Things that go "That's ASSAULT!" in the night.

So Saturday night was a concert night. My studio. That’s kids 3-16 and their families, primarily parents. Classical music in a local church, bring a plate for a little social time afterwards.

It was mostly good. Mostly.

Maybe because it’s a long term, or because this was our second concert of the term or it’s cold or there were only a couple of ensemble pieces or, or, or… 

I could keep making excuses, but truthfully I was reasonably devastated by the lack of turnout and the lack of flawless performances. Anyway.

We progress, me looking anxiously (and surreptitiously) at my watch every few seconds to see if we’re on track to stay within an hour running time. Child gets up, plays, stumbles, carries on valiantly, bows, receives applause, I make (positive) comment, etc, so forth. Fine. About to launch into most advanced solo piece of night (actually, can’t remember WHAT I was saying), but I suddenly become aware of a smell.

It’s the smell you whiff when you walk past a sheltered Melbourne laneway, and know that the people sleeping under cardboard beg to drink. They don’t get showers or prescription medicine, and their relatives don’t know when they’ll next turn up. The local cops know them by name, and their trolleys clatter along suburban streets as they bunk up for the night under the eaves of a church or hospital.

There’s a man three feet away from me, gesticulating wildly and shouting that he’s been assaulted. 

He wants us to call the police, he’s not leaving until we do.

A hundred people are looking at him, wondering if this moment is really happening.

I know I went toward him, told him there was a phone in the foyer and that we’d make the call out there. More shouting. “

Sir,- ” 

“Don’t TOUCH me!” and fathers, rising from the seats to cajole, repress, no-one quite sure what law prevails when dealing with madmen inside a church.

Nothing is easy with an audience, so I chose to shoo them out while my indomitable pianist decided to play a little light music. The men did manly things, like calling the police and making sure our intruder did leave the building. We returned and absolved our concert with a Veracini Gigue and a spook-busting Twinkle.

In the days following and subsequent lessons with students, I’ve found myself trying to force the situation into a humorous anecdote. We don’t actually know the truth of it.

He may have been assaulted. He may have been mentally unbalanced, or drunk. Perhaps all three. 

He could have been armed, or more violent, and the shadow of what might have occurred freaks me out more than I’d like to admit.

We’ll have to lock the front doors from now on. 

You have to laugh... or stomp on toes

It's been a week of high drama and we're up to... Wednesday. Awesome.

There's really nothing to make you question your life choices like dancing about in front of eight hundred people. Wearing a pink tutu. With a crying five-year-old on your hip. Who only stops crying when you keep dancing. I mentioned the pointe shoes, right?

Pointe shoes are bad enough when my own sixtyish kilos are sloshing about on top of them; add another twenty of lumpen child (also wearing spiky pink tulle) and they're instruments of torture.

But really, no concert would be complete without the class who can't seem to see the audience (and therefore perform half their dance facing the back, the wings, and (only by chance) the front.

Such are the joys of kinder-aged children cavorting about in front of their adoring parents. The more recent concerts, with school-age children, have been more successful.

Sure, there was the boy who announced (in the middle of a quick costume change between ballet and tap) "Oh, my tap shoes don't fit me any more." Mmhm. In the five days since dress rehearsal your feet have grown THAT much.

Thank goodness for the senior student who retrieved his shoes from the bottom of his bag and undertook to stuff his feet into them. Miraculously, they somehow fitted again.

Oh, there were also feather dramas. Idiot me undertook the manufacture of swan lake headpieces. This means feathers hot-glued onto a paper base in a wing shape, two per girl.

So, making eighty-odd of these took a fair amount of time and used up my 2010 quota of swear words, but that's fine, they'll look great. They did look great. Even better when pinned in with WHITE bobby pins (I know, I'm OCD). And I made six spares. SPARES!

They looked less great when, five minutes before the performance, four girls are telling me there aren't any left. Of COURSE there aren't any left. Some featherbrains have take them HOME after the dress rehearsal and failed to bring them back for the real concert. And so the spares have been used by stupid people and we're STILL short.

Seriously. Would you not check that you have, oh, your LEOTARD? Do me a MASSIVE favor and check on the status of your headgear as well. Thanks so much.

I have the distinct feeling that my lovely flowers post-concert were guilted out of the girls who faffed about in the following way: "We can't find the white castle headpiece!"

