The pit, the pit, the pit, the pit, in the pit.
My wife had Friday off, and not having anything scheduled for the day, I ran some errands to give her some time alone in the house. I made stops at Micro Center and My Music Store, as well as a handful of other assorted places. I was mainly looking for a 10 ft speaker cable, which I never did wind up finding. While making a stop at a Music Go Round, I found a used 70′s era Aria A-1910 bass, which is a Gibson SG bass copy. It was super cheap, but also short scale, and unfortunately the electronics were a mess. Fixable, but I’m looking for a secondary stage bass, as opposed to a collector/recording bass at this point. I also picked up a bike rack for my car, making the process of getting my bike to the park far easier. Oh sure, I could just bike there, but at my current level of fitness, I’d already be tired by the time I started the actual trail riding part.
After a delightful dinner of sweet potato fries and tuna burgers, it was off to the second performance of Sweeney. It went well, although I still had a few WTF moments completely missing some key changes. Oops.
Saturday morning my wife went off to donate platelets, and I did some light cleaning and fixed lunch when she got back. We then weeded the garden, sections of which were primarily weeds. I think it had something to do with the compost that we used in that part of the garden, but the ratio of weeds to actual plants was easily 15:1. Soon enough, it was off to Sweeney once again. Saturday’s show was the best yet, as didn’t make any glaring mistakes. I did have an annoying technical issue, which I was able to fix, and could have prevented. Friday night, when packing up at the end of the show, I thought about and realized that I should probably check my batteries before the show started on Saturday. I’m running a tuner and a volume pedal, both on battery power, and while they both had fresh batteries at the start of rehearsals on Monday, I realized that I’d played over 20 hours that week. I neglected to test the batteries before the show started, and sure enough, half an hour into the first act, I started getting distorted signal through my monitor. I was fairly certain it wasn’t my bass (which has active electronics, and therefore a battery), but distortion is the first hint that your bass battery is low. I figured it was probably the volume pedal, so between songs I quickly plugged directly into my amp, and problem solved. I tested all my batteries during intermission, and sure enough, it was the volume pedal. So, next week I’ll be running them off of AC power. Lesson learned.
After the show, the BPAC had a sort of “late night cocktail hour” thing going on, with some local artists and musicians performing, as well as drink specials. I enjoyed a Fat Tire and hung out with some of the other pit musicians, who invited me to a late dinner at Applebees. I had a great time, and I lost quite a bit of the “holy crap I’m old!” feeling I’ve had going into this show.*
Sunday we rolled out of bed a bit later than normal, and after breakfast started working on a new project: switching the washer and dryer to a different spot in the laundry room. Not that big of a deal, except that we also have to move a sink, and therefore have to move a whole bunch of pipes, faucets, and connections. We started by cutting a big hole in the wall, and found that the situation will be quite a bit harder than we though. So now we have a hole in the wall. Woo hoo! It actually won’t be that tough, just a bit tricky. We then headed off to the mall so my wife could get a haircut, and I wandered about, picking up a used copy of Iron Maiden’s Piece of Mind**. Afterward, we headed to pick up some free grilled chicken at KFC***, and returned home to eat chicken and watch True Blood. Later, my wife worked on some wedding photos and I cleaned the garage. I felt oddly out of place all evening, figuring out that it was the only night in the past week and a half that I wasn’t working with the theatre. Crazy.
* This fact still remains: I’ve been playing bass longer than a handful of the pit orchestra have been in existence.
** Purchased from a store where one of the pit orchestra worked, which I was not aware of.
*** Using our rain check vouchers from several months ago, part of the whole free chicken fiasco