Faux Paws

As often as possible I make it over to my neighborhood tennis courts to hit some balls with a friend. We usually play five games to eleven, we don't serve to start off, it's more like table tennis with gigantism. In the middle of game three my friend recognized Craig Kilborn looking for a tennis court.

Here's my history with Craig:



Anywah, I haven't seen him since the day the show aired. It was fun to catch up. He's still abnormally nice to me, and I hope to be able to lone him a kidney at some point to return the favor. We talked about Frank Sinatra and this song.

Craig reminds me of Neil Slater, the director of the One o'Clock Lab Band at North Texas. They're both real tall, have a sharp biting wit, and have a goofy side that's unexpected. Also, I can now add that they're both tennis enthusiasts to the list of shared mannerisms.

There are many Neil Slater moments and quotes that were gently scarring, but mostly make for good stories after the fact. Among them: "it's not too late to go to med school." The rest involve adult language and belittling oversleeping drummers. We'll save those for another time.

My time spent with Craig significantly more brief than my five semesters in the One o'Clock Band, but Mr. Kilborn's half-joshing "don't fuck this up" before I performed on the show was definitely Slaterian.

Now it's back to work. On my plate today: I'm arranging some strings for Brandon the Rogers today. He's going to record a version of "Broken" and I'm sitting down with a couple of wikipedia pages to remind me of the appropriate playing ranges and Beethoven's String Quartet in C sharp minor, to remind me of how a string quartet is supposed to sound).

This will be my first time writing for a string ensemble, which is one of the reasons I jumped at the chance to do it. I'm hoping to avoid any amateur-hour missteps (by the way, what's the plural for "faux pas", is it "faux paws"?). I guess I'll start by writing in pencil. After that I'm gonna go for the gusto like Sasha Vujacic shoots threes.

Wish me luck.