Yesterday was my usual pair of Sunday church gigs. After a not too late Saturday night (asleep by 2:30 AM?), I was back up at 6:45 AM to get a move on.
The first gig is always a little "seat of the pants," but this time it bit the band in the butt. We were supposed to allow the flags to process silently (in remembrance of September 11), and once they were in place, then begin the first song, but we forgot about the flags. So in front of everybody, Rev. Randy whipped around and cut us off--like you'd yell at a dog or something. Ouch! Wake up! The second song started, but the words did not come up on the screen, and Rev. Randy was hot under the collar again. After that, there was a brief video to be shown. One of the screens had only audio. Rev. Randy was thoroughly pissed at that point (also because he was the star of the video?). Anyway, that set the tone for the entire service--run away!!!!
Since this gig is a hard blowing situation, I used it to break in a few new tenor reeds.
As usual, I went home and slept.
My second gig was a little bit thin. For some reason, most of the vocalists were missing, so it was just two girls, piano, hand drum, and me. When we started, I had to dial in some of the stuff--I wasn't there last week (I was on the boat), and whoever had been running the sound board had been managing the volume by riding the gain instead of the volume fader. The first song had some crazy loud drum and piano. Once I got it under control, things were better. The drum guy was actually putting out some sound (usually his mic picks up more of the piano than the drum), but when I soloed his channel in his headphones, he went back to playing like a pussy. Such is life.
I haven't had much time to play flute this week, so I did lots of long tones during this mass to bring my face back to life.
It's not relevant to my music career, but Dallas needs a head coach who will bring discipline to the team. They have great talent, but there were too many mistakes last night--not just on the final play. I hope Jerry Jones made them walk home.
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