Addressing this crisis requires problem-solving abilities far beyond the reach of any normal human. Clearly.

"Have you checked in the chess headpieces box? Have you checked in the pawn hoods box? Have you checked in the box of black and white skirts? And what about looking on the list to see who wore it last and asking them?Hmmmm?"

Invariably, five minutes later: "Oh, it's ok. It was..."
UhHUH. Because it would have killed you to have looked in more than one place before you made it someone else's problem. Skilled. Is it just me, or are we failing to invest our teenagers with common sense?

It's not really very super then, is it?

Today I got my superglue privileges revoked.

It went like this: broken violin (teeny, tiny violin, not mine. Well, belonging to me, but not MINE per se). Hmmm. Scroll detached from body of violin. But superglue cures all (doesn't it?).

Find superglue. Open tube of superglue. Forget consistency of superglue (like water). I'm sure you all know what happened next. SPLASH!

Hmm. Ok. There's glue on my fingers, on my jeans, on my kitchen table... everywhere except the detached bit of scroll, in fact. Oops. I was expecting consistency more like cement? Spakfilla? You know, MOULDABLE, not "Hi, I'm REALLY sticky adhesive and I'm now going to coat every surface in sight!!!"

 I mentioned my fingers, right? MMmhm, now they're sticking together. I run to the sink, but water only makes the glue go off faster. This is good, since it's not so sticky anymore, but I can now feel that four of my finger are effectively COATED in the stuff and THAT feels like rubber bands tied around each finger (no circulation).

A panic-stricken few minutes later, I have nail varnish remover. Unfortunately, it's the gentle, non drying stuff, making it relatively ineffective against my good friend super glue. I wound up basically moving bits of my skin back and forth until the glue crackled and then flaking it off. And feeling very weird and light-headed all afternoon - possibly from the fumes, possibly the rampant chemicals being sucked through my fingertips and into my bloodstream.

AND, to add insult to injury (really STICK it to me, as it were), my lovely husband (after piecing the white smears on the table *thankfully gone now, my obsessive peering at my fingers, and the violin in two pieces together....) declared "Oh, you should have used PVA."
Dammit. I wish he'd asked me why I wanted the super glue in the first place.  Because, you know, enriching as the experience of sicking my fingers together and hallucinating all afternoon WAS, I'm sure I could have done better things with those brain cells. Thanks.

I should also mention that I am now in concert-aftermath mode. This mostly involves feeling like I have glandular again. And I will reconnect my fingers to laptop and actually compose paragraphs of edification amusement random.

Trust no-one... except the man you marry.

I have arrived at the ballet hall today to find it populated by mad religious people putting teenagers through a tedious bout of trust exercises.

Things like pairing them up (one seeing, one with eyes-closed and hands groping) so that one can yell impatiently at the other “Just go FORWARD already! Alright! So there’s a step there! So what! Just go FORWARD” while the blind victim giggles and spins themself in disbelieving circles saying profound things like “You’re totally going to walk me into a FENCE! Oh my gahhhd, this is so SCARY! I like, can’t see ANYTHING and you’re totally going to KILL me!”

Unfortunately, they’re probably not. I witnessed all the seeing-eye-teens (not to be confused with the thinking-brain-teens) being told “Do not take them ANYWHERE near the road. Just don’t go near the road. Take them (broadly gesticulating arm) THAT way.”
So much of the real mystery (and therefore, trust to be gained) has been excised.
With a sledgehammer. 

Real trust games for teenagers in this day and age should include real things. Like holding out a funny-smelling cigarette and asking “Would I REALLY give you drugs to smoke?” Of course, the desired (trusting) response would depend entirely on the calibre of your friend. Or holding the car door open while saying “Of COURSE I’m alright to drive. I only had one beer, and it was light, and it was HOURS ago.”

The real point of all this is that the people who play these trust games are usually the ones who WON’T drink and drive, or spike their friend’s drink, or set them up with a spliff instead of a clove cigarette. The kids who will – maybe they were never kids long enough to enjoy these games in the first place.

Hmm. I’m a bit worried about myself now. Still, given that I agonise over the nature of my influence on the kids I work with on an almost daily basis, I’m probably safe. Safe-ish. More likely that trust games just give me unpleasant flashbacks to being the new (immensely unpopular) kid in year 7.

