beautiful, funny, sad & true

This morning, I dropped my cello off to get the last of its big repairs done (yay!), and I stopped at Tiny’s coffee shop on the way home to. . .uh. . .get some coffee. After I made my order, the barista guy asked, “How’s your weekend going so far?”

“Great,” I replied. “I just dropped my cello off. It’s getting fixed.”

He stared at me, dumbfounded, with a horrified look on his face.

“What?” I asked, smiling.

“You CHOPPED your TOE OFF? Jesus! Are you okay?”

String arrangement – written

“Once” – seen. It was very good, very touching, very ‘real’, and the music is great.

The gig with Steph was really fun. It was at a middle school, to celebrate their last day before summer. We played two half-hour sets, took a short break, then played a third set. It was very unlike most of the other shows we’ve played, for lots of reasons. It was in a gymnasium, we had a whole corner of it to ourselves, so we (did I say ‘we’? Cause I meant ‘I’. ha ha) had plenty of room to run around. Another fun thing about it was that playing in a gym is very different from playing in a jazz club, and you get to play louder and act weirder. DrummerCharlie was having a blast getting to play in a way that he rarely gets a chance to, and I walked all over the ‘stage’ (really it was a corner blocked off by wrestling mats) like one of the Rolling Stones or something. BassPlayerKeith played with us for the first time. You may know him from being in Dirty Martini at the same time I was. It was really great to see him and play with him again; he’s just an all-around great guy. The kids were amazing. I think the second set of the three was the most fun. We signed T-shirts and yearbooks and somewhat surprisingly, even gave a few hugs. There was a group of boys who asked their teacher if they could dance. She said, “Of COURSE you can, that’d be great.” They replied, “No no, we want to dance with HER.” Meaning Steph. It was hilarious. We left the gig completely exhausted, with ringing ears from all the screams and cheers.

After that, I drove home to unload my instruments, then raced back downtown to the DMV to get new license plates. After having the car for six months, everything is finally legal and accounted for. Emissions test passed, registration in my name, Oregon license plates. Relief.

Crystin’s song – e-mailed. Now I’m just waiting for the verdict on the mix to see what she and the filmmaker think of the new-and-improved version.

This morning I’m going to take my cello in for Part Two of the repairs that it needs. It’s going to get the neck wedged up a little bit, because for some reason it’s not at the standard cello neck height. At the same time, it’ll get a new bridge, which is the little wooden tower-shaped thingy that the strings rest on. I’m also going to get a ‘wolf’ eliminator installed (it’s too complicated to explain what that is), and last but not least, I’m getting a new set of strings, because it’s time for that too. All these repairs are going to make my cello easier to play and stay in tune, make the sound ‘ring out’ better, but most of all it will make me a much better cellist. I’m going to have to un-learn a lot of weird habits that I’ve acquired, because of playing such a non-standard instrument for so long, but I’m very ready for that. I guess If I wasn’t, none of this would matter. I’ve improved a lot as a player, and I keep finding myself limited by my instrument, which is unacceptable. So off it goes to the shop, to get what it needs.

It’s time to go do that. I need to get off the computer, get into the shower, and start the day. And of course, some coffee would be good too; hmmm.

At work today, I came across a woman whose first name was Rosetta. I said to the lady who sits across from me, “This lady’s first name is Rosetta. Wouldn’t it be funny if her last name was Stone?”

“…?”

“You know, like the Rosetta Stone.”

“…?”

“It’s that stone with all the writing on it that shows how to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs into ancient Greek or whatever.”

“Oh. I’ve never heard of that.”

“You’d know it if you saw it. Here.” I sent her an e-mail with some pics from a quick Google search. “Look familiar?”

“No.”

“Uhh, okay.”

