At my mother's suggestion I bought a marble composition book to journal my trip to tour England and Scotland with the Rochester Philharmonic Youth Orchestra. I wasted no time and started journaling a couple weeks before the trip.
Fri 4/6/84 1:30AM
10 days to go till I go to Europe. I'm Ecstatic. I'm to tour with the Rochester Phil. Youth Orchestra for ten days in the U.K. Playing concerts in London, Harrogate, & Edinburgh. This log will contain day-by-day accounts of that trip...
Sun 4/8/84
Was up early because RPYO (rehearsal) was from 9:45AM to what turned out to be 4:48PM with only two breaks. I had missed the last two rehearsals so it was good to be back, even though it exhausted me. The pieces we are playing are all of professional caliber. Most of them are from the big orchestra's (Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra) library... I find this exciting, though I'm not sure the other kids really care. Many of them are veterans of RPYO; not easily pleased with such trivialities. None of them can escape the thrill of this trip. One can feel it as we work for and talk about it. Sometimes in my sleep, I awake and realize that I'm flying over seas, and it's hard to believe. The pieces we are playing are: Candide by Bernstein, Some of the nutcracker Suite, Lenore OV. (overature) #3 by Beethoven, The Moldau by Smetana, Hoedown by Aaron Copeland...
Mon 4/19/84
School is school. After that Dad and I went to Nippenoze in Holcomb to get me a Woolrich shell jacket for Europe. I am going to take good care of it. It will last me a long time. (I wonder now what happened to that jacket, how long did I actually have it?) Being in Nippenoze reminds me of how I like being close to nature. Afterwards we wnet back to my car at school and I went to Rossi's to get two D strings (I used to break a lot of strings) and ended up buying 4 bass picks also.
Wednesday 4/11/84 -6 Days
It will be good to break the routine of school on this tour I'm really getting sick of the day-in-and-out. Bill (a guitarist friend of mine from another school) and I are playing for a YMCA benefit production called “The Fabulous Fifties”. We're part of the pit band... Judy Cornish (piano) taught Bill a lot of music theory at rehearsal on Sunday while I was at RPYO rehearsal. Tonight we rehearsed for the last time before our shows on Fri and Sat. It occurred to me that this will be the first time that Bill and I play out together and this will be his first gig period.
Thurs 4/12/84 5 Days!
I'm starting to engage my anti jet lag strategy by getting up and going to sleep earlier, but my schedule this weekend could foil my plan. The show (a YMCA benefit) is Friday and Saturday, RPYO rehearsal on Sunday will go till 8:30 (plus the drive home). Jazz band rehearsal on Monday will go till 9. by that time who can sleep anyway, I'll be too WIRED! Mrs. Reifler (RPYO's tour manager) called and told me I have to take my bass (the school's) over because they couldn't rent them in England. So I've got to rent a hard flight case in NYC: $50.
Friday 4/13/84 FOUR DAYS LEFT!!
I love mornings, it's my favorite time of day, especially when I'm going on a trip. It's hard to believe we're leaving Tuesday. In school I'm always telling people how many days I have left whether they ask me or not.
Sun 4/15/84 2 DAYS!!!!
Hectic day. Bill and I left the cast party for the 50's thing (a YMCA benefit musical review) around 12AM last night so my sleep has been shot. I don't know if I'll survive the day ahead... RPYO rehearsal was grueling but effective and exciting. It ran till 9:15. I slept at 11.
-The Trip-
Tues 4/17/84
I was excited and could only manage a couple hours of sleep...
Mom and our neighbor, Mrs. Marsh, drove me to the Memorial Art Gallery parking lot where we were to board our buses, but there were no buses. Mrs. Marsh gave me an Andy Rooney book. After what seemed like forever 1 of the 3 buses arrived. We painstakingly loaded 2 harps, 5 basses, 8 horns 4 bones and 11 cellos on and under the bus. When the other buses arrived I got on the first one... the trip to NYC was good. The city (what little I could see of it from the rush hour traffic) fascinated me. NYC is so filthy though...
New York was still kind of a scary place back then both in my imagination and in reality too. It was the kind of place that if your car broke down it would be stripped of all it's parts within hours, at least these were the legends I had heard. I didn't know whether they were true or not until I saw several gutted cars along the expressways going through the city on our way to JFK airport.
The late buses had caused us to miss our Flying Tigers freight flight that all the larger instruments were supposed to fly on. Our tour manager had to do some fancy footwork and got our instruments re-booked on Pan Am Freight. The only problem was that all the cases for the basses and harps had been delivered to the Flying Tigers hangar and there was no way to get them to Pan Am Freight several miles away. If you've never been through JFK, it is, by itself, a small city. Three buses pulled into the lot of Flying Tigers looking very out-of-place next to all the trucks. Volunteers were asked for to go into the warehouse and help carry out the cases. Go into a air freight warehouse is one of the biggest airports in the world? Sign me up! Inside the terminal our tour manager told us to stay put while she disappeared inot the warehouse to find the right people to talk to. No sooner had she left when a very gruff razor-stubbled old dude named Rudolph walked up to us incredulously and yelled “You kids,GET OUTTA HERE!” Six or seven high school orchestra geeks then tried politely to explain that “you see, Mrs. Riefler" "She's our tour manager" "She went that way." "Yeah so like she, um, told us to to stay here and um...”
