Thursday, August 13, 2009

Performance Anxiety Alleviated by Beach Time (Maybe)


I was planning on posting some pictures of the food today, but I was in such a rush to eat it that I forgot.
It turns out that we will be giving a little concert for each other tomorrow. I play in two groups, one which is playing a rather straightforward Marais piece (flute, violin, gamba, harpsichord), and one which is playing a lovely piece by Locatelli (two flutes, two harpsichords) that must have been written to torture the counting impaired. If anybody doesn't come in right, it is, as our coach Jacques Ogg described it, like trying to repair a broken sewer line in the dark. If he had hair, I think he'd be pulling it out about now. We have never made it through this piece without a train wreck. And I am not always the guilty party. The other harpsichordist is also having a tough time. If we play the third and fourth movements, we have a 50-50 chance of not falling on our faces. The above picture was taken in happier times, before the flutists realized what they were stuck with. I finally walked down to the beach this evening. It's a beautiful rocky area, I wouldn't really call it a beach in the "go swimming" sense of the word, because of all the rocks, but it's still a very nice place to go. There are about 300 steps down to the beach plus a hill at the bottom that's about a block or so more. It was almost 8:30 when we went down there, so my pictures are rather dark, but it's a nice place. There's some kind of a bunker/lookout/something or other that looks like it's been there a long time. It's been papered over with posters of naked people (many repetitions of a few posters) possibly because this is a clothing optional beach. Yeah, like anybody's going to take their overcoat off here.
Did I also mention that there are 300 steps and a hill coming back up?

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