You can think of its overweening length as the punishment.

First, a little backstory: Sandahbeth and I have been married over 23 years now. We've performed and traveled together through much of that time and had our share of good times and bad. In the last ten years though, as you may know, things have been getting harder. Sandahbeth's health has gotten increasingly rocky and she's required more and more caregiving. As her most immediate family, that task falls to me. I've learned to accept that the intertwining of her fate and mine puts me in this role, sharing her illness as I shared all our other adventures. We're in this together.

Still, as anyone can tell you, caregiving isn't the easiest job in the world. Worse, the part of me that devotedly tends to my wife and the part that goes out to blow trombone or play songs coexist uneasily, grudgingly sharing the same body. One questions the integrity of indulging in frivolous musical recreation, the other resents the restrictions of duty.

This way lies the dreaded Caregiver Burnout. The only real solution is to give the dog his chance to go out and howl, without restriction or censure. While Sandahbeth had been in the hospital and the nursing home for four weary dreary months this winter, I'd taken what opportunities I could to vent my musical spleen, including playing the odd Chautauqua benefit (is there any other kind?). This had been aided by the ministrations of Fred, a fellow trombonist and brasswind mechanic who'd sat in at a benefit and taken on the task of rebuilding the valves on Bertha, my so-much-more-than-venerable bass trombone. With my main ax actually functioning to capacity for the first time in fifteen years, I was practicing nearly every day, and hearing my rusty chops coming back into some pale semblance of their former putative glory was a strong incentive to go out and bring da noise.

Meanwhile, Sandahbeth had been improving steadily at the nursing home she'd been released to from the hospital after the latest round of surgery, and becoming steadily more repulsed by the grotesqueries that are part and parcel of any longterm care facility. Leave us not mince words -- the place sucked. No worse or better than any other average nursing home, but suck it did. I spent the winter butchering my fingers and insulting my credit remodeling our house for wheelchair access, and as soon as it was remotely physically possible, we got Sandahbeth home. And then the fun really started.

I soon discovered that none of my previous stints as caregiver for Sandahbeth were preparation for life with a companion confined to a power chair. Not only did she need help with even the simplest (and most private) tasks, she needed the kind of constant are-you-all-right attendance one generally associates with preschool children. Worse, she required tending night and day. At the nursing home, at least the folks on the night shift got to sleep days. I had brought home an adult-sized rugrat that I had to dress, feed, clean and tuck into beddie at night. I had been psyched up to be a helpmeet, but I wasn't ready to be a mommy -- a single mommy at that.

The only solace, and a big one it was, was that Sandahbeth was there. She was still my beloved, whatever shape her body might be in, and I had missed her dreadfully while she'd been gone. Still, even the amount of togetherness, soulful and bodily, that we'd shared in the past, from living with three cats in the back of a Dodge van on up, wasn't a patch on the ungawdly intimacy with private functions we shared now.

Saintly I may be, but all too soon my feet of clay were leaving tracks all over my nice clean kitchen floor. By the end of six weeks, it had become clear to both Sandahbeth and me that the point of combustion was being reached. What brought the matter to a smoldering head was the Great Confabulous Chautauqua Benefit in Bellingham. To attend this Show of Shows, I would have to be gone for at least twelve hours, far longer than feasible for Sandahbeth to be alone. But the state in its wisdom had only limited funds to offer for hiring helpers for the disabled, funds which might lure a good-hearted but language impaired FOB or perhaps a large and friendly dog, but couldn't pay for a real convalescence caregiver.

Enter the eternal spirit of Kwan Yin cleverly disguised as Joanne Muryama (I know, I know, the ethnic background's all wrong -- work with me here). Joannie is also no stranger to the disability blues, and Sandahbeth and I have both benefited from her warmth and clear-eyed council. She is, in fact, one of the select few holders of the mystic Bonafide Certified Saint button (which I whipped up on my desktop publisher and ran off a few copies of with a Badge-a-Minute button maker), surely a sign of purity and esoteric adepthood. I've never checked, but I'm convinced that flowers spring up in her footprints as she walks. She suggested that various unnamed parties (You Know Who You Are...) could make some contribution to helping pay for an up-to-speed substitute me, so that the Musician Thaddeus could borrow the body for a little hotrodding without the Caregiver Thaddeus blowing the whistle on him.

We were willing to make the attempt, and located a suitable and quite personable worker. But we didn't quite believe the whole thing would happen until the check arrived, with a nice card inscribed "from your friends and family." Enough to pay for the caregiver and even a little left over for gas to Bellingham and a video or two for Sandahbeth.

The worker showed up on Sunday and I hit the road in glorious spring weather. I managed to miss the roadwork on I-5, cruising a nearly-empty express lane and glancing sympathetically at the two-mile backup on the main stem. The day was so lovely that I took the luxury of driving up Chuckanut Drive, a two-lane country road that clings to cliffside woods along the north Sound and reminds me of nothing so much as Highway 1 in northern California. It was one of our favorite drives when Sandahbeth and I lived on Lummi Island and worked the San Juans, racing to get to the Anacortes ferry on time. You could cut ten minutes off the trip by taking the Drive.

