1 Down, 7 to Go!

Sitting down to write this blog post, Ruth and I are relieved and very pleased to have played our first concert tonight. It went very well and we got good responses from the small, yet enthusiastic audience. I'm pretty sure the concert went so well because we were wearing these:

The hours leading up to the concert were mildly eventful. We had a touch-up rehearsal in the early afternoon. We must have been a little out of sorts because we kept dropping things and couldn't get our music in order. We needed to run through the Biber Sonata one more time and there is a movement in which I put a strip of paper in the strings to sound like a snare drum. It turned out that the paper was a little too short, and I hadn't rigged it quite correctly, because half way through the movement I stopped and Ruth said, "the paper disappeared!" I looked down sadly and said quietly, "it is in my cello..." The strip of paper had made its way out of the strings and had fallen into the cello through the f-hole. Picture the following scene:

Leah holding the cello over her head, trying to position the paper near the f-hole. Ruth is kneeling underneath with tweezers trying to extract the paper. It was like musical "Operation".

Eventually, we managed to get it out, and subsequently figured out a more secure way to position the paper. Luckily, there were no malfunctions during the concert tonight.

After we finally got the paper situation sorted out, Ruth asked me if I smelled smoke. I did, but thought it wasn't a big deal so we continued practicing. A couple of minutes later the smell had intensified so much that we thought that the apartment building was on fire. We quickly started running around trying to figure out where the smell of smoke was coming from and discovered that there were fire trucks and police cars down the street along with a large plume of smoke. We still don't know what's going on, but the street is still blocked off. Maybe we'll be able to provide details tomorrow. We are relieved that Ruth and Ben's house didn't catch fire though.

(Update: We were relieved to find out that no one was hurt in the fire. http://westhartford.patch.com/articles/fire-raging-at-multi-family-home-on-prospect-avenue)

After the concert, Ruth and I congratulated ourselves with a glass of wine.

Now, after a late dinner of Hawaiian pizza, oatmeal cookies, and writing this post, we're pretty tired and ready to head off to bed. We're looking forward to playing for a group of 50 kids tomorrow afternoon - it should be a fun concert!