The Note

This morning, like many mornings, I was driving the girls to school.  I tuned the radio to "their" station, HOT99.5 (gag).  The morning guys were talking about songs that must be played loud...and to my surprise on comes Andrea Bocelli singing Con te Partiro.  What? Huh? This can't be.  But he is absolutely right, you are compelled to turn up the radio....and....there it is.  The note.  The note that when a tenor sings it with such purity of tone and immaculate delivery, my breath catches and I start to cry.  I can't explain why, it just IS.  I'm playing the song on You Tube -right now- and I am crying.  It fills your soul so completely that it forces everything else out through your eyeballs.  Not unlike the brown note.  Sort of.

Attention readers! 

The following is a complete sidetrack from today's intended subject matter....

What is the brown note, you may ask? The brown note is a note at an extremely low frequency that when played supposedly causes people to lose control of their bowels.  Seriously.  Well, as serious as an urban legend can be anyway.  For example, on the season finale of The League, Taco took a bunch of vuvuzelas and reconstructed them to emit the infamous brown note.  The MythBusters even tried it.  The brown note theory was even tested as weaponry by the Germans, Russians and shockingly (or not), the French.  Nikola Tesla used the brown note to play a joke on a friend.....now behold the genius that is Tesla, Man Out Of Time....

"For entertainment, Tesla once convinced his good friend Mark Twain to test out a vibrating platform in his Manhattan lab. Twain took him up on the offer and found it to his liking. When Tesla commanded Twain to come down off the platform Twain refused because he was having a good time. A few minutes later Twain ran from the device. It seems that Tesla had deliberately neglected to tell Twain that the vibration tended to cause diarrhea."  http://www.intuitor.com/resonance/tesla.php quoting Margaret Cheney, Tesla Man Out Of Time, 1989, Dorset Press —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.90.183.53 (talk) 02:51, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

So, back to my gushing admiration for tenors.  This gushing admiration will come as a surprise to some of you, but not all of you.  I am a lover of ALL music (except country) but many of you probably know me as the crazy, metalhead, up-the-irons Iron Maiden lover.  Or you may know me as the dressing-in-costume-for-The Legwarmers show, shameless white-person-dancing, Aquanet-using 80's lover.  But not many of you know me as the tenor lover.  We all know that Bocelli is amazing, but I stand firmly on my opinion that there is no. period. one. period. better. period. than the Maestro himself, Mr. Luciano Pavarotti.  Which got me thinking (danger, Will Robinson!).....

I got to meet him once.  And because of that meeting, and the fact that I was with my Dad when it happened, I feel an extra special connection to him and his music.  We were on a flight from LA and I couldn't have been more than 8 or 9 years old.  This was when Pavarotti was HUGE (literally...he took up two first class seats).  To a little girl, who knew who he was, I was not only intimidated by his status but definitely also by his size.  Dad wanted to get his autograph for Mom.  So of course, as always, he made ME do it.  I remember like it was yesterday.  "Go get his autograph for your mother."  "No, Dad you do it!" "He's not going to give it to me.  He won't say no to a little girl.  You do it."  "Fine." (sigh. eyeroll.) 

My Dad had a way of always making me do stuff I didn't want to, but that was good in a way as it pushed me outside of my comfort zone.  Like the time he made me take the wheel of our 42-foot sailboat when I was around 10...as a freak hailstorm was hitting Long Beach Harbor when we were heading out to Catalina Island. "I'm going down to look for rain coats. I'll be right back. Hold the wheel!" "I don't want to! You do it!" "Just hold the wheel steady! You'll be fine." "Fine." (sigh. eyeroll.) ...of course when he finally comes out the hail storm is over.

Or the time he made me go down the double diamond slope at Mammoth, ok honestly it was probably intermediate but I was maybe 12 so it looked a double diamond to me. (And "double diamond" just sounds better for the purpose of a compelling story.)  It was spring break in No. Cali so we had warm days/cold nights. The slope was straight down at the start, so much so that my skis were hanging out in the air over the edge, and it was coated with a layer of ice from the overnight freezing. And since it was morning and going to be warm that day, I was wearing only jeans and a shirt.  NO GEAR. No gloves or anything. "Dad, I'm NOT doing this." "You'll be fine, just go side to side on the slope and you can't go wrong.  Just take your time." "Dad, I'm NOT doing this."  "Come on, just go." "Fine." (sigh. eyeroll.)  Anyone seeing a pattern here? About halfway down my skis lost traction and I ended up ass over tit down the slope, trying to stop myself by digging my fingers into the ice-covered snow.  To no avail.  I arrived at the bottom about the same time as my skis and poles.  

So now you understand.  Like all those times, I was scared but I did it anyway.  I took the dinner menu over to Pavarotti and I sheepishly asked him for his autograph for my Mom.  He was a massive man, and I could barely look him in the eye, but I said she was a big fan of his and it would be an honor to have his autograph for her.  I don't remember if he was overly nice about it, but he did it, and that was so cool.  Of course Dad says "See, I told you he would do it for you!"  Success!

I forgot where I was going with all this. 

Anyway, I had gotten tickets to see Pavarotti in concert, which I was lucky enough to have had the honor of doing once before with my Mom. Unfortunately as his health deteriorated his tour was postponed and then ultimately canceled.  He died on September 6, 2007.  My Dad, a little more than a year later, on October 30, 2008.  So you see.  Special connection.

This morning, as the girls were curious of my crying, I tried to help them understand these are not tears of sadness, that it's the music, how it swells my heart.  But in a way, for me, maybe they are just that.  And trying to follow the random connections my brain makes? From a 10 second clip of Bocelli on a crappy radio station, to all this I just spewed into your brains, which by the way all came to me in the three minutes it takes to drive home from the school.  Well, like I said, it's hard to explain. 

It's the note.