Thursday, March 18, 2010

Poncho's Audition & the Violin


I’ve decided to learn to play the violin.

Today, a lovely spring day, I chanced by a moving/yard sale that was only about ten miles down a half mud, half gravel road past the sign that first caught my eye. There I found a really nice violin with four strings and a rock-like hunk of resin in a battered old case. It only cost ten bucks and I just happened to have it! Oh happy me!

My daughter, who happens to live close by, has not been very supportive. I first became interested in the violin when she was an infant. I can’t remember now what ever made me want to play…it was so long ago. I do remember her brother and sister huddling under the sewing machine cabinet with their little hands over their ears when I practiced. Not a one of those kids had a lick of musical appreciation and never played an instrument. I blame it on my first husband’s genes because my two sons from my second husband are very musical. (Of course I had given up the violin by the time they arrived.)

Come to think of it, I’m sorry to say, my life has been riddled with failure. .just one debacle after another. Those violin lessons were just an example of a long string of incomplete and unproductive events in my life. The best I can say for myself is that on several occasions I have provided my neighbors and acquaintances with something to smile about.

But success, or victory or whatever you want to call it seems to elude me.

Take the time I took Kenny’s Beagle Hound pup, Poncho, to the Lyric Opera’s audition in Kansas City. They were looking for hound dogs for a production that had an English hunt scene and the lucky hound owner was to receive free seasons tickets. I love the theater.

I drove all the way to Kansas City from Henry County. The dog threw up in the backseat and wallowed in it. I had to stop at a car wash to hose him down.

When we got to Barney Allis Plaza in Kansas City the grassy little park area was full of well-dressed media folk parading their own mostly overweight but well-behaved dogs around on leashes. None of them looked like they had been through the car wash. I recognized several of the PBS-TV people that I had met through my Public Relations classes at CMSU but they didn’t seem to recognize me. It was just as well.

Poncho was pretty excited and let out that wailing, howling thing Beagle hounds do non-stop. He fought the leash and drug me all over the park, tangling us up with two fat, double-leashed Bassets and a skinny Greyhound who looked like he hadn’t eaten in three weeks.. The Public Relations Director who had seemed so very friendly on her visit to CMSU the last semester seemed rather cool.

I gave up and had to drag Poncho back to the car and we went home. But if you did happen to watch the news that night, KCMO-TV had a segment on the audition and the hound sound you heard was definitely Poncho.

I could go on and on about such failures but I am getting depressed.

However, I am more mature now and I believe the violin is just the ticket for a redeeming success!

No comments:

Post a Comment