SassyBlonde

[Guess what?!?!?!? I successfully badgered Frankenberry into doing his own post in this tour series, so here you go: introducing today's guest blogger!!!!]

So SB wanted me to to a guest blog entry, something that I really didn't want to do, originally, but she was so insistent and since she's kind of integral to some of the things I do, I figured I'd better keep her happy. A Managing Director scorned is...well, I don't want to think about the possibilities. So I'm blogging. Though I'm not a blogger. I'm not a tweeter, I don't even have a website. This is therefore very alien for me, and I apologize for any un-bloggish behavior. Now to begin:

We're in China. I really thought this would be the most different place on the planet from the U.S., but really it's coming across like a lot like big cities in Europe. It's quite dirty, kinda rude, and crowded. I don't understand them any better than I would Germans or Norwegians, though here there's little hope of finding someone who knows even a few words of English. These cities are dirtier and more crowded than Europe, but the comparisons in my mind are clear.

I must give props (yes, I said props, deal with it) to SB for being such a patient hostess. She has been my guide, advisor, and supporter, and has been kind enough to pretend that I'm not bugging her after a week of constant waking contact. Without her, I think this trip would have been a lot worse. Don't get me wrong, it's great to be here and see a few sights, but this tour is constant flying or busing, interspersed with concerts and a few hours of time in a hotel for sleep or a break. And for those who know me, you know I don't play well with others, so I may have been even more antisocial than I am right now, and sitting alone in my room wishing ill on everyone.

That being said, since this is a Sassy blog, I should say a few words about our orchestral compatriots, right? Right. You'll see the rules of the tour later, which will underscore their interesting behavior, but in reality this is just a case of being in a confined environment with 40 people for a very extended period. Personality quirks come to the fore, and many musicians just don't have the social filters that exist in regular life. Instead, we have folks who feel entitled to say what they feel, and expect other people to jump and react to please them. Goodness, I don't deal well with that. I would say something about suffering fools, but I bet someone will turn that around on me, so I'll avoid it. But gosh, I don't want to hear for the seventeenth time that you don't like your seat on the bus or your luggage got banged around or the woodwinds can't tune, because for one, no one likes their seat, for the second, that's life, and for the third, yes we can, evidenced by our blending on long octave passages between four players. So they can suck it. Yes, I can be as catty as the next musician, I just try not to show it very often. It's hypocritical, and I try to keep that to a minimum. I'm sure Boo Berry will have a response to that...

So I didn't have a good opening, and I don't have a good closing. I'm showing myself to be un-blogworthy.

And suddenly I have my close: Sassy is a Nosey Parker-- she just looked over once again to see what I was doing as we sit in this crappy hotel room in Wuhan drinking beer and catching up on our writings. Ha! I'm talking about her in the third person in her own blog! Unless she edits me. Hmm.

[SB: I promise, the only edits I made to this were a little punctuation. This one's all Frankenberry.]