Light Bright Magic

The magical properties I ascribe to my office mate Light Bright never cease, apparently, judging by the question I asked her yesterday. We had a very busy day running around, taking candidates here and food for luncheons there, then around noon we had a breather and sat talking to each other. One of the luncheons finished up at one, and Light Bright was going to go clean up afterwards and see if there was any leftover pizza. I answered a couple of emails and then asked Light Bright if she had gone to clean up the pizza, and she laughed. “I’ve been sitting here the whole time!” she said. “How could I have gone to clean up the pizza?” I plead natural blonde. But who knows, maybe she can be in two places at once. Maybe she is just that good.

A big shout out to the French readership I seem to have gained this week. Merci!

Famous Hat

Blonde Moments at Early Music Camp

Early Music Camp is using up all my brain cells, because I have had so many blonde moments in the last few days! I am starting to turn into my office mate Light Bright or something:

A teacher gave us an article to read on 16th century performance, and I said I was missing some pages. It might have helped if I had looked to see that there was writing on the back of the pages...

Another singer asked what the starting note was (meaning could she please have a pitch) and I said, "It's an E." Which, if we had perfect pitch, might have been helpful... as if she couldn't see it was an E.

I know there have been others, but the best one yet was when Banjo Player's husband said the turkey brat he had wasn't very good, and I said, "I didn't know you were a vegetarian." DUH.

Famous Hat

The All-Purpose Tropical Song

Continuing the "I'm So Blonde" theme, when I first got into salsa music, I was amazed to hear how often they used the bassoon. When I told the OTHER choir director about this, he was skeptical so I fetched a CD and played "La Mitad" by Willie Rosario, a song prominently featuring the croaking of a low reed instrument. The choir director listened intently to it and said, "That's a bass saxophone!" Like I would know the difference?? After that he would always joke about the salsa bassoon, like when we were doing a Bach cantata at the Lutheran church and he was assembling an orchestra, I said, "What, no bassoon?" since there seemed to be every other instrument known to mankind, and he said, "It's not salsa, you know." The moral of the story: sometimes it's a good idea to hold off on that plan to sell everything, quit your job, and become a professional salsa bassoon player.

Interestingly, A-Joz and I have very similar "career-for-a-day" fantasies: we both would love to be nightclub singers and/or jazz musicians. If anyone would like to indulge us in this fantasy, we'd be happy to do it on a Tuesday night to minimize damage to your business and/or musical reputation. How about it, nightclub owners and jazz bands?

The episode with the "salsa bassoon" inspired me to write an all-purpose tropical song for my imaginary band. This band would, of course, either have to be ENORMOUS or have members with extraordinary talent and lots of instruments lying around, because in order to play any type of tropical music called for, I would need the following: a slack-key guitar player and ukulele player for Hawaiian music, all sorts of percussion and brass for salsa (not to mention a keyboard player!), steel drums for calypso, etc. You get the picture: this band would have about twenty-three members. On the plus side, we could play the Tropical Song in any tropical style, including Dance Hall. (But not reggaeton, please!)

And, of course, I had to include a stanza about my tropical cred and why I am the best person to write a tropical song, considering that I have spent my entire life in temperate zones. So here, without further ado, is the All-Purpose Tropical Song:

Tropical song, tropical song,
I want to sing it all night long,
Tropical song!

I love that scorching tropical heat (tropical song!)
I love that sensuous tropical beat (tropical song!)
I want to dance under a tropical moon (tropical song!)
I want to hear you play salsa bassoon (tropical song!)

Tropical chorus here

The blood of the islands flows through me (tropical song!)
England and Ireland surrounded by sea (tropical song!)
It was cold when I was born (tropical song!)
But my sign is tropical - Capricorn! (tropical song!)

Tropical chorus here

Twenty-three members in my band (tropical song!)
Tropicalest group in all the land (tropical song!)
So many members when we play (tropical song!)
We each get fifty cents in pay (tropical song!)

Tropical bridge here, followed by tropical chorus and tropical finale

Note: Nightclub owners, A-Joz and I will be available to perform this song most Tuesdays in May.

Famous Hat

Stumbling Blondely Through Life

First, some kvetching: so last night Rich, Anna Banana II, and I went to the final concert of KlezKamp, but oddly enough it was not a klezmer concert. Instead, a couple of people played cocktail lounge music on the piano, and then they had a Q&A session about what makes music "Jewish." I don't know what makes it Jewish, but I know what makes it klezmer, and this wasn't it. The pianists did not agree about what made music Jewish, in fact they seemed to purposely disagree just to make things interesting. Remembering the proverb "Two Jews, three opinions," I figured that this could go on all night, so we left.

Since Hardingfele was fascinated by my family discussion yesterday, and she is my most faithful reader, I am expounding some more on my background. There is some sort of blonde gene in our family that KO's all the darker genes. It comes from my father's side; his mother had dark hair (but pale skin and blue eyes) yet he is blond like his father. My mother has dark hair and eyes and she tans so well that in the summer she looks like a Native American, and yet my brother and I are pale with blond hair and greenish-bluish-grayish eyes. My sister-in-law has brown hair and eyes, and yet my nephews are blond, and one is very pale like our side of the family. According to the statistics of genetics, this is not impossible, just unlikely, but obviously the reality of genetics isn't the same as the expected probability of a given trait appearing, and this must be one mean blonde gene.

How blonde am I? I have previously related the story of hearing someone's voice coming out of the speakers and not realizing it was mine, but it bears repeating. It was at a bluegrass jam, and I made the mistake of suggesting a song ("Long Journey Home"), which I hadn't realized meant, in bluegrass etiquette, that I should then lead the singing. So as I was singing, "Nothin' in my pocket but a two-dollar bill, Lord, a two-dollar bill," I could hear a woman behind me with a lovely voice, and I let up a little to let her take it, but whenever I backed off, so did she! So then I'd take it up again, and so would she! FINALLY it dawned on me that I was hearing myself. When I told some band members about this, they said it was like not recognizing yourself in a mirror, and I said, "Yeah, there was the time I wondered why the woman in the next booth was staring at me... until I realized it was a mirror." The fiddler laughed so hard I thought she might asphyxiate.

However, the ultimate blonde moment in my life may have been the secret message in the driveway. I live in a condo complex, and one night while walking home from my second job I noticed someone had painted "M075" in the middle of the driveway. Since it was clearly a professional job, I knew it must have some purpose, but I could not deduce what it might be. Then the moth planes began flying around, spraying the anti-gypsy moth bacteria all over the neighborhood, and I wondered if M075 were a signal to them. When I mentioned it to T, she asked me to show her the mysterious label, and when I pointed it out to her, she said, "You mean where it says SLOW?" Yeah, OK, maybe that's what it says in the OTHER direction...

Famous Hat