[Finale Pt. 3] The Outtakes: Blooper Reel | #1Summer50Concerts

Pro: this train only makes two stops between New Haven and Grand Central

Con: they gave us one of the shitty old trains without comfy seats and electrical outlets

As I head down to NYC for a self-care day that includes a matinee at the Met and an evening concert at the NY Phil (neither of which I'm going to write about, because SELF-CARE), I figure now is as opportune a time as any to tell you about a few times when fate got in the way of my concert schedule. Sometimes, shit happens.

• I got rained out of the Met Live in the Parks concert I was planning on attending. The headliners were tenor Ben Bliss, baritone Nathan Gunn, and soprano Ying Fang, who I had the fortune to interview not a week before. She's just lovely. So is her voice. Sigh.

• I mentioned this briefly in a prior post, but the first Chamber Music Society concert I tried to go to was completely, 100% sold out. Like, not a seat left. So we rushed to two Broadway theaters and tried to get rush tickets. No luck. We ended up at Upright Citizens' Brigade seeing comedy, which was sort of my default free-evening thing to do.

• After my first Caramoor concert (with Vivica Genaux), I wrote a whole post on Metro-North -- I think it was for the second night of ChamberQueer. I got home and pressed the post button, and the entire thing disappeared. That might have been the low point of my whole summer.

• Concert #1 was slated to be the NY Phil's free Memorial Day concert. But by the time my friend got there to get us tickets, the line almost snaked around an entire city block. I love music. But not that much.

• I was having a good day. Had lunch with friends, sat in a Columbia coffee shop for an hour and a half trying to write my first Opera News review (I got two sentences in that time, neither of which I liked at all), and then had a reading with one of my Bennington quartets. I was slated to go to the Martina Arroyo Foundation's Fledermaus with a friend that night. I caught the D train downtown from Harlem-125th St because the 1 train wasn't running that weekend. Around 81st St, we stopped. Power outage, apparently. I stood there looking like an annoyed New Yorker, because what else was I supposed to do. After about 15 minutes, it became eminently clear we weren't going anywhere anytime soon. So I did something hardcore. I sat down on the floor of the D train and I started writing that Opera News review. By the time we got rescued an hour and a half later, it was pretty much done. Silver linings! Of course, my poor friend was waiting for me at the Fledermaus performance, but I had no service to tell her that I was stuck. Sigh.

• There was a mystery concert #51, but you have to ask me about that in person.

Thanks for sticking with me throughout this project, and stay tuned for Classical Music Geek's Concert Blitz, October 15-20 -- I'll be attending 10 concerts in those five days!