TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 112

[Tobie Shapiro]

January 6, 2000000000000000007


Dear Every All,

	Feyna will be taking a music appreciation 
course at City College of San Francisco.  She'll 
also be taking a humanities course (buckshot), 
and an English course (lots of reading).  We went 
online to buy her books.  We'd gone on line 
previously to register her for classes and to pay 
for the tuition, too.  Everything happens on line 
now.  When I was in school, everything happened 
by waiting in line, not on line.  Since it's a 
community college, the tuition didn't amount to 
too much, not compared to the cost of a state 
university these days.  When I was in school, 
average people could actually afford to go to the 
University of California.  Now, it costs almost 
as much as going to Harvard.  It's criminal 
really.  Education sponsored by the government 
ought to be available to everyone.  It is the 
great equalizer.  Don't we want to lift up the 
poor and give a chance to the less privileged?  I 
guess not.  Anyway, the books for her classes 
didn't come to too much, except for the music 
appreciation class.  This involved getting a 
series of CDs and printed matter, specially 
concocted for the class, and I wound up shelling 
out 350 hot simoleans for that.  Feyna was 
outraged.  But I told her: that's the way it 
goes.  It's education.  We pay.  Now my checkbook 
is a little thinner, but Feyna will be fat with 
knowledge.  Still, I think they ought to limit 
the amount of money that they require you to 
spend on any class.  This could break the bank. 
No wonder no one appreciates music.



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The anatomy of a cello

	The tail pin on a cello is the long metal 
spike that comes out of the bottom of the 
instrument.  It is meant to find a fixed spot on 
the floor and hold the cello up so that you don't 
have to clench it between your knees.  There was 
a time when that was the standard way to play the 
cello, squeezing the thing between the knees to 
get the strings in position for the bow.  But 
now, only historically informed ensembles employ 
that technique when playing music from the 
eighteenth century and before.  I've tried it. 
It's very inhibiting.

	So this tail pin comes out of the cello 
from a hole framed in the bottom.  The pin gets 
shoved back into the cello when you put the 
instrument away, and a little key, like a wing 
nut, tightens to hold the tail pin in place. 
There is another more exotic way of attaching a 
tail pin to a cello, which is a piece of wood 
turned on a lathe, that holds a tail pin within 
it.  And that piece of wood is what gets put in 
the bottom of the cello.  Either way, the end pin 
comes out of something, and is cinched in to keep 
its position so the cello doesn't slide on it to 
the floor.  This can happen if you don't tighten 
the screw well enough.  And it actually happened 
to me once when I was playing the Kabalevsky 
cello concerto (go buy that CD.  It's a luscious 
concerto) with the Northern California Honor 
Orchestra.  We were in concert.  I was all 
dressed up in a chiffon magenta gown, with shoes 
dyed to match.  My hair was neatly done, 
everything about me clean and orderly.  I was 
hardly recognizable.

	We were in the middle of the first 
movement and I had a big octave run coming up, 
not even a chromatic octave run or an octave run 
following a scale, but forward and back, up and 
down, then a furiously bowed pair of octaves 
rising high into the upper register, part of a 
grand finale to the cadenza.  It was that most 
difficult part of the piece that I looked forward 
to with anticipation and fear.  Would I get it 
right?  Would I mess it up?  Just a few bars 
before the octave run, the tail pin started 
receding into the cello, disappearing from view 
as the cello swallowed it up whole.  So, leaning 
on the cello, I began to hunch over closer and 
closer to the floor.  This was when the emergency 
tactics needed to be employed.  I hoisted the 
cello up and hooked the scroll on my shoulder as 
I held the instrument between my knees, and I 
played the damn octave run perfectly.  There have 
been crazy virtuosos who planned emergencies like 
the breaking of a high string so that they could 
show off by playing the entire piece on a lower 
string.  This was not my gambit.  I prayed for a 
performance without extenuating circumstances.

	I must have been around nineteen when I 
purchased a new end piece, the kind that is a 
separate hunk of carved wood with the pin that 
comes out and withdraws.  This tail piece, I 
could carry with me apart from the cello.  The 
new end piece was very special.  The pin came out 
like a stiletto from its sheath.  I could loosen 
the screw and flip the end pin, sending the pin 
flying quickly out.  It would stop of its own 
accord when it reached its full length.  There 
must have been a stopper or an enlarged bulb on 
the pin that prevented it from coming out of the 
tail piece.  I enjoyed myself immensely, flipping 
the pin out and then pushing it back in, flipping 
it out and pushing it back in.  I brought it with 
me to an appointment with my shrink, and I took 
it out to demonstrate it for him.  Lookie what 
I've got!

	I loosened the screw and showed Dr. Foote 
how I could get that pin to fly out of the end 
pin and stop abruptly at its full length.  But 
when I did this, the pin didn't stop flying.  It 
flew directly out of the tail piece and stuck in 
the wall like an arrow, twanging only a few 
inches from his head.

	"What did you really mean by that?" would 
have been an expected shrink-like reaction.  But 
he only gasped.  I guess I could have killed him. 
I got up and pulled the end pin out of the wall, 
went back to the couch and sheepishly put the 
thing away in my purse.  I apologized lavishly, 
passionately.  I offered to pay to fix the hole 
in the wall.  I wonder what I DID mean by that.


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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net