The way I was going, though, it wasn't much of a shortcut, and I arrived at the Lincoln Theater in the midst of a lecture by the eminent Professor Howard Patterson on the organization and proper performance of one New Chumleighland March, apparently in the effort to bring some ringers up to speed on the inner mysteries of the Fighting Instruments of Karma Marching Chamber Band/Orchestra. Prof. Patterson paused to affirm my presence-- "Good to have you aboard, Commodore" -- and asked if I had any points to offer on the proper performance of the piece, seeing as how I did write it. "Actually," I answered, "I'm generally too busy trying to remember my own part to have much opinion." "Good," said Howard and went back to rehearsing. Eric the tuba player introduced me to a second tuba-ist (tubafore?) as the composer of the piece. "You wrote this?" "Yeah, but I haven't done anything since."

I settled into my accustomed place in the orchestra pit, down on the end of the Heavy Brass next to my esteemed colleague Heather, the finest trombonist ever to wear a tutu and an inspiration to us all. I noted the Eldest Magid Progeny in the front row, gravely fingering a clarinet seemingly half as long as her. Vaudeville, The Next Generation. "Oh I AM impressed," I said. "Isn't it great?" beamed Proud Papa beside her. Fatherhood seems to agree with Paul.

Rehearsal proceeded with the usual irrelevant side-remarks, Zen insults and offhanded zingers that are the very spoor of Vaudevillians At Play. Often I find myself wishing that the shows performed on the stage had half the liveliness and improvisational brilliance of the conversations in the pit. Of course, the stage show is only the stuff we're willing to give away, the skin of our very ripe sacred tomato.

At the customary Crew Feed (as featured on Wild Kingdom) I fell into conversation with Ned, a fellow veteran of the Electronic Music Wars, and we have a lively time dissing digital and praising/mocking old-school analog synths. It's a characteristic of aging that, as you mature, you find comfort in those who share your historical viewpoint. No matter how much fun it is to give young whippersnappers a lofty Heads Up 101 course summary, it's far more gratifying to sneer at them from afar with a member of your own generation. Safer, too -- you never know when one of those whippersnappers has a PhD in electrical engineering -- especially around this gang.

The food achieved its usual Olympian standard (funny, the food in Olympia was never this good when I went to school there), and nicely stuffed, we gaggle of honkers proceeded to showtime. I rescued Bertha from a dressing room she'd wandered into, apparently for a peek at the chorus girls, and we made our chaotic way to the front of the theater.

There are two supreme moments in a Chautauqua Benefit for me, and one is the initial march-in playing the Chumleighland March. It's a contrast thing: I remember the original Oregon Country Fair circus band in 1975, wheezing (and sawing -- we had a marching fiddler that year) its way through "Marche Grandioso," a duct-tape-and-bailing-wire construction I'd channeled the melody of in my garret in Olympia and scribbled out the parts for in the front seat of a Volkswagen the week of the show, adding a new countermelody for each successive instrument we could lure into our nefarious crew. Then I look around at the barbarian horde strutting their stuff by my side, their multicolored multitudes unleashing a stupendous glorious calliope into the unbelieving evening sky -- AND THEY'RE PLAYING MY SONG! Call it egotism if you will -- in this day and age, it's rotten hard to do anything that can outlast the pull date of last year's microprocesser, let alone add cultural context to a 25 + year folk tradition, and I'm perfectly willing to smirk with pride over the premier -- maybe the only -- cultural accomplishment of my have-fun-anyway life. But not while I'm playing -- it spoils my embouchure.

It's a truism that if it wasn't for the honor of it, playing in the band is the absolute Worst Seat In The House for a stage show. While you do get to see (or at least speculate in greater detail) how the magician makes his chopped up assistant disappear, you don't get the full frontal exposure presented to the cash customers beyond the footlights. That said, the show on Sunday was nothing if not rockin'. Almost every act seemed to have come across a stash of zoom juice prior to the show, perhaps anticipating that when the Karamazovs came on, it was gonna take forever and dynamite to get em off. Highlights for me: Spike Wilder rrrROWRed the crowd with her slinky-black- can't-bend-over-in-it post-post-feminist take on "My Attorney Bernie," Amanda added some deconstructed strip to her midair rope affair, Kevin Murphy blazed through the tongue-twisting slalom of his poem "Hungry," and Erin Corday carried us all away to a Brazil not even Terry Gilliam could sully. Artis the Spoonman, another family man, brought what seemed to be durn near every relative he had to the show -- a strong-voiced tribe, young and old alike, and probably rife with natural rhythm too. And Godfrey Daniel was -- bless him -- Godfrey.

I had just barely enough time during intermission to scratch out accompaniment to a fiddle tune or two with Pom backstage before getting back to provide aboriginal trombone on "La Pregunta." As I admitted during rehearsal, I tend to play all the band music from memory, including (or especially)! the stuff I don't know. Fortunately, I have site license on the High Screaming Trombone Freakout franchise, which helps immensely.

