Once upon a time...

...there was a handbell group that toured the greater Michigan area in search of the perfect audience. Okay, not really. We just play at any place that will take us in and feed us. Yes, it's handbell tour weekend, which means that we play 4 concerts in 4 days. Friday we went to St. Claire, and yesterday we were in Toledo, Ohio. Today have a concert in Eaton Rapids, and tomorrow we have one in a nursing home in Lansing. It's been an...interesting...weekend so far. :) Our concert friday was a little bit scary. And by a little bit, I mean a lot. Luckily, last night's concert was considerably better, and I'm hoping that the upward trend continues as we play more concerts.

It's funny how 4-hour rehearsals (with our director, Jane, continously pushing us to get better) cause us to get better slowly over time whereas a really scary experience in front of an audience causes us to whip ourselves into shape virtually overnight. I definitely notice the effect in myself. In rehearsals, I do a good job of recognizing and vowing to work on the musical passages that consistently are difficult for me. Meanwhile, the little mistakes that I make sporadically go by virtually unnoticed in the long-term. For example, when I play a C instead of a C# in measure 21, I think "d'oh!" but if it has never happened before, I attribute it to fatigue, I don't worry about it too much, and I forget about it quickly. But in a concert, all errors are equally bad. It doesn't matter whether or not the error is new. It doesn't matter if the error is a page-turning error or a key signature error or a not-watching-the-director error. Each error I make takes away from the musicality of the piece of music (unless it's a highly creative and ingenious error...but I don't have enough jazz training to do that). It's amazing -- I can remember just about every error that I made in last night's concert -- and I can guarantee that I'll be anticipating those places in the music and being extra careful to play correctly. It makes me wonder how many of these same errors I've made in rehearsals before and have promptly forgotten because it was merely rehearsal and merely a "silly" mistake. And it's funny how many parallels we can draw between music and real life...:)

Oh! And I liked the church we played at in Toledo yesterday. There were cool organ pipes in the balcony. Yay for organ pipes. And I met someone who has worked with Dr. Payn (my bell director at Bucknell), so we struck up a conversation about DP's wonderfully artistic conducting style. AND, right before my bell group walked onto stage, the pastor of the church made some brief comments...INCLUDING telling us the score of the PSU-MSU game (3-0 at that point)!!!

In other news, I had a great morning on friday. I attended an absolutely incredible zoology seminar that morning. The seminar was given by a job candidate for the zoology department, and she was a good speaker. And her research is so incredibly cool. She's been documenting genetic chimerism in marmosets. What does that mean? Basically, marmosets have a high frequency of fraternal twinning. During early development inside the mother, the fraternal twins will occasionally exchange genetic information (chimerism). This has some way-cool implications for genetically-based cooperation and conflict (which is, in my opinion, one of the coolest topics in biology. Not that I'm biased). For an example, say this exchange of genetic info takes place between a male and a female twin. Then the male has his sister's genetic info. Later in life, he mates with a female in the population...but due to the the random segregation of genes in meiosis, he passes along his sister's traits to his future progeny. For the new baby marmoset, now, its genetic father is actually its aunt!! So cool...and this job candidate lady is now examining the implications of genetic chimerism on aspects of parental and alloparental care (for example, does the aunt/genetic father of the baby hold it more often than "normal" aunt marmosets do to their nieces? her work to date suggests that this may be so). Anyway, I'm not summarizing the talk very well here, but I'll just say that it's probably one of the top 3 coolest talks (on any subject) I've ever attended.

The job talk seminar was also very cute. I got into the seminar room and noticed this vase full of roses of all different colors sitting on a display case in the back of the room. My one committee member noticed me looking at it and remarked that the flowers had just arrived -- the job candidate's husband had ordered them to be shipped to the zoology department in time for her talk. I couldn't believe how cute that was...maybe I've just grown too accustomed to academia being uber-professional.

And for my one friend...I have two words. Rabid. Wolf. :)