the weekend

Another August weekend has come to an end.

I played in a wedding over the weekend - did the rehearsal on Friday night and the wedding on Saturday afternoon. Gorgeous weather for it, unless you're stuck in a very, very hot organ loft trying to play the violin. Up there, it was just a bit on the sweaty side. However, I did have the pleasure of leaving the organ loft after the prelude and the entrance of the bride, running around the outside of the church with the organist through a very nice breeze, and entering through a back door to make it to the front of the platform in time to play the accompaniment for a vocal duet. It was really exciting when we couldn't get the back door open because someone had placed a music stand in front of the door, and the door kept getting caught on the stand as we tried to open it. I'm more appreciative now of longer wedding messages. And then after the song was sung and the piano and violin played superbly with them, we went back the way we came around the outside and climbed the steps to the top of the organ loft in time for the postlude. I climbed a lot of stairs over the weekend. Organ lofts are never close to the ground floor - they're always off soaring towards the ceiling, and there are lots of steps to cover to get to them. OK, so it doesn't look so bad, but I swear there were a lot of steps to climb to get here. The church is beautiful and has great acoustics and a fabulous organ. It also has an interesting story (used to be the Catholic church, but now Lutherans rent it, and somewhere along the line it was renamed the "Historic Church"; to add to the confusion, the wedding was neither Catholic nor Lutheran).

Since I was a friend of the bride's family, I also ended up going to the groom's dinner and the wedding reception. Both were very nice, but I was exhausted. And I wasn't even in the bridal party! I can't imagine how much more tired they were after all that - plus pictures and stuff.

Tomorrow is the State Fair day. I'm going with my two cousins. The new food this year includes spaghetti and meatballs on a stick. I'm very curious about that one, and will have to try it...