Daily Archives: June 27, 2002

Beauty

For some reason, I feel six feet tall today, willowy and all leg. My cello feels tiny. I hefted it through metro turnstiles and (worse) the outside doors to the stations themselves, where the vacuum created by the trains sucks them shut on you, forcing you to struggle to keep them open. Hard at the best of times; nigh impossible when you’re carrying sixteen hundred dollars that could all too quickly become firewood. Today it was easy, though.

I am, however, stuck humming I’m Getting Married In The Morning from My Fair Lady, since I played the Lerner & Loewe medley to bits this morning. I simply cannot get the Camelot section – Lusty Month of May is a cinch, but the actual Camelot theme – it’s a write-off. Fortunately I surge back supremely well with The Night They Invented Champage, thanks to MLG who burst into song in HMV last week when I asked him what show it was from. (You had to be there. No, really.)

There’s hope for me yet.

Play Dreams

It’s happened. I’ve had a play dream about orchestra.

Play dreams, for those who have never been involved in theatre, involve a variety of disasters revolving around the production which is rapidly approaching. They trick you by showing up even when you are fully confident in your abilities and the show. By dragging themselves out of your subconscious, they make you second-guess yourself, create your own doubt, and generally weaken that supreme confidence you worked so hard to construct inthe first place. Essentially, play dreams are paradox-creators. They’re self-fullfilling prophecies of the worst kind.

This one wasn’t completely awful, though, since for some reason Ceri was sitting next to me. No clue what she was doing in the cello section – without an instrument, no less, although she had a music stand (which I didn’t) and a good chair (which I was also missing). No, she didn’t have a sax.

I was sitting in the first chair (naturally – play dreams go right for the way to make you panic the most) and the whole thing began without me having my music out and ready, because the damn music stand kept swinging back and forth and wouldn’t support my music properly (this, at least, is based in fact), nor was there a chair available that was the right height. I didn’t even have my cello out of the case before Andras began conducting.

And, to make matters worse, he began with the Bizet.

I should have sat back and let them go. After all, it’s the first movement of the Bizet I detest.

I woke up with that annoying racing heart feeling that’s always worse in the middle of the night. My sense of time was so messed up that I thought it wasmorning, but it was only an hour after I’d fallen asleep. So I slept again to have more vaguely bad musical dreams until I woke up this morning and realised that the concert is not in fact a week away. It’s on Monday.

I’ve been meaning to practice for the past three days, and something always comes up – my husband doesn’t do something out of the house like he said he was going to, I fell asleep on the floor because my back hurt, I lost track of time, etc etc etc. I have a dress rehearsal tonight. I get half an hour this morning, then Saturday, then Sunday, then that’s it. My parental units are in town for the concert and I’m spending the day with them on Monday.

Actually, that’s lots more time than I thought I’d have. For some reason I thought I’d have to cram in a half-hour on each weekend day and that would be it. I can play a lot more than that. Good.

Enough delaying. I’m going to go practice now.

(Including today: two more days. And today isn’t the regular eleven-hour shift from hell since I must leave early for this dress rehearsal.)