The radio silence around here this week is due to it being one of the busiest times of the year for both Sarah and me. By tomorrow evening, I will have played 15 services (a service is either a rehearsal or a concert, at least two hours each) in 6 days, prepared and performed nine different full-length pieces (plus a pops concert with the awesome Josh Ritter) totaling around 7 hours of music, and generally logged more hours at work than at home. It’s actually been a lot of fun – busy weeks are chaotic, but exhilarating, and hey, weeks like this are why they pay me, right?
So anyway, Friday had been another very long day at the office, and I’m biking home from that night’s concert, exhausted, and think to myself: I’ve earned a treat. Saturday morning rehearsal or no, I’m stopping in at my favorite neighborhood dive bar for a couple of beers before heading home. Which I proceed to do.
I’m sitting at the bar with my Surly Furious, and because there’s nothing else to do, I start chatting with the burly guy on the barstool next to me about, you know, whatever. The Twins’ new ballpark, why local breweries are putting so many hops in their beers these days, etc. Dive bar small talk. Somehow we get onto the subject of grandparents, and he mentions that his grandpa, currently 91 and starting to slip away a bit, lives out on Lake Minnetonka. I say get right out of town, my grandparents lived on Minnetonka for decades until my grandpa started to slip away. So we’ve got that.
Then he tells me that his grandpa and a lot of other guys basically built the town of Excelsior way back when, and I tell him I’ve always liked that town, sort of frozen in time as it is, with it’s own little bustling downtown and all. I mention that I’m a musician, and I play a concert out in Excelsior every fourth of July. He realizes this must mean I’m in the orchestra, and I say yes. He says that he and his mom have been going to the Minnesota Orchestra together on a regular basis ever since he was a kid, and he just loves it, even though his wife never wanted to go – she’s more into clubbing and dance halls – until this one concert a couple of years ago that she loved.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised at this point when I run into people all over Minnesota who not only don’t grimace when I mention that I play classical music, but actually talk about the last time they came to the orchestra. But I can’t help it – I didn’t grow up in a place where seemingly half the population goes to plays and museums and orchestra concerts. Heck, half the population of my hometown pretty much never left their own houses at night!
So back to my friend at the bar. I go into my usual musician/ambassador mode, chat about a few concerts he’s been to, and tell him to come up and say hi the next time he’s at the hall. He says he’ll try to recognize my face in the crowd, and just to get it out there, I tell him to scan the brochures in the lobby, because I have this concert series I do with one of our conductors…
Instant recognition. Instant. Not only does he know exactly who I am as soon as the words are out of my mouth, but as it turns out, he’s been to at least four of our Inside the Classics shows. He even has the musical vocabulary to describe Sarah’s conducting style, and it turns out that show his wife finally liked was our Mendelssohn show from the 2008-09 season. He went on and on about all the stuff he loved from various shows, from the Baldwin sisters singing a Fanny Mendelssohn song to our performance of the swashbuckling Mendelssohn Octet to Mike Gast playing part of a Mozart horn concerto on a beer funnel.
Anyway, his folks live about a block away from me, which is why he was in the neighborhood, but dude. Talk about your only-in-Minnesota coincidences. Nice end to a chaotic work week…
