Sheila's dream

One of my bassist colleagues told me about a recent dream she had - and I hope she won't mind if I write about it here, since it's so fabulous I think it needs to be shared with the world.

In her dream, both she and I were taking some big orchestra audition. We'd been working hard for a long time to prepare, and all the rest of our section decided to come along with us for moral support. (I love my section, but I can hardly dream of anyone wanting to do that!) So we got to the audition, played our best, but neither of us got the job. That's life, I guess. But the really amazing part was the guy who won, and the reason - he had worked out this whole skit to go along with the excerpts from Ein Heldenleben. Something elaborate involving an anti-gravity mail-chute-type thing, shooting the music up into the air, and then he would play it. We were both really disappointed, in Sheila's dream, because we hadn't thought to prepare any skits to accompany our excerpts!

I'm not sure what the orchestral world would be like if auditions included props and pyrotechnics like that, but I imagine that the conversations afterwards with friends and family members might be much easier:

ZOE (my sister): So whatever happened at that audition you took a couple months ago? The one in Cleveland, or was it Colorado?

ME: Oh, you mean Kansas City. I played pretty well, I nailed the Don Juan and got all the notes on Mozart 35, though I may have been a little under tempo...

ZOE: Uh-huh, you're kind of losing me there, but so what happened?

ME: Well, I made semis, but there was a guy with a talking parrot and a little person in a tutu, so he ended up winning.

ZOE: A little person? Do you mean a midget?

ME: Well yeah, but they prefer to be called little people.

ZOE: Oh yeah. Well sorry about that. Anything else coming up?

ME: No, but if you meet any little people who can dance to Beethoven 5, you should let me know.

ZOE: Sure thing