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BAD GIG   PAGE

Face it, if you're a musician, sometimes you have to play some really bad gigs. If you're lucky, you may at leaste end up with a few amusing stories to tell. Well, this is the place for you to share your tales of rotten jobs. E-mail me your stories and I'll post the best ones. Submissions should be taken from actual experiences, however, as the point is to amuse your fellow musicians, embellishment is encouraged.  It's best to paste your submission into the body of the e-mail rather than send it as an attachment. Click here to e-mail me.

I'll share one of my experiences to get things started. This was not so much a bad gig as a really  weird one:

A few years ago, a small opera company was bringing a production of La Boheme to the Washington area. Early in the day of the show, I got a call from a frantic contractor who was trying to find a last minute replacement for a cellist who had gotten sick. I agreed to fill in, not knowing what I was getting myself into. Whenl I arrived at the hall, I was surprised to find out that the orchestra consisted only of a piano quartet plus a few winds. Not only was I the whole cello and bass sections but I also had to help cover some of the missing trombone, bassoon, tuba, and horn parts. My music was a mess of scribbled and pasted in cues. The performance took place in a high school auditorium that didn't have a real pit. Instead, we were set up in a room in the basement just bellow the stage with a two foot square hole cut into the ceiling. Through this hole, the conductor/pianist could hear the singers a little but could not see them at all, nor could they see him. The performance was to be done in English, however, one of the male leads had also taken ill at the last minute and the company could only find a replacement who knew the role in Italian. At least one of the female leads knew her role in both languages and went back and forth between the two. Down in the basement, the orchestra had little chance to wonder about the changing languages. We were straining to read our parts under the dim illumination of one flickering florescent light. The company did own a set of stand lights but one of the stage crew had backed over them with a truck earlier that day. Fortunately, the small group of musicians in the company were good players and very good sports about the whole thing. At the end of the show I didn't know whether to expect to hear applause or boos. Apparently, the performance wasn't too bad because the audience gave it an enthusiastic ovation and, almost the strangest part of all, the Washington Post even gave it a favorable review.

I'm sure there are many stories to top this one.

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