I’m so not a team player.

P.S. I love my husband. It's a testimony to his easygoing nature that at ten pm on Friday night I present him with a plastic skeleton (well, skull and two hands) which moves up and down beneath a ghostly veil while suspended from a black tube... and say "Hey! Can you get the sound on this to STOP working?"* The unnerving groans that accompany this are not desired for our purposes** (ballet concert) so I have been presented with this monstrosity and asked "Can Michael disable the sound? So it still goes up and down, just doesn't make any sound?"

*I just realised his instant compliance could be linked to my scariness, which increases exponentially and proportionately to days remaining until concert. Shut up, the lot of you who are nodding out there. I can see you and I know where you all live. Yeah. 


**Because our senior students do plenty of moaning and groaning and DON'T require a motion sensor to get started. If you're reading this, good luck refuting that. Really. You'll need it.

So anyway, I dump this in his lap (right on top of the beloved lappy) and remove myself from the room.

Remember, ten pm on Friday night.

He fiddles, goes and gets a screwdriver, and after about fifteen repetitive moaning descants (by which time I'm ready to set the thing on fire) there is no more. Just a gentle whirring, as the skull bobs up and down and spins gently. And my lovely, clever husband picks up his laptop and parks his skinny butt back on the couch. I wish I had that kind of insane equilibrium.

I'm a little bit excited...

I am trying to recruit another violin teacher to work at the primary school with me. She's Suzuki-trained, but no teaching experience yet... the possibilities look good but I'm a little nervous.

I'm trying to extend the olive branch of "Of course, you're welcome to teach from my studio space" but I really only want her to do that if she's going to teach Suzuki philosophy, and her students would be welcome to join onto my concerts and group lessons...but that really only works if they're learning Suzuki repertoire.. and I only want them doing that if there's Suzuki philosophy behind it!
Oh, fraught, dangerous and dipping toes in the lion's lair, I know.
But it could be so good!

I guess I'll just hold my breath and wait for an email reply.

In other news: I am not a swan, I'm an ugly duckling. Or an ugly swanling, since I guess I'm technically too old to be a cygnet anymore. Last night if asked I would have made a sworn testimony that BOTH my feet were not only left, but attached to my hips by planks of wood upholstered with jelly. Isn't that a delightful image? I know, I'm so brilliant with words.
My brain was clearly a lump of aforementioned jelly sloshing about in jug of my skull, because I left home without
:Jazz sneakers (aka keep the skin on the sole of my foot where it belongs)
:Pointe shoes (aka flay the skin from the tops of my toes; who needs skin there anyhow?)
:Pointe shoes no.2 (aka who needs to break pointes shoes in? That's SO for wusses)

I hope you've all enjoyed that belly laugh at my expense and that your computer monitors are still coffee/tea/hot beverage of your choice free. Now go back to work. After you tell me the best thing you've ever forgotten.

(Mind you, wasn't as bad as the time I caught a bus, a train, a tram and WALKED to Melbourne Uni to discover that after two hours of travelling I'd left my #*!&^@#)(*!&^@)*!@&#^ assignment at home. This time I just rang my husband and explained how having shoes at class would make my world an infinitely happier place.  Nearly as happier as if someone put the swan I'm meant to be out of it's misery with a garotte. Oh, wait, garotte's just another name for the WHITE lycra leotard I have to shimmy myself into come Sunday. Universe, this is not funny any more.)

Happy day...

Go T! Congratulations to one of my students; she played her way to a scholarship/music bursary thingy at a local college today and I couldn't be happier for her. She is not a child to whom violin comes easily, but works damn hard and has seen the results of her consistency over the last few months pay off. I've worked with this (nearly teen!)kid for six years, and her parents have been behind her all the way. Actually, not so much behind as beside, in front of, beneath... all the things they should be.

J's at a scholarship interview this afternoon; hopefully he goes well. His presumptive secondary school usually gives scholarships to singers, so a (mostly classical)violinist may be too wacky for them... but we'll see.

Today's been a good day. Three sleeps till our concert and I'm actually not losing sleep over anyone flunking their solo or bursting into tears. They're well prepared and mostly seem to appreciate the improvement they've made by focusing practice on an already-mastered piece and taking it up through different skill levels. And I haven't been at all surprised by the parents/children who have chosen to make that effort!