for the printer would probably help too.)

Over dinner last night Ceri gave me her latest pages of creative effort, and for the first time since we began doing this exchange of writing in July, I had nothing to give her. I felt guilty when I left the flat yesterday morning, but then I told myself that I really didn’t have to feel that way since I had given her seventy-eight (!) pages of the Great Canadian Novel over the past three months. I did try to write earlier this week, honestly I did; but I opened the laptop, made a couple of corrections as I re-read the eleven pages of the latest section, and then stared at the screen for about twenty minutes. I’m stuck. Normally when I’m stuck, I jump to the next scene and then go back and fill in the necessary space with an event of some sort, but the next scene I had planned was Christmas shopping, and the characters were still only in mid-November with no way to get to early December. So when I shared that frustration with Ceri yesterday, she said, without missing a beat, “Make it snow,” which was absolutely brilliant and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it. Another of Ceri’s super-powers, by the way, is being a Muse for people. She gives them great ideas. She occasionally laments that alas, she doesn’t inspire herself in the same fashion, so I can only hope that our writing arrangement covers at least the deadline sort of inspiration that writers need. I did give her a nifty idea for her husband’s Hallowe’en costume, but I doubt it even comes close to repaying the Muse-debt that society has incurred to her.

I’m terribly looking forward to driving up to see my parents next weekend; I haven’t seen them since July, and we haven’t made the drive to Oakville in this new car yet. After its spectacular performance through New York and Pennsylvania, this five-hour spin should be a dream! Seven days to go!