Sticking It Out by Patti Niemi

Author:Patti Niemi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2016-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Richard came to many of our performances, sometimes with his wife, sometimes alone. We were always playing for him. No one else in the audience knew better how we measured up, no one else knew our strengths and weaknesses like Richard. I was comfortable with him there; with one of us onstage and one in the audience, our relationship made sense.

He came to another of our performances that spring, a concert in Avery Fisher Hall. Fisher, neighbor to Juilliard and home of the New York Philharmonic, was a strange place to play — it appeared that the architects had been more concerned with their vision of concert hall as boxy rectangle than they were with concertgoer comfort. How else to explain that if you were seated on one of the upper floors and facing forward in your chair, you would be looking not at the stage, but at your fellow patrons on the other side of the hall?

But to be standing on that stage was thrilling. To look out and see the ground-floor seats filling up, to see the squirming patrons on the sides as they tried to turn and face the stage — that was exciting. We were playing a huge, ambitious classic — Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. Just like he did with his sonata, Bartok began the second movement with solo snare drum. And, as with our sonata performance earlier in the year, I would be the one playing it.

And fuck if I wasn’t as tightly wound as one of those coiled trick snakes in a can.

We’d already finished the first half of the concert, and now, during the intermission, I was wandering around backstage. I walked down the half flight of stairs to one of the musician warm-up areas, fingering the 40 milligrams of Inderal in the pocket of my black pants. There was an empty chair in the corner, and I sat there with a program, pretending to read the bios. In fact, I was calculating. At seven I’d taken 60 milligrams of Inderal, which had peaked at their maximum potency at eight, just as we were beginning the concert. Now it was nine o’clock, what would be the actual amount still in my bloodstream? And how long was the first movement of the Bartok? The stage manager called 15 minutes left in the intermission. So I now had 15 minutes plus the first movement until my solo. If Inderal took an hour to be at its most effective, how much should I take right now in order to still have some working a half hour from now?

It seemed to make sense to err on the side of taking too much. As I headed up the stairs, my back was to the musicians in the room. I pinched the pills, brought them to my mouth and made like I was picking my teeth. By the time I’d reached the top of the stairs, the pills were under my tongue. To the musicians backstage, I was just getting a drink at the fountain.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.