Once a week we conducted a pick-up orchestra from the Manhattan School of Music and they were a dreary lot - not in their playing as they were super - but they hated playing the same piece for the 4 of us for 3 hours as we made one boo-boo after another, got yelled at, ridiculed and generally had our genitalia removed for sport.
We really had to know the music before those nights so about this time (class was at 7p sharp) we students huddled and tried to talk each other out of throwing up. It seemed it was always raining (like tonight) and the wind was blasting down Broadway (like tonight), the lights of the city and streetlamps felt like old London (like tonight) and all of us desperately wanted a couple shots of courage (I'll have a nice mulbec thank you).
I'm listening to the symphony in the picture above. That was one of our weeklies. It is 40 years later. 40. I can hear every note in my head. I can still write out the score from memory. I'm not saying that in any other way that when pressed, the mind does some work.
I need to keep pressing as I get older. I want to remember tonight when I'm 100 as much as I remember the auditorium stage in Horace Mann hall. I still own the music score. It is right up here.
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