With only 3 weeks left in Vancouver before my NYC trip for the Dropback Show & to teach the 1st Yoga of Belle workshop, the pressure is really on to finish all the endless house details.

The place looks amazing, having gone from crayons to perfume, from steakhouse lighting to postmodern chic:

Now, of course, I feel like I have 4,000 little things to do — from Ikea returns to setting up the wireless printing — but I am determined to keep practicing.  After all, when I look at the slow movements of the Barenboim recordings they range from 3:56 to 13:16, with 16 of the 18 below 10 minutes and 12 below 7.  In other words, time can’t really be an excuse.  One can always carve out 3:56 in the course of a day.

Even so, my “to do” list is now volumes long thanks to my three deadlines, but they are helping me focus and clarify enormously.

You see, on the 14th of December, I have the Duo Theater event for their Holiday Happening (I am, as the last act, more of less the finale).  Honestly, there’s nothing like a live performance event where you have to perform gymnastic stunts to get one focused.

The same is true for the December 16th first workshop for the Yoga Of Belle;  I’ve got to have something worthwhile for a roomful of my wonderful students, and in a perfect world, I want to complete the book.  Frankly, having a workshop as a deadline has been tremendously helpful to focus and shape what the book should be.  The issue seems to be the proper voice for the book — not too academic and not too generic — and having it be grounded in my authentic teaching voice, the one I’ll use again in front of a live class might just be the most natural, easy solution.

Back to the music –

So today, I played, for the first time ever, through K 457 in E flat, a piece which a moment of chord progressions and a melody which remind me of the Chopin Etude Op. 10, #3.  And I diligently practiced the K332 fancy chromatic passage, and for good measure played through the K 545 as well while Adrian cut and measured wallpaper for the bathrooms on the dining room table.  Actually, the only reason I stopped was because our contractor came back to retrieve his circular saw and Belle insisted on a big greeting.

I am reminded of how an old friend of mine, E.S., once had an idea for a book project for the two of us.  As we were talking about it over a coffee shop lunch, she pulled out a notebook and a pen and pretty much said, “OK, let’s go.”  I was startled because even though I do tend to plunge in all the way, I somehow feel that artistic projects — especially beginnings — need to be more, well, “ritualized.”  Didn’t we have to consult my astrologer/lit theory PhD friend Hillary and wait for an auspicious New Moon?  Didn’t I need to make a visualization collage or at least do a lot of broad background reading?  Could we just START like that?

The same is true for playing the piano.  My fantasy artist cottage in Nova Scotia — one where I do nothing but court the multi-media muses — is a far cry away and probably doesn’t exist.

Thus, perhaps the most valuable life lesson I’ve learned in Vancouver is that, given their mostly under 10 minute length,  I can play almost any Mozart slow movement with utter devotion while waiting for two lunchtime potatoes to bake in the microwave.