Of Cough Drops & Futility

I'm sitting on my couch in a semi-comatose state right now, which is a position that has become all too familiar to me this season. I think, prior to this past fall, I had missed a grand total of four concerts due to illness in my ten years with the Minnesota Orchestra. Today, I'm missing my fourth since October. (Granted, the other three were all in a single, awful, piggy-flu week, but still.)

I probably shouldn't have played last night's concert in St. Paul, either, given the likelihood of exposing everyone around me to whatever crud I seem to have picked up, but as previously mentioned, I absolutely hate calling in sick if there's any way I might be able to perform, so I slogged my way over to the Ordway, tried not to touch or breath on anyone, and made a go of it. All things considered, I think I played fairly well, considering that I was having to dive into the pocket of my tux for a wad of tissues every time we had a rest of more than two bars.

But I'm not the only one suffering in our viola section right now. Our two front-desk players, Tom Turner and Richard Marshall, have both been battling a nasty cold for weeks now, with the result that, while they are both healthy enough to work at this point, they are also both prone to sudden, random spasms of coughing at any moment, which is not a terribly helpful condition in our line of work. Especially when you're playing, as we have been this weekend, the complete ballet score to Stravinsky's Firebird, which consists primarily of long stretches of incredibly quiet music during which a coughing fit in the viola section would not go unnoticed.

So last night, Tom, Richard, and I (all sitting tightly grouped at the front of the section) made up a hilariously unhealthy triangle, and midway through Firebird, as I was wiping my nose for the 723rd time since we'd come on stage, Tom started to cough. Richard had already been emitting occasional grunts and soft ahems, but when Tom made a quiet strangling sound, it was clear that he was holding back a big hackfest.

Now, ordinarily, when we're playing at Orchestra Hall, anyone who's sick makes a point of grabbing a few cough drops from a big cup we keep just inside the door to the wings, and stores them on a little shelf just underneath his/her music stand, in case of emergency. Tom and Richard have had about two dozen Halls sitting on their shelf for the last couple of weeks. But at the Ordway, there is no cup of cough drops, and even if there were, the music stands there don't have the little shelf, so you'd have to find somewhere else less convenient to keep them. The upshot of this last night was that, when Tom started to cough, he had no cough drop to help him out.

My stand partner, however, did. Ken Freed is pretty much never without a cough drop, or an extra set of strings, or any number of other emergency items, and as I wiped my nose and Richard grunted and Tom started turning bright red with the strain of not coughing, Ken fished in his pocket and came up with a single cough drop. But here's where it gets complicated: keep in mind that we're in the middle of a performance of a hugely dramatic but extremely soft score, and that we're all sitting right under the conductor's nose, more or less exactly where the eyes of the majority of the audience are probably focused. Also, Ken was sitting to my right, meaning that he was too far from Tom to be able to alert him to the fact that a cough drop was available.

What happened next was possibly the world's most elaborate and yet unsuccessful attempt at cough drop transference in human history. As Ken pulled out the drop and looked at me to see if I understood what he was trying to do, I nodded but also immediately pointed my bow at our stand to signal that we were about to have to play again. Ken quickly handed me the drop, and having only a few seconds to spare before our entrance, I placed it on the leg of my tux pants and got my bow up to the string just in time. Unfortunately, tux pants are extremely slippery, and the drop almost immediately began to slide towards my knee.

We were at literally the softest moment of the piece when the drop fell off my leg and headed for the stage. In desperation, I clamped my shoes together, and somehow managed to catch the drop soundlessly. But now we were into a stretch of Firebird where we would be playing continuously for several minutes without so much as a bar of rest. Meanwhile, Tom was still fighting the cough and my nose was running again.

About five minutes later, we finally had a quick rest, so I let the drop slide off my shoe and, catching Tom's eye, pushed it towards him with my bow. He corralled it with his foot just in time for us to begin playing another unbroken stretch of music. Unbroken, in fact, to the extent that we wouldn't have another rest until the end of the piece. The drop remained sitting on the floor by Tom's chair straight through to the finale. Great success.

I'm relating this story only because I've occasionally been asked by audience members about some odd musician dance that they saw occurring during a performance, and it's usually something like this. Anyone else got any good stories of in-concert damage control shenanigans?