4/1/99

There's a flip-flop in the street. The first time I saw it, I thought it was some unlucky bunny and I swerved and "eeew"-ed. Nope, just a flip-flop. It's been there for 4 or 5 days now. I have this absurd, fiendish giggle every time I flatten it under the wheels of my Escort.

Scored an Easter gig today! All churches like to have joyous brass music on Easter, but most churches don't have a whole lot of professional brass musicians in their congregations. Many churches will save for the entire year to be able to hire a brass quintet on Easter Sunday. This creates a wealth of business opportunities for college-aged brass players.

But! Not for euphoniumists. We sit back and watch the trumpet, horn, and trombone players suck up the gigs. Even tubists get decent money on Easter. Those of us who double on trombone might snag a service here or there, and once in a while an ambitious choir director will use a larger brass choir that includes a euphonium. We mostly get the shaft.

Until the day before Good Friday, that is. That's when those not-so-quick church directors get their butts moving. Sometimes they come into extra funds, sometimes they've just forgotten, and once in a while they get screwed by a trombonist who found a higher-paying gig. For whatever reason, they get desperate. They start asking around, they plead with a chain of trombonists until someone says, "Hey, maybe you could use a euphonium instead...." And that's when we score. I have played an Easter gig every year for the past five years or so, and for only one of them did I have more than a week's notice. Sometimes I play euphonium, sometimes I play trombone. Sometimes I transpose F horn parts and read them on my euph. Sometimes I play the tuba part. But I always always always have a gig. And the choir directors tell me, as they hand over the checks, that they'll have a euphonium for sure next year.

Funny, then, that they never invite me back. I wonder how many gigs I've lost by moving and changing my phone number every year.

I love Easter gigs. The music is generally easy enough, though I'm sometimes challenged by the ensemble I'm sitting with. Last year I played in a hastily thrown-together brass quartet, made up of trumpets and horn players who didn't have gigs yet by Good Friday. As you can guess, there was a reason they didn't have gigs yet. I fought with out-of-tune trumpets through three services, and the horn player sneezed on me in the middle of the sermon. I got a snot shower. He didn't even apologize.

I digress. I like playing Easter Sundays because I miss the church I belonged to when I was growing up. It was a liberal, accepting, very friendly congregation, nobody was obsessively God-fearing and nobody was condemned for "non-Christian" acts. Whatever those are. I miss my church, and attending services on Easter gives me that warm, mushy, happy nostalgia feeling. The congregation is always delighted to see a member of the heathen, feigning-interest brass group actually participating in their service. I make lots of friends at my gigs. I like learning about different denominations and churches, even though I rarely share the beliefs and such that I'm supposed to. (What would my Baptist or Presbyterian host churches think of this journal? Oh, geez.) And I love getting paid to play--that's what I'm all about.

Last night the tuba-euphonium studio met for a mock audition session. Mock audition: we assign excerpts in advance, set up a screen, have the players come in one by one and "audition" as though they're trying to get a military band gig. And we write comments on each person's performance. Sometimes we go so far as to choose a "winner". Since I'm a grad student and I've actually taken real military auditions, I'm exempt from the playing ordeal--who'd want to "compete" with me? I just write comments. And I write damn good comments, too--I always get nice comments on my comments. It's a blast hanging out with the studio. We spent half of the time we were working giggling like idiots, good-naturedly teasing those unfortunate souls who chunked a few notes.

This is me heaving a sigh of relief. I convinced three professors to serve on my orals committee--first try. Now I have to study....