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

LA in brief

Thanks for the welcomes, and I'll be back to writing more soon!

I've been in LA this week, visiting my brother and his dog. My brother works at USC, designing their website, and he also instructs yoga part time. He took me along to a couple of classes and I was thoroughly humiliated - I have to work on my headstands.

I also had a lesson with David Moore while I was out here. I've been meaning to write more about Mr. Moore, who is one of the most intelligent and perceptive musicians I've ever met. In fact, he's so intelligent and perceptive that my lessons with him tend to focus on minute and very fundamental concepts, stuff I maybe should have mastered many years ago. Like playing open strings, and holding the bass. I leave every lesson feeling very inspired though, and ready to apply these concepts to everything I do.

This evening we're driving to Las Vegas, to visit my mom and stepdad. Most people are shocked or amused when I tell them my parents live in Las Vegas - I didn't grow up there, they relocated when I was in college. My Thanksgiving itinerary is organized around the principle of avoiding traffic at all costs - and so we're planning on leaving LA at 10 pm tonight, when some of the I-15 chaos may have subsided. Realistically though, this is LA, traffic is unavoidable.

Best wishes to everyone and enjoy the holiday!

on being a twin

my twin brother Dan with Gilles

Whenever it comes up in conversation that I have an identical twin brother, I notice people looking at me strangely, like they are trying to fit me into a new mold. Naturally, my twin and I must live in bunk beds and wear matching outfits every day, when we're not pulling off a big switch-o-change-o scheme to ace the math quiz or get our parents back together. Then again, based on our geographical distance and my cell phone records, you might easily conclude that we hate eachother's guts. I spent almost the whole summer living with Dan in LA, and we spent most of the time pretending that the other wasn't there - the summer actually brought me closer to Gilles, who you see in the picture above, than it did to Dan.

The reality of being a twin, for me at least, is pretty complicated. It's a little like having constant access to live video footage and psychological profiles of yourself - interesting sometimes, and a nice resource to have, but a bit much to take all the time. That's why when we're around each other, I think, we can be almost cold to one another. And yet, there are moments when we connect and understand eachother so completely, I feel, that I can tell him anything. And conversely, he's told me stories from his life that I instantly recognized in my own - only the characters were different, it seemed, the situations and emotions were exactly the same!

When we were little kids, one night my sister Zoe had to finish a science project for school, and decided at the last minute she would do a twin study, testing our telekinetic and esp abilities. The result was absolutely ridiculous, which is why we've never let her forget about it - some day we need to post it on the web! She asked one of us to think of a number, and the other one invariably thought of a different number, which she explained by saying their shapes were similar. I'm pretty sure we can't pass numbers back and forth, and I have never felt his pain or anything; still, in a very real sense, Dan is the closest person to me in the world. I'm still learning what it means to have a relationship with my genetic duplicate.

According to mapquest.com, Dan and I live 2,744 miles from one another, which is about 42 hours if you're driving. Bring carrots.

uncle, and bluncle

Yesterday I became an uncle for the first time with the birth of my nephew, Isaac; I also became a bluncle, when my twin brother Dan created his own new blog, whisper key. My brother plays the bassoon, and the way I understand it the whisper key allows a bassoonist to produce a delicate, intimate tone quality without the risk of choking his or her sound. Or maybe it's a way of quickly clearing some of the spit out of the instrument without taking the whole thing apart. Either way, it seems like an apt title for a personal blog.

Dan is a fascinating and very funny person, so you should definitely click over and read him in person. I am planning on writing a bit more about him and being a twin, and posting it here later today.

Isaac's first day

Here is the official site for my nephew, Isaac Joseph Zaret. Funny how it took me 27 years and change to get my own website, and this kid has one on his first day.


mother Zoe with baby Isaac

I first heard the news while writing in my blog this afternoon, so it seemed appropriate to post the news, even if I was maybe the last in the family to hear! I tend to turn my phone off for long stretches of time, leaving me more or less unreachable. Still, though, now that I've had the benefit of a few hours to ponder, I wanted to write a little more on the subject.

I've lately been reading this book called The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg, and I find it's a very difficult book to explain to people. It's one of those books in which the things it talks about - weather, insects, trees, animals, farming, etc. - are not really what it's about at all. I realized today that what it is about, what so many beautiful works of literature and music are about, when I stop and think about it, is time. We think we understand time, we think it behaves as simply and predictably as the gears in our watches, but then a day like this happens, and everything seems to change in an instant.

Would this day have seemed any less life-altering had it come a couple of weeks from now, when we were expecting it? For the past many months, whenever I told anyone I was about to be an uncle, or even thought about it, I always attached that word "April". So when it happened, my first reaction was, "How could this happen? It's not April yet!", as if the number on the calendar was the most amazing thing about this day. Really, though, I'm not sure anything would have prepared me for the idea of calling my sister Zoe "your mother", of calling my own mother "your grandma". I seem to have left the world I woke up in this morning for a different world, in which everyone has a new title and a new identity, all in relation to this new person.

Of course I've been telling everyone I know about Isaac, and looking forward to a chance to visit and see them in person. I'm not sure what it will be like to be in the same room as my new nephew, and I think it might seem just as strange and unfamiliar to see my sister as a mother. I am sure that she and Elliot will be great parents though, and that Isaac will be the new center around which their life orbits.

To extend that celestial metaphor a bit, I feel like I've been a comet that went skimming across my sister's atmosphere every so often, and it makes me a little sad to think that we'll be just as distant for the foreseeable future. Zoe has a very busy career, and I can only imagine how full her life will be now. Still, though, this is a day to celebrate and to marvel at my sister, and at life.

my sister's baby

I just found out that my sister gave birth to a baby boy today, Isaac Joseph Zaret. I heard from both of my parents, who left voicemail messages just a couple of hours ago. The baby came a couple of weeks early - we expected him around the middle of April, so it came as a surprise, but a happy one, since apparently they are both healthy. My brother-in-law Elliot is quite a web programmer and prolific writer, so I'm sure you can read much more about IJZ and see pictures soon at his website, which I will link to here.