Hello all,
today’s news, I did an interview on David Rottenberg’s Ballet site
http://balletconnections.com/JustinLocke
hopefully you will find some of it to be amusing . . . an excerpt is below. these are stories from my ballet playing days that didn’t quite fit into “real men don’t rehearse ”
A quick background, I met david, (fellow author publisher), at the Five Seasons Restaurant in Jamaica Plain. It was kindof an algonquin round table, only with tofu. Anyway we keep in touch and he has become a ballet aficionado lately, and since i played some 500 nutcrackers, he asked me to do an interview for his site which, if you are into ballet, has a lot of cool stuff. — jl
Q. You have written a very humorous book about playing in orchestras. Anything humorous happen in the ballet orchestra?
Justin: Oh jeez . . . well, when you are in orchestra pit, the audience cannot see you. And this opens the door to a whole new level of fooling around. For example, in the Nutcracker, there is a scene with the rats and toy soldiers where a gun goes off. Our percussionist had a real live 38 caliber pistol for this sound effect. When he fired it in the air, the packing of the shell would come raining down on the brass section. So he took to packing the muzzle with more and more newspapers and what not to get an even bigger effect of crud raining down on these other musicians. One night he goofed though, and put so much stuff in there that the gun failed to go off.
Also in Nutcracker, when the mice came out they used to hassle us directly, was great fun, as we would wallop them on their mouse heads with our bows. We thought about making up a big 2-foot long box of D-Con but figured that might be too much.
Another night, a percussionist ran a fish line the full length of the ceiling of the pit, and had a bag of that phony snow rigged up in the ceiling above the celeste. And as the celeste player played Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, he was subjected to a blizzard of snow on his keyboard. Hard not to laugh out loud.
And one day at a kiddie concert ballet, the two lead dancers had to do this move where the guy picks her up and her feet go up over his head, and his knee buckled under the weight (not injured, just slipped) and they went splat all over the stage in a pile of arms and legs at the high point of this Tchaikovsky music. Not something you see every day!
There are more stories like that in the book… I have lots of stories like that, buy me a few drinks and I can go all night. I also wrote an entire story based on the true stories of the fooling around of the brass section of the Boston Ballet. It’s called The Legend of Albert Haaaugh, and you can read it on my website.. justinlocke.com/al.htm