“I don't care about no missus nobawdy, now GET OUTTA HERE!” Rudolph and his three day growth stomped off back into the warehouse.
Mrs. Riefler returned a moment later. Several of us chorused to her at once: “There was this big guy...” "He was mad..." “He, um, yelled at us and told us we had to leave...” “Yeah, so, um, maybe we should wait outside.”
“You're my responsibility not his. Just stay here,” she said. Then, to our horror, just like 'that', she left us again. The teamsters hanging around and loading trucks (mostly hanging around) were having great sport laughing at us as we looked around in fear of the formidable Rudolph. Naturally, it didn't take him long to return and see that there were still young clueless intruders loitering in what was clearly his turf.
“Hey you kids I thawt I told yous to get outta here. GET OUTTA HERE!” he bellowed. We started to move towards the door we had come in through like a nervous herd of cattle. “NOOO, NOT THAT WAY, THE UDDA WAY, GET OUTTA HERE!!” He pointed in some direction that was no where near the direction of the way we had come in or of where the buses were parked. One of our guys, a bit more nervous than the rest of us, could take no more and made a break for it. He ran towards a loading bay door and slipped out between the truck and the rubber flap in the doorway. I couldn't see him after his jail break, but I feel confident he was running with his arms flailing all the way to the bus.
Eventually everything was worked out and we were piling luggage into the empty seats of one of the buses and loading the large instrument cases into the now empty luggage bays. The harp cases were so big that we couldn't get the doors closed, so we carefully drove to the Pan Am freight terminal with the bay doors wide open.
The sun was down by the time we boarded our plane an Air India 747. That's right, Air India—mythinks someone found a good deal on 100+ tickets. The flight attendants wore saris and bindis on their foreheads. They bowed with 'praying hands' when I entered the plane.
I regret now that I didn't take a camera with me.
This picture is just one I found but it's exactly the way I remember the
flight attendants when boarding our Air India flight -just on a much bigger plane.
This picture is just one I found but it's exactly the way I remember the
flight attendants when boarding our Air India flight -just on a much bigger plane.
The bad news: with a 2:11 chance of getting a window seat on a 747, I didn't even get near one. The good news: I was sitting near a rather cute violinist named Kristin.
Wednesday 4/18 continued
The in-flight movie was "Tender Mercys" but the sound was terrible and the film kept getting jammed and melting turning what was probably supposed to be a heartwarming drama into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. I was on the Aisle on the inside and sitting next to me was Kathleen (violin) and her Friend Kristin. Kristin, who I became rather found of during the flight, played violin as well. At first she was quite quiet but she opened up eventually. She talked of all the places she's been (Germany) and complained about how picky her grandparents are...
Kathleen grew up to be quite lovely but was a bit geeky back then. She seemed to eye me with suspicion as well. Kristin was more interesting to me and as I said, cute! I wrote in my journal that we exchanged several smiles on either side of her sleeping friend. I was disappointed to learn Kristin and her friend were only 14. It was no surprise that Kathleen was that young but Kristin seemed transcendent of her age emotionally. There would be no dating her though, especially if her German parents were as strict and old fashioned as she said they were.
In the comedy of life it should be noted that the woman I would end up marrying was only three years old at the time.
Another plus about the flight: the best airline food I had ever eaten before or since. They offered us a choice of an Indian and a Western style meal. Unlike most of the kids around me, I choose the Indian. I already knew what Western airline food tasted like. The Indian folks seated in the sections behind us may have thought the Indian food was poxy, but I found it delicious.
I had been going on very little sleep and had hoped to catch some on the seven hour flight to London. I actually drifted off for about a minute until some guy on the flight crew was hurrying down the aisle and ran into my knee. We hit turbulence over the Atlantic that were severe enough to knock open the overhead bin above us open. “My violin!” shouted Kathleen in a panic. “Your violin,” I muttered, “my life!” Between that, flirting with Kristin and my excitement about the trip, I never did get any sleep on the plane.
When we were over land again the sun had risen. It was still around 2 AM on my body clock. I was able to get up and look out some windows. Seeing bright green landscape the red tile roofs of the houses below let me know I was indeed in England.
Standing in line for customs at Heathrow, I strained my ears to hear an English accent but, I was still surrounded by people from the flight: New Yorkers and Punjabis. Being in England wasn't going to be real until I could hear someone talk. Someone say something!
The customs agent was curt and brief but he had an English accent God love him! That was plenty good enough though, music to my ears. I was really in England and my passport received it's first stamp!
