[Harp-L] dry mouth update

[Winslow Yerxa <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

I want to thank everyone who offered advice on dealing with dry mouth a
couple of weeks ago.

The two bits of advice I liked best were the one about fresh fruit a
couple of hours before the performance and the one about moving your
tongue around to different edge positions.

I had already tried the Biotène saliva stimluating mouthwash without
much success. Drinking water is something I have to be careful about
when going onstage - it passes through quickly and getting up from the
middle of a seated group (with fiddle bows flying) in the middle of a
set) is not a good thing (Neither are urgent and painful messages from
the bladder region).

So during this weekend's series of San Francisco Scottish Fiddlers
concerts, I made sure to avail myself of whatever fresh fruit was in
the buffet and to do some of Rupert's tongue exercises.

I also received help from an unorthodox source. The first evening, I
thought I had set a decent tempo for my feature set, only to discover
almost immediately that I had been duped by that trickster adrenaline
and we were running away out of control. The mouth dried up and it was
sledding on gravel for the next four minutes.

So the next day I pulled my little group together early and rehearsed
the set at a super-slow tempo that would allow us to groove and play
around with the subdivisions of the beat. A few times through and this
was imprinted.

Time for the feature set came up and I was halfway through schmoozing
the audience when there was a disturbance in my pocket. I pulled out
the offending device, glanced at it, and shared with the audience,
"It's a text message. It's from my spirit guide. He says . . . .'slow
down and take it easy, eh?'" and I proceeded to count off the tune. I
didn't bother to explain how the spirit guide could send text messages
through a metronome.

Oh, and there was snow under the sled.
 
Winslow


		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Plan great trips with Yahoo! Travel: Now over 17,000 guides!
http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide