Benefit Concert with Isabelle Yawning

Early Sunday morning. My head is hurting. Thank god for coffee this morning!

Friday night Isabelle and I performed at a benefit concert for the San Franciso Aids Foundation at Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church. We were first on the bill, at my request, but the show did not start until 7:30. Isabelle is pretty tired at that hour, even though she would never admit it. She had also been sick for the whole week, like everyone else around here, so she didn’t feel that great and was acting a bit out of sorts, like children do when they don’t feel well, frowning when you asked her a question, hiding her head in her coat when someone new would come up and talk to her...

So, anyway, we finally played our four cello duet pieces. She played well, not missing a note, but everytime I looked over at her, she was yawning. It was pretty cute, I have to say, if not the best stage presence. The wonderful man who was in charge of the concert, Valdez Hill, awarded us with gift packages for performing, filled with Easter goodies, and off we went to sit with dad in the front seat and listen to the rest of the variety show type concert.

It was kind of a refreshing concert filled with variety, true to it’s name. So, there was a dapper young man singing some tenor arias and filling the church with more vibrato, bravura and volume than it might have ever known before, there was a young woman (girl?) playing some kind of a modern oboe piece, there was man with salty hair and a white beard singing opera selections, complete with hand and facial gestures, there was an African American woman singing some long and slow gospel selections with an amazingly wide vibrato, and the last performance before the intermission was a Vivaldi picolo concerto, with an alleged allegro that started off somewhere in adagio, and as the sixteenth note passages came around, it tended to get slower and slower.

Isabelle was fast fading. She was laying back against me, clutching her new stuffed Easter bunny. She kept asking me, "mommy, when can we go home?" She also had this celophane bag that was filled with chocolate easter eggs that she kept rattling throughout the concert.

It was kind of fun being in this community setting, for the evening.

Last night, I played with Ana Nitmar’s latin band somewhere in San Francisco. It was a fundraiser for some school, I didn’t catch the name. The music was loud! Too loud, as is often the case with bands that play electric. Too loud! I’ll say it again. That’s why the headache. At least I got to play next to my pal- buddy seven string guitarist Robin Lewis, who is always good fun at these kinds of events. Last night, I labelled him a silly intellectual, as he did a goofy dance to the music. That’s the silly part. The intellectual Robin is the guy who took a look at one of my new compositions and suggested that instead of modulating from C major to C minor, which I was perfectly happy with, that I try to go into five other keys there, and see what I think. (I chose A flat minor after that experiment, unbelievably.)

So, anyway, now I lost my train of thought. I had a bit of a headache and drank a marguerita that Ana gave me. That made it feel better for a time.

But now, this morning, it’s back again. And I have to teach.