Back from the wild

Hello suckers...I mean loyal Wavelength subscribers and bloggie guests. The Houston Symphony is back in season. We the musicians have as usual been escaping the heat/ gallivanting around the world since you saw us last, from the grassy plains of Iowa to the volcanic crags of Mount Kilimanjaro.

A good number of Houston Symphony musicians go for 2-3 weeks to the Grand Teton Music Festival. It's a pretty light schedule there, only 4 rehearsals and 2 concerts a week, so come afternoons you can see most of the musicians on a mountain, hopping over streams, sliding down scree, running from grizzlies...One year I remember walking down a very heavily traveled, paved trail to find a group of tourists taking pictures 3 feet away from a baby grizzly. "It's OK," one Hawaiian shirt-clad woman told my rapidly retreating back, "it would've attacked by now, if it was going to." "I don't think its mama cares much about that," I muttered back, reflecting on clueless cityfolk and theories of Darwinism in general.

This year was a VERY good wildlife encounter year for me; by which I mean plenty of viewings not involving scrambling up a tree or crouching to protect my soft tasty underbelly. My dog Stella and I managed to flush out moose (meese? mooses?), foxes, snakes, and most exciting of all, a Great Grey Owl. Fellow Houston Symphony member/violinist Marina and I were hiking up to a mountain called Oliver's Peak when I saw a huge movement to the left of the trail. It was daytime, perfectly sunny and warm, and the owl with her six foot wingspan flew across the trail, paused on a branch not 2 feet from me, assessed my dog for snack potential, (found her wanting) and flew off.

"Can you believe that?" I said excitedly to Marina.
"Believe what? I had a rock in my shoe" she answered.
"...you...you didn't see it?"
"See what?"

Apparently staring at shoes has caused Marina to miss many a sighting. She told me she's missed Rod Stewart standing right next to her in Jackson, Wyoming, because she was fixated on a pair of shoes in the Jackson Bootlegger (dubbed "Bootlicker" by festival musicians).

The Rod Stewart near-sighting was confirmed by the newspaper. It's not unusual to see celebs in Jackson. Many a violist (not naming names) has spent a rehearsal conniving how to get "rescued" by Harrison Ford in his helicopter. Actually, part of the fun of concerts in the Tetons is the "spot the celeb" game. This is usually delivered in a series of urgent whispers in between movements of pieces.

"psst! Robert Wagner, 3rd row center!!"
"You mean the guy sitting next to William Shatner?"
"That's not William Shatner, that's Jon Voight!"
"Really? Maybe....hey look! Edie Falco!! Next to Bob Hope!! Hey, isn't Bob Hope dead?"

I feel sorry for the non-celeb victims of all these unconfirmed sightings. Do they wonder why everyone on stage is staring at them? Do they check their teeth for spinach? The sudden growth of a third eye?

Even better, in my opinion, are guest artists, or conductors that look like famous personalities (though maybe not any more famous than they are in their own minds). Then what you hear, sotto voce in between movements, are things like:

"Hey, I didn't know Colonel Sanders/Bob's Big Boy/Skeletor/David Hasselhoff conducts/plays the piano/violin.."