I sing in a choir once in a while and we just started our spring season rehearsal last night. We are singing Mozart's Requiem. I know some of you are music lovers, so you probably know how magnificent the piece is, but also how challenging to sing it.
Normally we take ten to twelve weeks to rehearse, but we have only six weeks this season before the spring performance. So everybody is trying to make best of what we can do, but then everybody is under a little bit of anxiety.
Last night, our choir director (by the way he is one of the most beautiful human being I have ever known, which makes our job much more fun) divided the women's group by their parts for fifteen minutes. I ended up standing right next to "Margaret" who is a perfectionist as her friends often call her. She is very musical and she and her family often play ensembles together in public, with their cello, violin, piano and sometimes flute. She has a lot of nervous energy, which probably is one of the reasons why she is highly accomplished microbiologist and an award winning professor, but she can wear you out.
We were counting the beats of one of the very complicated sections of the music. She could not stand still while we were doing it. She moved around back and forth and half way turning this way and that around her standing area and her movement wasn't anything in synch with the rhythm of the music. I got so distracted that I closed my left eye, which was the side she was to me, to block her off from my view and read the music with my right eye. Ten minutes into this divided practice right next to her I was getting seasick, just like when you are trying to read in a moving vehicle. She whispered once "I need to have my piano tuned because I cannot do this piece without the accompaniment." I had to bite my tongue not to say "No, Margaret. You need an exorcist, not a piano."
I went to the bathroom to just get away from the seasickness, twice in that fifteen minute span. A woman, who retired from a high school music teaching job about a hundred years ago later called me to her side and said, "Honey, it's just the age. Sometimes I have to go to bathroom every five minutes. There is a cure for the bladder problem though, you know." For a while I didn't know where she was coming from, then I realized what she was saying. I thanked her a lot and told her that I will call her if I needed more medical information on it. She winked at me with a "I won't tell anybody about your problem" kind of friendly look. I love this place. I just have to find a better place to stand next time.