Bushel #15: Snap
From the Archives: January 7, 2022
Notes: Come From Away, the Broadway musical for which I originated and performed the violin/fiddle part, temporarily closed due to the pandemic on March 12th, 2020, and didn’t reopen until September 21st, 2021. The story below was written after a series of additional Covid closures over the holidays a few months later. Unfortunately, it closed in early October of 2022.
Come From Away was finally able to reopen tonight, following two temporary shutdowns due to breakthrough COVID cases. The company was rallied to the theatre, everyone cleared testing, we put on our uniforms, our battle paint, and onstage we went.
In the middle of #5 (“Wherever We Are”), during a section of long notes, my bow exploded. Sound ceasing to exist, hair everywhere, cloudlike. The hilarious thing is that in the split second it happened, my brain said: Just keep playing. Everything is fine. If you try hard enough you can overcome this problem. And so I did! I took two more bowstrokes on the wood itself.
I’ve always had this acutely physical sensation that my violin is an extension of my limbs, and in that moment the gruesome image that unwittingly popped into my head was that of a soldier getting an arm blown off. And in the instant afterwards, being confused as to why her weapon isn’t in her hand anymore. The music kept playing, and I kept playing the violin, but the violin stopped playing; notes became absences, ghosts.
All this evasion of reality took four beats. In the next two beats, I admitted that I was mortally wounded. The soldiers around me continued dancing and singing and playing.
A few months ago I was walking up the stairs to my dressing room after the show, with my two bows hanging from my index finger. Someone asked me: Do you always take two bows onstage in case one breaks during the show? I laughed, haha. No, I said. I’ve never had a bow break. Not in my whole life, not since I started sawing on this spruce box at age three. The wood bow is my good one, my secret weapon, my beautiful workhorse, best I’ve ever owned. The carbon fiber one is solely for playing the col legno sections (hitting the stick against the strings) of this show we’ve marched through 1500 times. I don’t want to damage my precious battle-axe.
Two beats: My broken friend, horsehair tensionless and swishing gracefully as if back on the horse, rests. Two beats: The second arrow is drawn from the quiver, stick up, hair down for once. Two beats: I wonder if the col legno bow feels excitement, or fear, or comeuppance. The melody is back, it’s coming from my violin. No one out there knows a soldier went down. No one noticed. The show goes on, the battle is won, the audience cheers, some of us live to fight another day. 2022 begins.
My bow was eventually repaired (extremely skillfully - this type of break at the tip is notoriously difficult to fix) at my local luthier, David Segal Violins. It is still my primary bow and the best I’ve owned, even with its scar.
The view from my stand on closing night, October 22nd, 2022.
A note on subscriptions: I turned off paid subscriptions because I wasn’t writing consistently enough. I’m not going to turn them back on for now.
If you read a bushel and you value it, here’s where my tip jar lives. Many sincere thank yous.
Wow! That was a Bow Hair-Raising story - you deserved to take an extra "bow" for that feat (and for sure an extra bow here on after).
Great story!!