Pro!

On my 50^th birthday yesterday I was able to accomplish two goals I've had for myself for a number of years. The first was to experience flying a seaplane. The other milestone was that I can now claim in the denotative (if not connotative) sense of the word to be a professional musician! The denotative sense being that someone is willing to pay me money to play. I finished my premier 3-night run at the Enigma restaurant in Satellite Beach, Florida and walked away with a check twice as large as the best I had hoped for. Not quite up to my best day rate for camera work but not too far behind! And better than some of the cheapie camera jobs I've taken this last year. I also left with the proprietor's invitation to come back and play whenever my schedule allows. Pretty cool. I'm not sure how much I'll be able to do it, but I plan to go back.

Almost all of my experience playing in public before had been in church. I'd often thought about how different playing in church is from professional performing even without regard to content or musical styles. In church the audience stays more or less the same and one plays different music every week, often with barely adequate rehearsal and sometimes less. In most other performance environments, the musician plays more or less the same repertoire and the audience changes. I always thought I'd like to have a go at the latter mode and see what it's like to be able to get far beyond executing the song to the point of concentrating mostly on emoting and connecting with the audience. I've seen a good many church musicians who can do it all in a church context, but I've never been good enough to get it all together to the fine edge I'm talking about in just one rehearsal. So far it's been a really enjoyable experience. And a paycheck ain't at all bad either. Maybe you can teach an old dog some new tricks after all.