There were two musical engagements on the 19th and both involved alto saxophone. The first one was a mad dash to find an elementary school for the first time, my head and band email filled with stories about how the ways to it often involved gradients of impressive "steepitude". Instead of actually dialing up Map Quest, this old guy sans smarty phone used a written description of a way he'd gone many times. But he mistook the fork in the road and took it a few times; a frenzied call to one of our facilitators was stymied with "no service" at first.

Music reflects life when it's not transcending it and I was asked to pull out my tenor sax; like a tribute to Douglas Mortimer's horse in "For A Few Dollars More" Blue Bossa was packed with my reed arsenal. Then the tenor player showed up and it was pack up one instrument in somewhat crowded conditions and set the first one back up, all the time trying to avert "dent-sity". This was for a pair of sets for the children and their Piaget noise indicated they loved us, even given the plain noise at the beginning when some of the band couldn't see the director. Their story, anyway.

That afternoon some of the steps were retraced to play my road wise alto in a kind of/sort of dance band at a cantina (says that on the marquee, anyway) in Burbank. Well, if it sounds like a dance band it may be. "Quacks like a duck" is already taken. Traffic is heavy going there with copious thanks to the studios of Donald and Daffy spilling their forces into the traffic stream. In an email to a dear friend I rued the small town mentality of every light turning red in one's face (all together: "Aww.") but also wrote this was about music, not selling cotton swans.

Oops, correction taken, "swabs" it is. One species, let alone two individuals, of waterfowl are enough to tempt me to quack up. And with the cantina being in the equestrian district, perhaps Douglas Mortimer and his horse could be on the trail behind the place. How much does he want----?