The Sunday Musician

I like to keep things simple. It’s my whole approach in life. (Well, not the whole approach; widen the focus just a touch and Mexican restaurants immediately join the picture.) I don’t like 14-page menus, novelists that fill pages with endless descriptions of grass and wallpaper and the smell of elderberries, and I don’t like local productions that mistake form for content. Come to think of it, I don’t like national productions that do it either.

One Christmas Eve Service I participated in fit this bill in every respect. It was over-long, over-scheduled, over-produced, featured numerous, multiple combinations of singers and kids, lighting changes, and for the band, many, many pages of music.

What we did in those days, to avoid buying multiple copies of a songbook, was to buy two or three…oh, why lie…ONE copy of a songbook, and then make photocopies. You know the kind of songbook I’m talking about: the score features three vocal staves, plus two for piano, which means the publishers could only fit about 4 measures on a page, maybe 6, and the song ran 15 pages easy, sometimes more, often with multiple endings, codas and repeats. (Note to publishers: These things are a friggin’ nightmare. It'd help greatly if you included a simple chart for the band.) The guitar players did what they always did – threw the music away and winged it. But for me, I was stuck with the music. There were simply too many songs to memorize, and since I was leading the band, I had to know where we were.

So I taped the photocopied music together in sets of five and six pages, then threw them on the floor when I was done with them. You had to be careful when you whipped them off – too fast and they’d pull the next one with them. Did that a couple of times. Some pages folded over in the pile, some slid halfway to the drums. It was a mess.

For this special service we had – not kidding – probably 20 songs, all with at least two, sometimes three sets of multiple pages taped together. It took me probably half an hour to tape it, and 10 minutes to assemble it in the right order for the service. It was an inch thick. Once the service started, I watched the Order of Service, playing the songs and tossing the music on the floor as I went. Honestly, it was an okay system. Better if I could have re-written the music, but that would have taken weeks.

So there I was, forty-five minutes into the thing, collar itching, sweating under the lights in the old rented theater, back already sore from the long afternoon’s rehearsal, and finally, FINALLY, I got a break. Three grade-school aged kids came out and sat on stools with special-made folders containing long, unbearably meaningful readings about trees and snow, but at least I could just turn my mind off for a while. I had the next song ready, just waiting for my cue - the kids exiting. I had paid little attention during run-through, but I knew this part was fairly long. So I zoned.

Suddenly, silence. My keen, primeval Music Director instincts took over – the pause was too long. Something was wrong. There sat the kids, all looking at the pages, and I thought, “See? See? THIS is what you get when you over-produce something. Now here sits some poor kid who’s forgotten where to come in. Later he’ll be crying at home, Christmas Eve will be ruined, and thirty years later the little Christmas-Service-Ruiner will be sitting in a counselor’s chair, blurting out that every December 24th he gets the urge to paint his face, put on a trench coat and set up a .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle on the building across the street from the church.”

That’s what I was thinking as the silence dragged out. I wanted someone to help the poor guy, save him from this embarrassment. I got a little angry, actually. I pictured myself in someone’s office the next Monday, railing like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington about the uselessness of these lengthy productions.

And then one of the singers half turned toward the piano and said, into the microphone, “Let’s…all…sing that old favorite…’We Three Kings’ (or whatever). Then she just looked at me. I was thinking, “Well don’t look at me, sister! I’m not responsible for this mess.”

And then very, very slowly, like a nerve impulse traveling up a dinosaur’s tail to a brain the size of a Three Musketeer’s Bar, the song title started to sound familiar. Yeah, now I had it – we’d just done that song. The singer was making a mistake!

Or…

I looked at the program and…sure enough, there it was in 14 pt. Times New Roman...We Three Kings - it came after the kid’s thing. What? No – we’d already played it! Then…the nerve impulses fully reaching the candy bar…it came to me: I’d been ‘smart’ and figured I’d save time and hassle by using the same song we were about to sing as an offertory. We’d play the song instrumentally, then the kids would read, then we’d sing the song as a congregation, and the whole thing would just flow and I’d have one less piece of music up on the rack. Except…I’d thrown the music on the floor.

I had no choice but to bend over, aim the better half of my anatomy toward the audience (the piano was facing sideways), and grope around among the Gut Pile until I found the music, all three sections of it. And then make sure the pages were in order.

So in short, it was ME who was humiliated, ME who’d been cocky, over-confident, condescending…in short, the Ed everyone had come to know and love.

I couldn’t find a .50 cal. Barrett (apparently there are laws), so I’ve settled for a two-liter SuperSoaker with a battery-operated laser pointer. The cats love Christmas Eve now.