* * * * * * * *

[edit:] After reading this blog entry, Crystin reminded me of a conversation I had at a different job, a bunch of years ago:

Me, to Person 1:

“Ohmygosh, I went to the Chinese Garden for the first time today. It was amazing. Have you been there?”
“No. What is it?”
“Uhhhh. . .it’s a garden, built in the classical Chinese style. With the stone walls and the teahouse and the pond and all that. Beautiful.”
“Oh. Well, my kids did this funny thing today–”

Me, to person 2:

“Hey, I went to the Chinese Garden today.”
“What’s that?”
“You know, downtown. It’s been in the paper for months. . .? Just opened up. . .? Anyway, it’s awesome; I recommend it.”
“Hunh. I never heard of that.”
“Oh, okay.”

Me, to person 3:

“Hey, I went to the Chinese Garden today.”
“Oh, I don’t like sushi.”
“No, it’s not a restaurant, it’s a garden. THE Chinese Garden. Downtown.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“Well, it’s kinda new. Anyway, it’s a classical-style Chinese garden, built in Suzhou then taken apart by hand and shipped over here and put back together. Really beautiful and amazing.”
“I never heard of that.”

Me, to person 4 :

“Sure is busy today, huh?”

For the last couple of years that I lived in Yakima, mountain biking became my Thing. Yakima itself may be a dump, but it’s close to lots of beautiful mountainsandtrailsandskiingandhikingandbikingplaces. So there you go.

In order to get my strength and stamina up for our weekend jaunts to the mountains, I started riding my bike to my job at LocalComputerStore, which was about four miles each way. My favorite way to ride home was the dirt road along the railroad tracks that went through the older, historic parts of town.

Oh yeah. In order for this story to be funny, you need to know that back then I used to have my hair pretty long, in a mullet. Yes, a mullet. I usually kept it in a ponytail, though. That’s gotta count for something, right?

So picture this. I was riding along the tracks, with my ponytail and my helmet and my T-shirt and my long shorts. These two guys in a battered white Ford pickup came up behind me and honked, and PassengerSideGuy rolled the window down to yell, “Hey, nice tight ass!”

As they slowed down and pulled up alongside me, I looked over and laughed, which is when PassengerSide saw my five o’ clock shadow and glasses. He turned to DriverGuy and said, “Oh, dude. . .it’s a GUY. GO GO GO GO!” and he did that rolling motion with his index finger as he said “go go go” that made me laugh so hard I just about fell off my bike.

I was also glad, in that moment, that I wasn’t a girl riding by herself out in the middle of nowhere, because things would have likely been very different. Then again, if I was a girl who looked like I did at the time, I would have been a very scary-looking girl indeed. Hairiest legs in the world, for one thing. Scraggliest hair and biggest glasses, for another.

Sorry I’ve been so absent from blogging this week. I’ve had rehearsals almost every night, and I had a gig somewhere in there too. I should have a little more time this weekend for writing about more ‘real’ stuff than this. But in the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this story.

If you’ve ever been to Yakima, Washington, you may or may not know about Ron’s Drive-In at 16th and. . .uhh. . .Lincoln.

My family moved to Yakima in 1971 from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Suffice it to say that I still wonder why we ever moved. If I’d had any say, I would have happily chosen to stay in Cambridge, rather than a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, but whatever. It’s all water under the proverbial bridge, and I have a really good life now, in Portland, so it all works out.

I know, I know. All my Yakima stories start that way. And this post started out as a witty, insightful memoir! Le Sigh.

So anyway, Ron’s Drive-In. They were famous for chocolate and vanilla swirl ice-cream cones, so one hot summer day while my brother and I were driving around, and we stopped at the traffic light in front of Ron’s, we looked up to read their rotating sign. It said,

“HAVE YOU HAD YOUR 1 AND 1 TODAY?”

Then there was a space, and two 2’s almost underneath the 1’s. We sat at the light, confused, reading aloud, trying to work out what it said.

“Have you had your. . .one and one, two and two. . .one-two and one-two. . .one-over-two, one-over-tw–ohhh. Half and half!” I wish I could excuse our ignorance by telling you that we were too young to know any better, but in all honesty I can’t. I was in high school and my brother was in junior high.

Boy, did we feel intelligent that day.