BOCAL NIGHTMARES

About a month ago, my friend spilled her bassoon out onto the floor from about waist level. Twice now, I’ve had very vivid dreams of calamity befalling my beloved bassoon....

In the first, I’m practicing at home and suddenly just let go of my bassoon. It falls to the floor after hitting a cabinet. The bell is in two severed pieces and I can’t make out what happened to the rest of it but it is very Not Good.

The second was last night. I’m in chamber orchestra and our former conductor is at the podium again. We take a break and as usual, I rest my bassoon safely in its stand and wander offstage. I return to find a large orchestra-pit size gap where I had been sitting. The stage crew gave us insufficient notice of this stage change and the conductor has moved my bassoon for me. Fine. Actually, not fine but better than than down the hole. We are now about 30 feet to the left of the strings, have a very small walkway to navigate, and there is a large black curtain obstructing our view. Worse yet, I sit down in time for a stage crew member to grab and mangle my bassoon and bocal right in front of me. A small split starts at the cork, slowly unraveling the entire length of metal until I have this curly mangled metal thing before me. I then realize this is NOT my bocal. The conductor has cavalierly misplaced my bocal and the owner of the hall only points me to a pile of misshapen, non-Leitzinger bocals, and is of no help whatsoever. Like the not-my-bocal, I come completely unraveled and am crying and wailing inconsolably. 

I stayed in bed an extra 45 minutes trying to sleep my way to a resolution on that one.