Days 9 & 10: Cincinnati

After over a week’s worth of hotels, planes, trains, venues, and assorted electronics operating flawlessly, it’s time for a little chaos theory. The flight from California to Ohio went well, and following it immediately with 4 hours of auditions at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, while not a great idea, actually worked fairly well. But by later in the evening, the cosmos started to right itself.

Whine Whine Whine

First, the mouse and touchpad on my laptop went berserk. Floating around on the screen at will, not responding to me pounding the touchpad, throwing the mouse on the floor, or cursing at it.

Next, I dutifully signed into the united.com website to print our boarding passes for Friday’s flight to Chicago. Blocked from online check-in. Not a good sign. Undoubtedly overbooked. A similar thing happened to us last year on this pre-Thanksgiving weekend. The drive to Chicago is only about 5 hours….

The irritations continued this morning. My travel bottle of hair gel exploded on my head, and I am now wearing a hair helmet. My wallet spilled all of its change on the floor of the CCM Café. We set up all of our equipment in the wrong studio this morning. When we relocated (to the very useful black box theatre), we used the wrong extension cord and managed to throw the light board into totally disarray. 10 minutes of darkness ensued.

But we got back on schedule, I got some paperwork and phone calls taken care of during the lunch break, and there was some lovely singing to cheer me up. (Not to mention Thomas, who, when I get cranky, gets correspondingly perky!)

There are a few blogs that I try to visit whenever I can, and one of them is oboeinsight. This recent post reminded me of all of those nights where my life as a working musician got in the way of my attendance at important events in my kids’ lives. I’m missing my daughter’s concert at UVA this evening. (I'm a college a college a cappella junkie.) And although she’s twenty years old and probably barely notices that I’m not there, I’d so much rather be there than working my way to O’Hare.

Tomorrow’s Another Day

A quick look at blog stats shows a dramatic increase of readership during the audition tour.
If you surfed here today in search of something of substance, I apologize. I’ll do better tomorrow!