Wednesday 4/18/84
After touching down, 100 weary musicians trudged through London's Heathrow Airport. Customs lines, baggage lines and waiting for everyone else to finish took forever. We finally loaded onto some buses (I was later to find out they call these coaches) The coaches were quite different than I expected; very luxurious. Our bus had TV with a VCR and a Blaupunkt stereo, sunroofs and a very nice interior. Kristin and Kathleen were on the other bus, not as nice as ours but still better than those smelling Greyhounds...
What I didn't mention about the English coaches was that they were built for midgets, there was so little leg room my knees were crammed against luxurious upholstery of the seat in front of me. In-fact I soon learned that everything in England was a slightly miniaturized version of what I was accustom to in the US: homes, doorways, dishwashers, cars and especially the roads they drive on.
Our coach would drive along highways that were smaller that the secondary streets with stone walls coming right to the edge of the pavement through the countryside and buildings and homes blurred by my face it seemed only inches away.
According to Google Earth, the main street (called appropriately “Main Street”) of my birthplace, Canandaigua, New York, even wide by US standards, is seventy feet from curb-to-curb and another sixty feet from the curb to the front porches of the homes on either side. The English highways were often merely two ten foot lanes with no shoulders in the country and only a small sidewalk separating the road form the fronts of the buildings in the towns and villages.
Wednesday 4/18 continued
...I rode deliriously to Stratford in awe of the lush countryside.
My delirium was a juxtaposed result of my lack of sleep, jet lag and my wided-eyed joy of being where I was: England! Despite my efforts to stay awake and enjoy the miracle that this was for real, I would often drift off to sleep, but because my face was glued to the window to take in every quaint, historic, and picturesque detail, the corner of my glasses would hit the window and I would be jolted awake. This kept repeating itself in an endless cycle until we reached our first destination.
...I was disappointed in Stratford. It was so touristy. I am fascinated with the cars. They look so different and no rust in sight. I have seen Ford and Chevrolet models that I have never heard of. So odd to see those emblems on cars that look so European. I walked around Stratford with Lisa (Bassoon), Pete (Trumpet), Joanne (violin), some others and my roommate for the trip, Dave (clarinet) whom I just met.
I made my first money exchange at a bank (I was carrying all my money in travelers cheques), then we went to a restaurant where we were practically ignored. We left and boycotted “Wimpy” for the rest of the trip. For lack of affordable options, we ended up at a McDonalds of all places.
By that evening we arrived in Shrewsbury (pronounced: shroze-bree) and met our host families at a car park (parking lot).
One of my favorite parts about our trip to England, and I felt this way even before we left, was that we would be staying with host families instead of in hotels. I was looking forward to experiencing England and Scotland with regular folks in their homes. I imagined that hotels would be, for the most part, like anywhere else and the folks who hand you your room key, extra towels and dinner plate were pretty universally generic themselves.
When we got off the buses, our tour manager, Mrs. Reifler, told us that, because of the last minute change in flights, the large instruments had been held up in customs. She hoped they would arrive by truck some time the next day.
The next day was our first rehearsal and concert. Though one might not miss the two harps frankly, the Rochester Philharmonic Youth Orchestra was going to sound pretty funny without any cellos, basses, trombones, french horns or a tuba.
Not counting the restless two hour 'nap' the night before I left home and the cumulative ten minutes of ten second naps I had had on the coach, I had now been awake, for around forty-five hours. I could have passed out face down in a ditch and not moved for ten hours. Dave (my roommate) and I waited with our luggage until our names were called. A middle-aged guy with a long brown overcoat stepped forward. I wondered what he was like.
I also wondered if he had any cute daughters.
| DOUBLE J's Double Take |
| A Music & Personal Update |
| This is a feature I am going to try out and see how it goes. This blog is essentially about my music career but there's not always enough to report on to make for an interesting read. however in keeping with this original intent I will post a brief update in this box every week. This week after a number of delays I finally moved into my rehearsal space. One more excuse eliminated... that's good right? I only had time to write my blog tonight but I am going to rehearse tomorrow afternoon. I got some drum tracks from a friend of mine recently (no explanation the tracks just showed up) which have proved inspirational, I am going to create some music to go with a couple of them and see what happens. It'll sort-of be a new direction I think. I have been working crazy night hours at Tennis Channel during the French Open. Things are pretty quiet at night and I have been able to spend time working on a electronic modification of my Repeater looper (a device that allows me to play more than one part at a time on stage) to reduce some excess noise. It is a difficult and delicate procedure and I fear I may have killed one of the inputs... not a real big deal since I only use one. the night hours have been tough getting used to and I missed calling my nephew on his birthday today. Things are just topsy turvey in general. I don't mind the shift itself though. It's kinda cool and you can't beat the fact that there's not much traffic at 1AM. If only that were true in the morning when I go home dog tired. |
