View From The Stage: Musician’s Lifestyle

As a professional musician, you work opposite hours to the rest of the world so you learn to live your life from a different perspective. Working evenings, weekends and many holidays gives you opportunity to be creative! I have fond memories of waking up late Monday morning and listening to the world get going outside my window as I am recuperating from an exhausting weekend of giging. It always felt so good to be able to sleep in a bit on a Monday morning. Shopping was never a problem because the stores were always pretty empty on Monday and Tuesday and I never had to wait for a table going out to eat on a Monday night either. I am not a big stickler for celebrating things on the day and that worked well for my musicians lifestyle. I worked for over 30 years in a row on New Years Eve so my friends and I would throw a musicians New Years Eve party a few days later. For many years I worked at a restaurant on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. That actually worked out well for me after my divorce because I would celebrate Christmas with my kids a few days early. They would sleep over and we would have Christmas morning and then a nice Christmas dinner a few days before Christmas and then they would celebrate Christmas again with their mother. It worked out well for all of us and my kids loved getting two Christmases! Thanksgiving was a holiday I also used to work on. We would just celebrate it the next day on the Friday. That was great, especially when I was living in New York because trying to get around the city on Thanksgiving day is murderous with all of the traffic. Birthdays and anniversaries would also be celebrated whenever we could. Being on the road also provided it’s challenges as I would be away for many of those dates and we would just work around them. While I enjoy celebrating holidays and such, it has never really mattered to me when exactly I celebrated them. I know some people have to have their weekends free. I loved working evenings and weekends and having my days free. In a way it felt like I was never really working because I enjoyed playing and getting out on the weekends as well as going home with money in my pocket and having my weeks free gave me the opportunity to do other things and live a more relaxed schedule. This attitude is certainly helping me deal with this pandemic. Obviously many of the holidays this year will not be celebrated together. I will not be able to attend my grand kids sporting events or hold birthday celebrations and the like. It is a bit sad but the good news is that this pandemic will pass and we will be able to safely get together again with family and friends. We will be able to all sit around the table again and share great food and fellowship, The key is patience and the ability to hang in there until we are through this. I often think about my friends father who was a waist gunner on a B-17 bomber during World War II. He was shot down over Germany on his 9th mission in April of 1944. He spent almost 14 months in a German POW camp. He turned 21 in that camp. He told me how there were a few hot heads who felt the need to try and escape to get back to the war. Most of them were shot dead. His attitude was to keep his head down and survive. The conditions were hard, there was a lot of boredom and he had a few scary moments but he survived. He lived to the ripe old age of 93. He lived to have a full live of work, family and to see his grand kids and great grand kids. Yes, this past Thanksgiving was very quite with just my wife and I celebrating together and Christmas and New Year will be the same. We won’t have our annual holiday party and I haven’t had a gig in a while nor do I expect to have one until at least next spring. But my home is a whole lot nicer than a POW camp and this holiday season I am focusing on all of the blessings that I have, to be grateful for the things I didn’t get that I didn’t want. I wish you all a holiday season full of peace and wellness. So until next time, I’ll see you from the stage!