When 'Yes' Means 'No!'
2006-05-01, 16:16

At least I'm not completely embarrassed to be seen in public. It really, really could have gone better, though.

Opening night (Friday) went just about as expected, which was, in our (the performers) opinions, not well at all. Everyone, including the band, took turns screwing something up. We're all a pretty fair hand at covering up, though, so I think at least half the mistakes we made went unnoticed. The Second night went better, at least overall. The good thing about all this is that all of our collective solos have gone well, so the group incidentals ended up not being as glaring, even if it shouts, "We needed more rehearsals!" to a more perceptive audience member.

But good lord, the first group number, somewhat ironically called 'Yes' - we all butchered it. No one person was at fault; killing the song was a group effort. Of course, we did spend the three days previous saying to the music director, "Could we work on 'Yes'?" but for various reasons we never got to it. Part of the reason was that the band was still hacking out its problems days, even hours, before the show started. And certainly some of them were not hacked out even then. Opening night, at least, had for me an overall feeling that I can only describe with the word 'ramshackle'. Which is a very odd word.

Access - Etymology

Ramshackle

:

1830, back-formation from ramshackled, earlier ranshackled (1675), alteration of ransackled, pp. of ransackle (see ransack).

Ransack

:

c.1250, from O.N. rannsaka "to pillage," lit. "search the house" (especially legally, for stolen goods), from rann "house," from P.Gmc. *rasnan (c.f. Goth. razn, O.E. �rn "house") + saka "to search," related to O.N. soekja "seek" (see seek). Sense influenced by sack (v.).

There, I feel better.

Anyway, all seems not lost, and after demanding to rehearse the song in question at least 17 times on Wednesday during the brush-up rehearsal, we should have a better show come next weekend.

I really need to work on my ability to accept compliments. I've had this problem before, but I certainly haven't gotten any better at it. All I've been able to muster this time 'round has been a string of uncomfortable 'thank you's. Honestly, I'd much prefer to learn of any appreciation for my singing through statistical data than from a live person. Graphs and charts and lists are more telling overall, and you can stare at them for a while to glean the minutiae. People? They generally don't appreciate staring. So for the next show I'll be handing out review sheets, for the audience to mark their rating of various aspects of the performance, on a scale of 1 to 5. Hopefully the exit polls will foretell a good overall rating.

As I understand it, when one is able to, on rare occasion, actually get a good night of sleep, one has these mental apparitions some call 'dreams'. I had one such 'dream' over the weekend, and I thought it odd enough to share.

I was at a friend's apartment, a place I didn't recognize, but that's not important. I was looking through this friend's collection of old video game stuff (because what self-respecting geek didn't keep his old game consoles in a box for memorabilia's sake, especially if they still worked?) and came across something that looked like what a hand-held game system might have looked like if one had existed in the mid 80's. It was bulky and funky-shaped, and loading games was complicated. But I had to try it out, because I found a game card for it called "Queen", as in the band, ala "Journey Escape", and was, in my mind, a must-see. I was having a hard time getting the game to work, though; I don't think the card was originally meant for that system, because there was some sort of adapter that had to be attached to the console for the game card, which was about the size of a SD memory card and with these two short, flimsy wires coming out of one end that had to be delicately lined up in the adapter or the game wouldn't work. It never did; every time I turned on the game system, all I could get was this default game built into the console, which was this Pac Man knock-off, called 'Aisling'. I'd describe the game more, but that would be even more boring than this dream stuff is already. That was pretty much the dream; I was woken up before I could ever get the game to work.

Aisling isn't a word you hear or read very often, as in only once before, at least for me, as it was the title of a Louise Cooper book that I read once a long time ago (part of a series that I never finished because the direction it was heading annoyed me). So I look up the word, and the word means, in Celtic mythology, 'dream or vision'. It's also an Irish poetic form. How this relates to Pac Man, I know not.

-- End Transmission --