How to make Kathleen lose her temper

It's been a tremendous week - Jorge Alabe came up for a whole week, doing a huge series of workshops and advanced sectionals with the Lions, and then a set of dance classes (with the amazing Rodson teaching samba-reggae dances). Last night, the culmination of it all, a gigantic Brazilian dance party hosted by the Lions. Orixa dance, capoeira, a huge samba-reggae set, a fantastic forro set by Z'bumba and then a gigantic Rio samba set, culminating in the Salgueiro '08 samba.

It was quite a night. I'll fill in the story of the rest of the show later, but this is the story of How to Make Kathleen Lose Her Temper. (method 1 of 2.)

We were supposed to bring the surdos extremely early for tuning, so I'd dutifully showed up two hours early with my third surdo. I found all the surdos and some caixas in a big cluster by the side of the stage, and of course nobody was tuning them. I realized I would have to wait to tune them till I could find Randy, who knew which of the middle-sized drums were supposed to be segundos. I set my surdo and caixa with the other surdos and caixas, and I put the bag that had my surdo tuners neatly on my surdo, ready for tuning. (You can see what's coming, right?).

Fast forward. 8:30pm, the time all Lions are supposed to be here, which means, of course, 1/3 of them are here. I'm hunting for Randy. At this point I get distracted by a new issue: It suddenly turns out we're changing the entrance of our big piece, the Salgueiro '08 samba-enredo. Why change it at the very last second, right before the show, with no rehearsing, you may ask? Well, radical last-minute changes are a proud Lions tradition, and we are not about to break that tradition tonight! (Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to play or die.)

It's actually a very small, simple change and we ought to be able to pull it off. It appears we are going to play a certain break in isolation. The concept is (hypothetically) easy to grasp:

(1) Be quiet
(2) Play break
(3) Be quiet

...but there ensues a long, elaborate discussion that I swear I have seen in a Marx Brothers movie, perhaps "Samba Soup" or "A Night at the Lions Show". Picture a tiny backstage room, maybe 6x12", crowded with over a dozen people all talking simultaneously and chiming in with "And then we stop?" "And then we go into samba right after the break?" "Do you mean we stop, like, we go into samba, or do you mean, we stop, like, we actually stop?" "When do we do the other little break?" "What do you mean we stop?", "Don't we do that other little break?" "I don't understand how we come in after the break." "Is that when we do the bird thing?" "When do we start again?" Our fearless leader is trying over and over again to explain: "No no no no no LISTEN TO ME EVERYBODY, JUST PLEASE LISTEN FOR ONE SECOND, we do the break and THEN WE STOP!" New people constantly streaming in with "Hiiii folks! What's going on?" and the whole discussion starting all over again.

It's all very entertaining, but suddenly I realize it's only ten minutes till show start! The surdo tuning issue flares up bright and burning in my mind, and I physically pull Randy and Mehmet out of the dressing room and up to the surdos. "The surdo tuners are right here," I start to say, and then I realize: The bag with the tuners is gone, and the bag with my caixa is gone. GONE.

Randy and Mehmet just dig up their own tuners and get to work. They're on it.

I forget about the surdos and now all I am thinking is: WHERE IS MY CAIXA?

I look around all the surdos. Look around all the timbals. I ask the backstage guy - have you seen a bag with a snare drum in it? He hasn't seen it, didn't move it. I go downstairs and ask everybody in all the dressing rooms. Anybody seen my caixa? Anybody seen a gray-and-blue bag with surdo tuners in it? Nobody's seen it. Back up the long hallway, back up the stairs.

Now I remember that in the caixa case is my outfit for the night, my Lions t-shirt and white skirt, and all my straps, sticks and mallets that I need to play timbal and third surdo, too.

Now I get worried, and now I start to tear the entire ballroom apart, floor by floor. I search around and under EVERY surdo. Search the whole ballroom main floor. Search the second floor. Go through everything on stage (audience watching curiously), comb through both wings. Ask both backstage guys again. One of them finds a nest of drum bags wedged into a corner. I tear all the bags out, open them all, check every one. Not there.

It's not with the drums, AND it's not with the drum bags, and that's just weird because those are the two logical places for someone to have put a drum in a bag. Up till this point I thought it had just been misplaced, and though I was getting progressively more po'd about it (because somebody's broken the basic rule of, never move an instrument to a different room without telling the owner; especially not at a big multi-band show like this, where it's generally difficult to get messages to everybody, and where it might belong to a totally different band.) Now for the first time I wonder if it might have been stolen.

A fury starts to boil in my blood.

Back downstairs again, this time to bellow a desperate question to the whole band in the dressing room: "Has ANYBODY seen my bag??? My caixa?? Anywhere?" Everybody looks around. Nobody's seen it.

Back upstairs again, where I just wander around staring at all the same things I've already checked three times. Back downstairs where I walk the long hallways to the end. I look hopelessly under the coffee maker and the water jug, and on the tops of the cabinets. Not there.

It's time for the show to start. Everybody vacates the dressing rooms and heads upstairs. I'm left alone with just a couple of stray Lions who are grabbing water bottles for the show. It occurs to me that now that everybody is out of the way, I could maybe crawl under all the furniture.

Crawling under the furniture, at last I find it. Whoever had taken my caixa had put it:

Downstairs,
Down the longest hallway,
At the furthest back dressing room,
In the furthest back corner of that dressing room,
Under the table,
In the furthest back darkest corner under the table,
Covered with a jacket,
Shielded with other bags in front.

I rip it open. There's my caixa. And my show outfit.

It's thirty seconds till the show starts.

There is now a white-hot fury BLAZING through my whole body.

Someone innocently asks "Did you find it?" and I spin and roar:

"YES and I WILL FUCKING ***KILL*** ANYBODY WHO **EVER*** HIDES MY DRUM FROM ME LIKE THAT AGAIN!!!!"

Immediately I was ashamed of my outburst, but, Lions being Lions, they forgave me instantly and all were just concerned about me. I was actually shaking, I was so mad. Whoever moved my drum - what were they THINKING? Hiding a drum like that??? Tucking it as far away as possible where it would be nearly impossible to find??

I've been in hundreds of complex dance shows at this point in my life. Day-long, multi-band shows with hundreds of dancers and drummers, complicated choreographies, quick set changes, quick costume changes, tight schedules. You just don't fuck with people's stuff like that!!!! You DON'T MOVE that one bell that's in a funny place, that white petticoat mysteriously sitting in the wings, that bit of fiddle rosin in the dressing room, that little bag of safety pins, that little guitar pick sitting on the music stand. You never know when something's been put there for a reason! You just don't move shit, and if you have to move it, you slide it only a small distance so it's still within eyeshot of where it was, and if you have to move it further than that, you TELL everybody. If you moved Steve's Macedonian tambura and Steve isn't around, you picture in your mind whether or not Steve is going to be able to ever find it again, and if you think there's any chance that he won't, you goddam FIND STEVE, chase him down at the Starbucks a mile away if you have to, just to tell him "Steve, your tambura is now behind the big amp."

A half hour later I had almost gotten back to normal and was upstairs watching the capoeira group enter. I watched as they walked confidently over to the surdos and then... that look came on their faces, that puzzled searching look, and immediately I knew what had happened. Somebody'd moved the capoeira group's atabaque! And this time the whole audience was watching.

Luckily they had an entire group to search for it, and the atabaque was bigger and more obvious that my caixa, and hadn't gotten very far. The show was back on track in only about three minutes. But still! Jeez.

Don't! Move! Drums!

Jeez, I haven't lost my temper like that since I crossed the Fire Swamp. But that's another story.