4-30-11 Mr. Wilkes

Thanks to Blogger's automatic resizing limitations, the screenshots below may be a little fuzzy. But I have to share them because they remind me exactly why, for all its shortcomings, I love Facebook. Thursday was my high school band director's birthday. I left him a short note with a link to the particular section of Scheherazade that I recalled sight reading in band for Mr. Wilkes some 24 years ago. It was Mr. Wilkes' last year at Dobie before he left us for Tennessee where he now serves as the Director of Orchestras at the Chatanooga School of Arts and Sciences. 

Now, here's the thing. I don't think I have a particularly exceptional memory. But there are certain moments in your life when you spend the rest of your lifetime remembering them as though you'd videotaped taped them and played them back a thousand times. And this just happens to be one of those times.

I'd always been a lazy player, one who never practiced enough and skated by. My freshman year I'd come in as the second chair oboe to Robin Blilie, senior and the most amazing, committed, accomplished oboe player I'd ever known. I was not worthy. The day the spring class transfer came through to send me to the First Wind Ensemble as second oboe was about a week into class. They'd been working on some piece of music that blackened the page with notes, which I must say, as I would recall it in years to come, as similar to Salieri's complaint about Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio, "Ten minutes of ghastly scales. Arpeggios! Whizzing up and down like fireworks at a fairground!" I sat there quite dumbfounded as they played through it. Mr. Wilkes stopped everyone, gave me one his patented stares, and said, "You have to try."

It was Mr. Wilkes who introduced me to the film Amadeus in fact. We watched it later that semester at the end of the year, after it had won its eight Academy Awards.

For some reason, I remember Mr. Wilkes directing the orchestra on one of those days where the elementary school kids come to hear a performance and touch the instruments. We were playing Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. I froze, or my reed did, or maybe both, when we came to the first line of the oboe solo (the entrance of the duck) and he nearly came over the first row of violins to throttle me for missing it.

I also remember him after school one day playing a jazz number, written and recorded by my boyfriend Lance and a number of other former band members, on the loudspeakers into the band hall because he was so impressed.

But the above Facebook comments are in reference to one of my most vivid memories. It was his last year as my director when he selected passages from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade for the wind ensemble to sight read that stands out as most distinct in my memory. I'd heard the piece only months before when I'd gone to see The Man with One Red Shoe, a farcical comedy starring then relative newcomer Tom Hanks, as a violinist whose orchestra performs Scheherezade in the film.

When we started our way through it, I immediately recognized it. In other words, although I'd never seen the notes before, I'd heard them, which is all that mattered. So after the bassoon solo, came the oboe solo, which I already knew how to play since I'd already heard the melody. (I told you, lazy.)  Anyway, about halfway through the solo, I glance up at Mr. Wilkes who has this bug-eyed look on his face and he's just finished mouthing something, which I think was intended for me, and which I instantly read as doing something wrong. I think I've come in at the wrong time or something and stop playing. Turns out, he'd just mouthed "She's sight reading!" to the assistant band director, Mr. Scott, who was sitting at the back of the band hall.

When I learned this, I have to tell you I beamed with pride the rest of the day.

So it's not all that surprising that this would stay with me for all these years. What delights me is that I could share it again with him and some other former band members. This, for me, is why Facebook exists.