Terpsichore Plays Sax

Don hardly ever handed out new music. However, it was all new to me since I was but a wee lamb with hardly an ounce of practical life experience. Despite my dad's love of the swing era classics, I hadn't yet heard most of the songs in the band's repertoire. Side note: it took me a solid 2 minutes to type in various phonetic spellings of repertoire into Google for it to finally come up with the word I was looking for.

Stolen Moments appeared on my music stand at rehearsal one night. I remember hearing my dad making noises of disgust at having to play this. Maybe I imagined this; it in unclear at the present moment. Why are the moments unremembered? One could argue they were... stolen even. The original song is already slow enough but we played it at this unGODLY slow tempo. I think my section got yelled at a lot for rushing the soli section??

On every car ride home, Dad and I would bitch about every possible thing we hated about that evening's rehearsal. I don't think we were even out of the parking lot before my dad starts in with, "Stolen Moments!!! Stolen Moments, really Don? Ugh, this is the worst. Moments? More like minutes and hours stolen from my life by practicing this song. Stolen moments? More like stoned moments!" From then on, everyone in the band (except Don) called the song Stoned Moments.

"He had a very long career and it was primarily cowboy movies that made him famous. As Charles Silver - of the museum of modern art - observed, 'Wayne made westerns for twice as long as it took to fight the Indian wars. He made westerns for about as long as it actually took to settle the continent west of the Missouri.'

"[Wayne] is part of why this western period is so central to the American idea, particularly the right-wing idea of how this country was 'founded'. It's because he was in movies romanticizing that period for longer than it was ever real."

Instead of paying people livable wages, the government launched a series of programs attempting to cut down on the number of homeless people. We all love it when people have places to live, right? Yeah! Which is why so many people got brainwashed into believing that preventing homelessness is better than actually assisting the currently homeless.

One of the new policies was to stop citizens from becoming "starving artists". The government drastically cut down the number of self-employed, freelance, and art-type jobs from existence. Jobs where the work is sparse, competition is fierce, and the market is extremely volatile: music, art, content creators and freelance jobs were at the top of the list, along with various jobs that don't earn W2's. These included actor, filmmaker, musician, painter, photographer, author, consultant, dancer, as well as several more professions, which (for the sake of simplicity) I will condense into one job: the artist. If you were paid above a certain threshold then you were deemed important enough to continue to create content, considered to be "essential".

Because the government had reduced the number of available jobs, this only further strengthened the "starving artist" stereotype. People could still do these things for fun, they just wouldn't be paid. Neither paying tips nor giving donations were allowed (or aloud... get it? Because buskers are often musicians? Sorry not sorry). Everyone employed as an artist had to find entirely new jobs or do things as hobbyists, not professionals. For me in my own personal bubble as a hobbyist, I'd be out around 600 bucks per year. That's less than my paycheck every two weeks for my full-time office job.

Hee hee. I forgot I played the licc.

But ya know what...