When I do the “up-and-overs” (work afternoon Day A into an overnight on-call into morning Day B, which I do twice a week, Saturday into Sunday and then Monday into Tuesday), then I come home and sleep hard for about three hours, I usually end up watching concert videos while eating my “dinner” of... whatever it is, because by then it’s nine o’clock at night. Tonight it was pretzels and yogurt.
Music has been super-important in my life since I was a kid. My dad is a huge music fan. I started playing the piano when I was eight and picked up percussion in a matter of months in high school - the piano’s just a percussion instrument, after all. I played in jazz band and in marching band and in symphonic ensemble and in my favorite place, the orchestra pit for musicals. I don’t remember a lot about high school due to being crazy and then overmedicated for the crazy, but I do remember that a lot of my happiest moments were when I was playing music.
I realized tonight while watching the boygenius concert for the tenth time there are Very Specific Things I miss about being in performance spaces.
I miss rapid-fire switching between instruments between numbers, feeling like time’s both slowed and faster than it should be, knowing exactly what to do after weeks of practice but never quite being sure if I’ll nail it every time.
I miss crawling around in the orchestra pit to situate myself between the timpani and the xylophone, and laughing at all of the shenanigans that go on when a bunch of musicians are crammed into what’s basically a large-ish walk-in closet.
I miss everyone having the same goal in mind and breathing in at once as the conductor raises their baton - that multi-celled organism a band becomes, breathing together and moving together, feet rocking and tapping and fingers working and heads bobbing all somehow in sync.
I miss solos, even when I was so nervous to get one, because when I did one perfectly there was no better feeling.
I miss Band Trips, like when the jazz band went to Major City in My Home State to play for A Group of Educational Professionals at A Noted Fancy Building and I ended up reassembling my vibraphone on the floor in front of a group of Japanese tourists who took pictures of me. Or like when we went to Disney World and the jazz band got to play on a stage that rose up from the floor and they said “Okay, keep your hands inside the platform or your arms’ll get cut off okaykidshaveagoodshow” and then we were rising up with everyone going “What the fuck?!” Even the bus rides were fun when we were all together, except for possibly the 24-hour one from Home State to Disney World (ugh).
I miss my fingers feeling nimble and like they knew what they were doing. I miss feeling like Mistress and Commander of the Far Side of My World with a tray of varied percussion instruments in front of me and knowing I would absolutely nail the piece, juggling all of them like a smooth - and more attractive - circus clown.
I miss when a night felt special for no other night than it was a performance night. Coke tasted sharper, Airheads tasted sour-er, popcorn tasted saltier on performance nights - especially with the caveat of not supposed to eat in your uniform. Or watching a football team that you gave absolutely no shits about win the game, and being excited despite not actually liking football. Or driving somewhere far away when it wasn’t our turn to play music, just to play music, because I loved music just that much.
I miss the batshit crazy inside jokes that came from being in an ensemble. When the high school pit (and some random community members) played for the middle school production of “Wizard of Oz,” we wrote an entire fucking parody script of the musical with all of the jokes, and I spent one hot summer day cranking out copies of it in the teachers’ lounge, with the blessing of our conductor/the choir teacher, and driving all over town to deliver them to the pit members.
I miss the quotes that I scribbled down and taped to my journals, like “Let it FLY, Munchkins!” which was also from “Oz” pit and was, historically, said by the musical’s director as he attempted to get the Munchkins to bring out a little more energy, and which now means nothing to anyone, except to me.
I miss being inside the music.
I miss being that happy. I might not remember it all now, but I do remember what came after, and everything that came after was fucked, for the most part, and definitely not as happy. I have pictures and souvenirs to remind me of the happiness.
I miss the belonging, like when the seniors drove out to our band director’s house in the country on the last night before the last day of summer band camp and “raided” his house by playing music outside and then marching inside. (He knew it was coming, obvs.) He’s retired now and lives across the street from my aunt, but he taught me so many important things, and only a few were about music.
I miss the blisters, and the sunburn, and the joy, and laughing until I was sick, and drumsticks in my hands, and ugly shoes, and super inconvenient call times, and the hushed silence in an auditorium right before the curtain goes up, and tuning timpani with my ear down towards the shining white head, and watching the sun go down on Friday nights, and the sound of cadences, and hand warmers in my mittens at the Christmas parade, and the weight of my bass drum on its harness, and the resonance of chimes through the tiny wooden hammer and into my hand, and being “on jazz band time,” and milkshakes after rehearsal, and squeezing too many people in the back of a car on the way to pep band, and Big Boy’s bills paid with more coins than was probably appropriate, and how easy it was to say “it’s for band” and get away with a lot of things, and playing “Pomp and Circumstance” at graduation until my hands were numb, and only rolling my eyes sometimes at the show choir we played for, and ugly uniforms and -
I’d give a lot of things to feel it again.
