This is one of the weirdest things that has happened to me in a long long time. It was about 7:15 tonight, and I was in the green room of the recital hall at Carthage, waiting with Shannon Burke and her teacher Amy Haines in anticipation of Shannon’s Senior Voice Recital which was to begin in fifteen minutes. We were all excited because this promised to be a powerful program featuring incredibly challenging and uncommon repertoire which Shannon was destined to sing extremely well. (You just know when someone is really riding a wave and poised to do incredible things.) I was also nervous because in all of my years at Carthage this was probably the second hardest recital I’ve ever played for. (The hardest was when I played for professional violist Paul Cortese, filling in for someone else and having to learn a tremendously difficult piece in a very short time, and then play it for a world class musician who settled for only the best. That was the hardest, but Shannon’s was a close second. Almost everything on the recital was brand new to me and hard- but it was also exhilarating to put this kind of music together with her.)
Anyway, the three of us are sitting backstage and I’m about to tell them about an exquisite Emily Dickinson poem I read earlier in the day when suddenly BLAMO! My glasses just sort of spontaneously self-destructed right on my face. Apparently, one of the screws just popped right out, which caused the one half of the frame to suddenly split apart which sent my left lens flying. It was so bizarre and it felt for all the world like I’d just been hit in the face by a baseball- that’s how sudden and even violent this was. And Amy and Shannon were sort of left staring at me in stunned surprise.
We quickly determined that the tiny missing screw was nowhere to be found – and we suddenly had a truly urgent need to somehow get my glasses back together again. Not to brag, but there are some voice recitals where I know the repertoire so well that I could pretty much play it all without music. But not this recital; I would have been sinking in deep you-know-what if I had to walk out on that stage without my glasses. (I was having enough trouble playing this music with my glasses on!) Having lived through something like this before (although never having had it happen so suddenly, as though it were a strange optical form of demon possession) I knew that the quickest solution would be if Amy could find me a straight pin, which I would drop in where the screw had been. But in this case, the entire left half of the frames had sprung open and a simple pin was not going to do it; it was going to require wiring the left corner of the frame shut again so the lens could be snapped back into place without risk of popping out mid-recital. (We were SO grateful that this happened when it did and not in the middle of the performance; how awful would that have been?!?) Amy was back in a couple of minutes with a handful of paper clips of various sizes, and the smallest one could slide through the screw opening – and with just a couple quick twists of the wrist, Amy had wired my glasses shut with the left lens back in place. Now it was up to me not to screw it up by bumping my glasses or doing anything else that might pop the lens out again. You can’t imagine how cautiously I walked on and off that stage – and as I played these incredibly complicated and challenging accompaniments, I held myself as still and static as possible. And I am happy to say that I made it to the end of the recital without any further mishap. And no one seemed to notice anything amiss with my glasses, although a couple of freshman guys asked me why I was limping. I wasn’t, I said; I was just walking really carefully because I felt like one wrong move or careless move might have set off another spontaneous destruction of my glasses. And wouldn’t have that been fun?!?!?!
pictured: the handiwork of Amy Haines.