<\/p>\n
I played a crummy clarinet,<\/strong><\/span> blasting against the side of a barn door on a bike trip in rural Ohio.\u00a0 I nearly destroyed my lip.<\/p>\n Last summer my friend Mark Schilling<\/a> from Japan wanted to ride the Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure (GOBA), so I couldn’t very well say: “Mark, I’m passing on GOBA. \u00a0I have a big gig coming up and need to practice.”<\/p>\n I had to practice for Yiddishe Cup’s twentieth anniversary concert, which was the day after the bike tour.<\/p>\n Some musicians don’t need to practice; they practiced in music school and can wing it as adults.\u00a0 I didn’t go to music school. \u00a0I have to feel the notes in my fingers and brain almost daily before a big show.<\/p>\n My borrowed cheap<\/strong><\/span> clarinet had decayed pads, squeaky keys and cracked dirty reeds.\u00a0 The mouthpiece had layers of caked lip gunk. The axe was plastic and generic.\u00a0 No name.\u00a0 I got it from a friend.\u00a0 Ray-somebody in Sioux City, Iowa, had once repaired it; his card was in the case.<\/p>\n Why didn’t I have a back-up axe of my own? Was this an example of rigid thinking on my part? \u00a0I had put my professional clarinet through so much — parades and other outdoor indignities — and didn’t own a back-up.\u00a0 For example, I should have had a plastic horn for the 2004 Israel Independence Day parade when we marched outside in 40 degrees. (One Yiddishe Cup musician went AWOL on that parade because he didn’t play under 50.)<\/p>\n On the GOBA trip, I played next to the Wood County Fairgrounds sheep barn. \u00a0If I had stood in the middle of the horse-showing ring and played — without the barn wall to bounce sound off — I would have blown my lip out even more.<\/p>\n I had to practice high notes, which cheap clarinets don’t do well.\u00a0 You need a decent mouthpiece and a quality reed. \u00a0I bit down hard and tore my lower, inside cheek.<\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n Nobody on the bike tour —<\/strong><\/span> about 2,500 riders — complained about my playing.\u00a0 Midwesterners, particularly bicyclists, are very tolerant and polite.<\/p>\n I also practiced at a high school football field. That town, Elmore, had a bass drone coming from the Ohio Turnpike a block away.<\/p>\n I used cortisone cream on my cheek.<\/p>\n The final day of the ride, my friend and I performed at the bike rally’s talent show. \u00a0Mark and I had written a song about aching backs, bad food and smelly port-a-potties.\u00a0 So had all the other contestants.\u00a0 The difference: our tune had a klezmer clarinet.<\/p>\n We riffed on the<\/strong><\/span> melody “Nayer Sher,” a.k.a. the “Wedding Samba,” popularized by Xavier Cugat. \u00a0I had heard that 1950s tune on Muzak in a Cleveland grocery store.\u00a0 The song had crossover appeal.<\/p>\n But we didn’t win.<\/p>\n A barbershop trio did.\u00a0 They sang about tandem bike riders smelling each other’s gas.\u00a0 We hadn’t thought of that.<\/p>\n Irwin Weinberger, a veteran GOBA cyclist and Yiddishe Cup’s singer, came in second.\u00a0 Irwin inserted port-a-potty lyrics into the Kinks’ “Lola.”<\/p>\n Irwin hadn’t practiced all week.\u00a0 Irwin is a natural.\u00a0 And he’s a gas.<\/p>\n —-<\/p>\n GOBA<\/a> begins June 20 <\/strong><\/span>in Logan, Ohio. The GOBA encampment is half Pilot Gas rest stop, half Cabela’s.\u00a0 There are six semi-haulers and many tents.\u00a0 The semis carry the cyclists’ baggage.\u00a0 Two of the semis are actually mobile shower trucks (which are sometimes used for natural disasters). There is\u00a0close-quarters snoring on the football field, with hundreds of tents pitched within several feet of each other. \u00a0Rated: Difficult. I played a crummy clarinet, blasting against the side of a barn door on a bike trip in rural Ohio.\u00a0 I nearly destroyed my lip. Last summer my friend Mark Schilling from Japan wanted to ride the Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure (GOBA), so I couldn’t very well say: “Mark, I’m passing on GOBA. \u00a0I have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-road","category-sports-pages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1565"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8985,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565\/revisions\/8985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n—-<\/span>
\nYiddishe Cup plays the post-parade concert at Parade The Circle<\/a> 1 p.m. this Sat. (June 12).\u00a0 Wade Oval, Cleveland. Traffic tip: Ride your bike to the parade and park in the Ohio City Bicycle Co-op lot.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"