Terry logs: “Wanda, do you have any idea what it's like
being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this
dread of, of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone ‘Are you
married?’ and hearing ‘My wife left me this morning,’ or saying, uh,
‘Do you have children?’ and being told they all burned to death on
Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we'll all terrified of embarrassment. That's
why we're so…dead. Most of my friends are dead, you know, we have these
piles of corpses to dinner.”
John Cleese, screenplay for A Fish Called Wanda
I dunno - after 5 years of playing the harp for a living, I am absolutely unembarrassable. I have asked a tramp to hold my harp at 2am outside a casino while I clamber into my car boot to unjam it from the inside. I have been dressed as a fairy, a mermaid, a 1920s burlesque dancing girl complete with red sequinned cigarette holder, been asked to play topless (no, I didn't), been asked to wear a sailor's outfit (no, I didn't - although that was more because the orchestra requesting it wasn't supplying the gear, and I don't have a sailor's outfit hanging next to my long black), and played behind a screen in case I gave the 100 dining Arab men wrongful thoughts. I have done countless youth concerts in a variety of silly hats, although fortunately not a WW2 gasmask, which was once given to the principal double bass. I've done pubs, clubs, casinos, cruises, discos, orgies, supermarkets and public lavatories. I've also played in private lavatories, when no ground floor warm-up rooms have been arranged. I have performed My Heart Will Go On 75 times accompanied by bagpipes, kit and a Wurlitzer Organ - together. I've improvised sotto voce alone in a neighbouring room, so the creepy religious cult I am working for can pretend they are artistic while still not actually having to listen to me. I've been told the dep I booked was too fat, or too male (although not too fat and too male, as all my boyfriends are hunky).
Correct, schmorrect. I don't care if you're the King of Bahrain, Queen of England, Jesus Christ or Mandy from Kent on her wedding day; I like you if you are nice. People never cease to suprise and delight me, such as the Twickenham rugby executive who asked me if I didn't think the Reinecke harp concerto extraordinarily underrated.
The English class system is the most complex in the world, but entirely absent from the music profession. Perhaps it's because you have to be yourself to be an honest musician; or perhaps, as a friend of mine once put it, being a musician is de facto incredibly embarrassing, so we all got over it somewhere between the religious cult lavatory and the sailor's outfit. Anyhow, being unembarrassable is liberating. Especially if you're English.
The only trouble is, moving to Munich, I've got a whole new set of hierarchies to learn, and another thousand Plätze to put my foot in it.
I have moved. I loaded up my car with all my worldly possessions
(harp, harp stool, harp trolley, harp music, harp strings, harp tuning
equipment, harp screwdrivers, harp-feet-mats and pictures of harps),
played a last wedding and progressed to the ferry, the Hook of Holland
and driving on the other side of the road. All went well, other than
when we stopped map-reading to laugh at how we were passing a place
called Wanken, and immediately got lost in a strange big cornfield. That's what you get for not respecting the environment. 