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[Chris "Johann" Borton: ]

------- Forwarded Message

>From esantos@jupiter.Berkeley.EDU Wed Nov 14 16:20:19 1990
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 90 16:20:50 PST
To: physi-ax@garnet.berkeley.edu

In a year of reading hec.rumor I haven't seen this one yet, and we've been
afflicted with much worse ... well, maybe not.

It wasn't a big city, but more of an upstart little town.  There were a lot
of wealthy inhabitants, and they had aspirations of becoming cosmopolitan
if not delusions of already having achieved the status.

One of their less ridiculous ways of showing off was to fund a lot of fine
arts projects, including having their own symphony orchestra.  But some of
their ostentation didn't contribute all that much to the general welfare:
rather it just scored social points.  There was a family in town who had
gone so far as to send their daughter to a pricey European finishing
school.  While she was there she met a count, who was impressed with such
significant traits in a woman as her looks and her balance sheets.  He
proposed to her, and madly in love with being the first in the town to get
a title of nobility, she accepted.

Her family, of course, were thrilled.  They held their noses higher than
ever, and when their daughter and her fiance were to come to the United
States to be married in her home town before returning to live on his
estate in Europe, they planned an array of festivities beyond anything ever
held there before.

She had told them how her beau loved concerts, so her parents arranged a
series of seven of them to celebrate the nuptials.  And so the celebration
went: parties, receptions, dinners, the wedding itself, the concerts.

The groom was quite used to the spoiled life from the other side of the
pond, but he did have two requests, which his parents-in-law were only too
happy to honor: that the day before their Monday morning departure for his
estate, they hold an old-fashioned American outdoor barbecue as a change
from all the fancy cuisine the couple were being served at all the other
functions and so that he could get a chance to taste some traditional
picnic dishes, and that the final concert culminate with his favorite,
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

And it was the classic hot summer Sunday, perfect for a picnic.  So the
potato salad, the corn on the cob, the outdoor spit, the kegs of cola and
lemonade, the picnic cloths, and everything else for the cookout were
prepared, and the count dug in heartily to this strange food on which his
new bride had grown up.  His system wasn't used to being outdoors in the
Midwestern heat, nor to the spicy barbecue sauces, nor to the large amounts
of iced carbonated drinks; he ate and drank too much, too fast, and he
developed a lot of gas.  It was their last few hours in the United States,
and he had to make all his official farewells to his in-laws and their
friends after the concert, but he was in great gastric discomfort.

Meanwhile, things were getting under way at the concert hall.  The singers
- -- for the last movement of the Ninth is a choral work -- were arriving and
checking into their changing rooms.  The symphony volunteers were getting
the sheet music ready for the last performance, and the binding on the
score of Beethoven's Ninth fell apart in their hands.  There was nowhere to
get it fixed in their town on a Sunday, so they punched holes in the inner
margins of the pages and tied the score together with string.  Everyone was
in a hurry, for this was a 3:00 P. M. concert, in order that the newlyweds
and the groom's guests could get to sleep early and wake up for their
morning flight.  At least the air conditioning was working, and the fans
hummed gently as they spread the cool air through the auditorium; the
afternoon heat would still be in full blaze outdoors through most of the
performance.

At last the concert started.  The conductor conducted, the instrumentalists
played, and the singers waited patiently.  But after intermission, the
conductor noticed something wrong: the singers had all gone out, but only
the sopranos, altos, and tenors had returned.  The men who sang bass were
nowhere to be found.  The guest of honor had tried valiantly to contain his
abdominal discomfort, but it was getting to be too much for him, and he
began to belch again.

They were almost through the third movement of Beethoven's Ninth, the
climax of the concerts, when finally the bass singers staggered back.  A
couple of them had hidden some liquor in their garment bags and they had
all been drinking themselves silly since the beginning of intermission. 
The third movement drew to a close, and in the moment's silence between
movements, as the singers stood up, two of the men in the bass section
didn't make it all the way to their feet; they passed out cold on the
floor.  Clunk, clunk, and then BURRRRRRRRRP.  The nobleman couldn't hold it
in any more, and he let one out that reverberated through the auditorium,
rending the silence, shattering the performers' concentration.

But the conductor assessed the pressure of the situation, the grim looks on
the faces of the players in front of him, and the murmur of the fans behind
him, and knew what he had to do.  He grasped the wood firmly and choked up
just a little as he lifted it, because all eyes were on him as he stood in
front of the expectant crowd: it was the last of the Ninth on the seventh
day of the series, the basses were loaded and there were two out, the count
was full, and the score was tied.

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