Phantom limbs

I admit I was giddy with the distractions of spring for a while. Okay, I still am. There's a lot going on, rebirth-wise, green things poking up where there was only brown before, and all like that. Everywhere there is dirt that needs tending to -- not enough of it outdoors, too much of it indoors. 

But, back to the accordion. 

Oh, and about that ... I had an appalling lesson last week, one of those classes when someone else's hands have been surgically attached to your wrists, and they are hands that haven't been practicing. I totally and fatally messed up the right hand of Sous le Ciel de Paris, and then I thought I'd do it all over again. I got preoccupied with the thirds of the left hand, and my right hand wandered around like Prissy in Gone with the Wind. 

Also, the right-hand part of that section is a series of "blind leaps," as Tiina calls them. As I mentioned, I was working with someone else's hands, and those hands were not a good substitute for my own. Which had practiced! Unlike these new stoopnagel ones. I don't know how these things happen. You go to bed at night, and in the morning you wake up with alien appendages. Sometimes it's your head that goes missing, and that is really a nuisance. That's when it helps to have your to-do lists recorded on gqueues.com, or you would be completely at a loss.

But as I was saying.

I was stumbling along, perhaps hoping that Tiina would overlook the fact that all the notes were wrong. Finally she couldn't take it any more.

"Stop!" she said.

I put on my best "oh is there something wrong?" expression.

"Before you try to find the note with your right hand -- think about the sound of the note you want to play."

I may have looked skeptical. What use is imagining the sound of a note to someone deprived of the use of her own hands?

"No really, try it."

I did. And it worked! But I had to stop playing in order to hear the note in my head, which meant the piece was full of pauses, a swiss cheese of a waltz. That didn't seem right, so I tried to rush through the next bit and didn't leave myself enough time to think the note before I played it. Wrong.

Partway through I thought of a scene from Black Swan, the part where black feathers start poking out of her shoulder blades.

Wrong note.

Then I thought I saw Tiina look at her watch, so I looked up at the clock on the wall. 

Wrong.

"You don't have to keep track of the time," she said.

"I only looked because you did," I said. 

"Everybody is talking back to me today," she said to the air.

But the thinking-the-note thing, it really worked. Magic.

Not at home though. This is situation-specific hoodoo.

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Just one tiny digression: some pictures of the train from The Railway Children, which opened yesterday at the Roundhouse Theatre in Toronto. First, outside:

And then inside:

The Roundhouse Theatre was constructed just for this production and is at the foot of the CN Tower.