Today:
- I tried to clean the house. I made it partway through.
- I tried to make reeds — both oboe and English horn (I’ll get back to that after my latté, actually)
- I tried to remain confident even though my reeds are not behaving
— FAIL —
- and, finally … I tried to be more “real” about my bio for our upcoming UCSC faculty recital by supplying the following bio:
Patricia Emerson Mitchell has performed professionally in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1975. She has been a member of San Jose Symphony and the Midsummer Mozart Festival orchestra, freelanced with a number of Bay Area ensembles, and is currently principal oboist of Opera San José, and oboist and English hornist in Symphony Silicon Valley. In addition to teaching at UCSC she maintains a private studio. In order to avoid reed making Patty spends a good amount of time on her website, oboeinsight.com. She is married and has three grown children.
Something we classical folk are told a lot is that we are snooty. Snobby. Inaccessible. We are told there is a “wall” between the audience and performers. So I thought, “Heck, let’s be more of who we are! Let’s break down that wall. Let’s see if we can bash it to pieces.” Okay, maybe not bash it, but at least be a little more “real”. So I asked the players to provide one or two sentences of a more personal sort. Two of the other four did so.
Turns out our bios were “too long” for the back sheet of the one page piece of paper we will hand out (ahh, budget cuts!). Guess which lines came out?
Yep. Nothing personal left.
— DOUBLE FAIL —
- Oh … I also tried to make a latté, choose the bigger of the two remaining chocolate chip cookies, and dip said cookie into my wonderful latté.
Finally … SUCCESS!
