Carter Dewberry

Thankfully, I don’t think any bones are broken.

For the first hour after I felt — more than heard — the “crack!” of the weighted piece of glass sear through my sandal and connect sharply with the base of my toes just before noon today, I wasn’t so sure.

This is hilarious. I have been playing cello for over 25 years (15 of them as a professional), hold a doctorate in music, and can boast over two decades of teaching experience.

Yet here I sit, scrunched over my notebook, surreptitiously eyeing each professor who walks out of the office to see if he or she might be *the one*, trying not to stick out from the others lounging in the hallway.

(Disclaimer: This is not a Facebook-style whimsy intended to give you another label to post on your wall. This is about how the movie “Helvetica” worked my visual and aesthetic perceptions.)

I encourage the utmost silliness at the top of a mountain.

In the land where an ordinary banana and peanut crunch bar are the new gourmet, where lines of bodies yearning to sweat out the seriousness of the week wait for a parking spot, this is the best seat in the house to watch the sun rise in the eastern sky and laugh at how small everything looks from such a height... including perceived problems.

My show on Saturday night was a dream come true, the event I have always wanted to create.

From the moment I stepped onstage, all my little voices quieted, and my entire being focused on my only real job – to express whatever it was in that moment I had to offer to the hundreds who had chosen to spend their Saturday night with me at the Yost Theater, Santa Ana.

I thought scheduling my concert — this Saturday night — to fall just after my birthday and dumping half a year’s worth of savings into the production would make it an inevitable success.

For nearly my whole life, I have considered myself to be a classical musician. I have poured over 20 years’ worth of energy (and money) into other people’s music, trying to become the best possible performer of these works.

My eyes popped open at 4:30 again this morning, brain still adding countermelodies to the new song I had started before falling asleep.

I don’t know who came up with the stereotype of artists as being decadent and lazy.

Tears blurred my vision as I performed Fauré’s Elegy alone in the living room of my family’s summer cabin.

I had just heard the news of my grandfather’s passing, and I was pouring my sorrow and anger at the loss of so much history and memory into the dramatic fast notes leading to the piece’s climax.