The rest of the show was a 10k marathon down Memory Lane with the FKB's in as old-school a form as you'd ever want to see, performing a selection of classic routines from their grab-a-spot-and-start-barking days. Time has been kind to the boys -- either that or they've got one heck of a plastic surgeon -- and they evinced a fair approximation, if not quite the accuracy, of the pep and vinegar they had back when, as Heather put it, "We'd go back to the tent and count quarters." For all their worldly successes, the gigabuck productions in architecturally challenged theaters, the rubies pressed into their bodily orifices, the lucrative tackle endorsements, the dates with paper-thin supermodels, the Presidential pardons and all the rest, it was evident that this old act, this venerable stable of hoary old warhorses of technical innovation and stolen lines, was the soul of their schtick, the core constituency of their collective mind's theater, the very borscht and kasha of their art. Sam and Tim bumbled and danced (respectively) back into their ancient roles as if the parts were well-preserved uniforms of honor that neither the stains of the seasons nor the faint aroma of mothballs could dim and which -- mirabile! -- still fit.

It was a chance for those among us old enough to remember but young enough to still be able to hear to mumble favorite punchlines under our breath -- "More than once" -- "Without the sex" -- "In the wound" -- "What?" --but it was in the improvisational pieces, "Jazz" and "The Champ", that the weight of the FKB's multidecade theatrical experience firmly planted its prodigious posterior. Howard's skill at conveying a multitude of words, most of them not suitable for public consumption, with a single raised eyebrow has definitely aged like fine wine or a ripe cheese over the years, while Paul's uncanny ability to sprout several extra arms to snag the hail of UFO's loosed upon him by the remaining brothers at the multi-orgasmic climax of Jazz never ceases to amaze the juggling-educated eye, though for the rest of us it remains bewildering impossibility impossibly materialized. In Jazz as well the museum-quality ensemble skills of the foursome are on permanent display. If there was such a thing as jam circus, the FKB's are as close a thing to the Dead as it would have.

I said a few miles back there that there are two supreme moments for me at a Chautauqua benefit. One is the entrance. The other isn't the Climax of the Show, whatever that may be, nor the unholy racket the audience sees fit to make when the whole sick business is done -- no, not even the Crew Feed. After the final official number, "Radio Brazil" (again sans Terry Gilliam), is played, there is usually a brief pause, a minute perhaps, and then, inevitably, someone, somewhere, starts to play, very gently, almost tentatively, the first notes of "Down by the Riverside," in Bb. Gradually, the rest of the band begins to join in. For the entire show, the band has been playing for the audience, but at that moment, with the customers filing out and the stage lights coming down, we're playing for each other. Whatever we have left of our fat-lipped chicken-cheeked chops is thrown into the mix in a final paroxysm of joyful noise that splashes our souls on the walls like graffiti on a downtown bus and sorely interferes with the ushers' efforts to clear the house. I watched Howard deconstructing the entire Brandenburg Concerto on the baritone, while Paul aimed his clarinet at the flies reaching for impossibly high notes and catching them, while around us a dozen musical voices individually and collectively spoke their own conviction to "study war no more." This is Vaudeville Satori -- there is no other.

With our mutual embouchures lying in pathetic shreds on the stage, there was nothing to do but pack up and go back to reality. Paul Black performed his own Amazing Feat of carrying his entire drumset out in One! Single! Trip!, the various props and infernal devices were returned to their receptacles, I hunted down my ragged gig bag and tucked away my oldest friend, and within moments as it seemed the entire edifice of art and spirit had melted away like one of Tom Noddy's soap bubbles, leaving nothing but a dumpy old theater with a repulsively messed up stage floor. But on my way out, I stopped to play a few more tunes with Pom, and eventually there were a half dozen of us singing "Goodnight Irene" in the dressing room, with half the room dutifully altering the lyrics to "Goodnight Irene you sex machine," and with the final a cappella chorus, the night finally came to an end.

Fortified with bottled water and leftover cookies, I got home at 1 AM, paid the worker and started preparing for bed. I asked Sandahbeth how her afternoon had been, but I already had an inkling from the startlingly tidied-up porch that had gleamed at me on arrival.

The worker, as it turned out, was nothing short of wonderful -- cheerful, diligent, intelligent and creative. Sandahbeth had had a pair of unimpaired hands to perform the legion of tasks she'd been too immobilized to do herself, and had known I was too busy to accomplish either. The refrigerator was stocked with tasty entrees, the house shone like a new penny, and to top it off, the worker had herself been incapacitated by a car accident and regained her mobility over four years of hard work -- and could tell Sandahbeth how she did it.

There are only a few gifts that are really worth giving, but spiritual renewal, creative outlet and the inculcation of hope have to number among them. And a clean house doesn't hurt either. To all of you responsible for this gift (You Know Who You Are...), thank you. Thank you immeasurably.

And to all of us, here in this weird little corner of Big Bad America, dedicated in our dimwitted way to such spurious distractions as making the world a better place, Thank you. Thank you for caring, for making the attempt, for providing bulk and substance and sweat and spit and exhaled breath to an exquisite and fragile castle in the luminous and only slightly polluted air. It's been a pleasure.

Thaddeus

5/22/01