Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Well yesterday's snow was pretty (still is, all over the tree in front of my house) but waaaaay slippery. Slipperiest suff I've tried to drive or walk in since ... well it's been a while. It was far more slippery than snow here usually is, and more slippery than the snow I've seen in NYC, Boston, and Toronto. I fell down on my sidewalk in the afternoon, then kept sliding away whenever I tried to scoop a shovelful later on. Somebody who didn't bother to look before pulling out of a side street in the afternoon, before it got really deep, put me into a spin in the middle of Frederick ave.

There I was, chugging along at about 15-20 MPH in "don't make any sudden moves" mode (IIRC the speed limit is 30 MPH there), and as I'm coming around a curve, this guy pulls out into my lane. He accelerated slowly because of the snow, and was close enough in front of me that I had to brake, steer, or both. I don't remember which I did first, but I wasn't given enough room to do it gently enough for how slippery the road was. I was gentle, but it didn't take much on that surface. I don't know whether the guy even looked in his rear view mirror to see what was happening to me. Thing is, there were three blocks of open road behind me, so it wasn't like he had to jump into the only break in a long line of cars or something.

I was dismayed at how poorly my car reacted to my attempts to counteract the spin. Dunno whether it's a flaw in this car, a sign of how slippery the road was, or maybe I'm still better at doing stuff like that in a rear-wheel-drive car despite having driving front-wheel-drive for the past 6+ years?? Anyhow, I felt that I should've been able to stop the spin before it got past sixty degrees, and was quite upset at doing 180. I've straigtened cars out when they were rotating faster than that in the past.

It wasn't all that deep here (the news said three inches at BWI) but it was slick and then some. Driving was bad enough to make me wonder whether the event Thrir Venstri Foetr had a gig at would be cancelled. It wasn't.

Apart from that spin (didn't hit anything, but I was still unhappy about it) and my car's deciding that an old kludge was no longer good enough (I had to push it to the side of the road and tinker with wires ... must remember to reconnect the second radiator fan before the weather warms up again), I made it home safely from a failed errand in the afternoon and started getting ready for the performance.

I made it to the gig and back safely, and was surprised at the degree of clue exhibited by other drivers on I695 and I97 -- they were often frustrating, especially when people doing fifteen MPH slower than I wanted to go (which is to say 35MPH slower than I'd normally drive) paced each other in adjoining lanes, but there was surprisingly little tailgating. *whew* I hope all my bandmates (and I'm including the dancers here) made it home safely as well. (The roads were much better on the way home. It had stopped snowing, and highways had been plowed/salted. Still kind of slick in places though.)

My toes got very, very soggy.

When I fell in the afternoon, I landed quite hard. I was worried about getting a bruise on my butt or injuring my SI and being uncomfortable the rest of the night, but I got lucky in that regard. Instead the problem was my right knee. Driving is upsetting that knee more and more. I'm scared that it'll get to the point where my mobility is reduced because of driving getting too difficult/painful. But I'm not going to think more about that right now because it's too uncomfortably scary for the moment.

The bandmate for whom this was her first gig with us managed to find things that fit in the assortment of garb other members of the group had kindly lent, and looked yummy in the borrowed garb as expected. She and her new husband, who haven't been around much lately, were rather important on melody at the gig. I took along extra microphones and stands and my four channel mixer, because I remembered that this event had a sound system but didn't put many mics on the stage. That turned out to be a good move. There were two mics on the stage, and five of us. Last year we just clustered people around the mics provided. This year each musician got at least one input. (I used separate inputs for my six-string and a recorder/drum mic. Another musician wound up playing my 12-string instead of me, so he was using an input for the guitar, plus a recorder/mandolin/tambourine mic.) We either used one more input than their board could've accommodated easily (they had a couple of wireless lapel mics and a wireless handheld, plus mics for the madrigal group), or we just barely would've fit into their board except for the fact that we'd already wired my mixer into it. The sound guys said that (after setting initial levels during what passed for a sound check (our fault for the sound check being disorganized, not theirs)) we needed almost no tweaking despite the instrument changes! This is a group that nearly always plays unamplified (unlike The Homespun Ceilidh Band, which plays amplified more than half the time).

This is an event which has historically included a certain amount of chaos and confusion for us (which, fortunately, doesn't come across that way for the audience). In the years we've been doing it, they've gotten better at making sure we have the info we need, but it seems like each year they add one more way to confuse things as well. So it's two steps forward and one step back, or two steps forward and shuffle back half a step. Unfortunately, I didn't prepare the person for whom this was her first gig -- I should've warned her in advance that it'd be like that. She got jitters. I think she said something about not having had stage fright before ... if I'm remembering what she said correctly, and this was her first case of stage fright, then I really screwed up as music director for that to happen when it did. :-( Like I only did half of my job.

FWIW, every note I heard from her sounded good.

We had a couple of miscues, but as a whole I think things went pretty well. Could be better, of course. Well, one run-through of the complete program with all the different acts present -- or maybe a representative from each act -- would make this event work more smoothly next time. I think the madrigal group and the cast get to work it out together, but I know we're not involved in any of their rehearsals and I got the impression that the same was true of the jugglers. We did get two copies of the script (one for the dancemaster and one for me), but there was a lot of stuff ad-libbed, or just never edited into the script, or vague in the script. I'm glad I had the script; it helped a lot, and things basically worked, but it could be done even better.

Also, since we didn't have a drummer, I drummed on a few pieces. And I screwed up the tempo on two of them. This is why I'm not the first-string drummer. Had a little problem with a dance where the madrigal group sang while we accompanied them ... the leader of the madrigal group tried to adjust the tempo (I had started too fast) but the beat was hard to catch from the singers (our dancemaster had asked me to make sure I provided a solid beat, so I was drumming), and I couldn't see her hand when she conducted. Fortunately one of her singers in the back row started waving his hand at me, relaying her direction, which was enough to put the band on the stage and the singers on the floor back in synch. The audience probably caught that glitch. (But as is the nature of live performance, most of them probably forgot about it soon after we fixed it ... at least I hope so.)

There was, as it worked out (due to timing, who was able to show up at our group's rehearsals when, etc.) some sight-reading involved. Fortunately I had two people up to that task (one of whom was having stage fright on all the stuff she already knew but calm for the sight reading ... go figure).

I was already getting tired and wanting a nap before driving out to Annapolis for the gig, but I caught my second wind at the site. When I came home, I shovelled the sidewalk, unloaded the car, and was about to put things away when I rather abruptly got the "lie down or fall down" message from my body and elected to land on a bed. I didn't fall asleep right away, but I certainly wasn't getting up for a while, either. When I did fall asleep, leg cramps and other pain woke me half an hour later, so I got up to take some magnesium and a painkiller, and went back to sleep for another two and a half hours. I've been up since, but hope to get a little more sleep Real Soon Now.