The Licorice Stick Did Sudoku

It was freezing yesterday, and I wasn't looking forward to catching a bus at 6:30 am, but a neighbor happened to pass by and offer me a ride. This was even luckier than I realized, because the buses were running very late, so other people told me they waited forever for a bus. I experienced this for myself in the evening, while waiting for the bus home... for an hour and a half!!! Had I known, I would have just walked - it's only an hour away!

Not surprisingly, I was late for the dress rehearsal for the Messiah, but so were a lot of others. I sat next to the Artist Formerly Known As Banjo Player, and we were both amused to see one of the licorice stick players doing sudoku whenever she didn't have to play. Now we are just volunteers doing this for the love of singing, but the orchestra was paid! Can you imagine doing sudoku during work? That would be like blogging during work or something. AFKABP said, "Now I have lost all respect for oboe players," and when I asked how much she had had for them before, she said, "Not much. I used to play oboe."

And why do professional sopranos use so much vibrato? Do other people actually like that? I sure don't. In my opinion, any of the sopranos in the choir would have done a better job than the paid soloist, although for a brief, lovely moment she knocked it off with the vibrato and she really did have a beautiful voice.

At 9:30 the orchestra, who are all union, had to have a vote about whether they were going to vote on working on overtime then or later, when they would be working for double overtime. Don't these guys have tough lives? They get paid a living wage to play music, and then when we ran late, they could get double overtime! We - the free choir who had to work at REAL jobs the next day - got jack for being there till almost ten. The orchestra couldn't decide if they should vote on taking a vote so they tabled the vote on voting, and AFKABP said, "It's like one of our faculty meetings... only we're not union."

The director decided to cut things short right before the orchestra would have gotten double overtime, so I was on the road about 10:00. (Of course, the way the roads were, I didn't get home until after 10:30.) Actually, we got through everything but the final Amen, so it was all good. It was so wonderful to hear that Baroque music all night long NOT in equal temperament, and then in the car I turned on the D O double G and Luda, with the bass-cranking button on, of course. Finally I was in my warm, soft bed, doing my own sudoku. I'll be interested to see if the licorice stick cracks out the sudoku during the actual performance tonight...

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