The best ideas

A lot of the best ideas for the project have come from my life partner and self-appointed roadie/driver/recordist, Annelies McVoy.

Some of these are one-time little but valuable things, like paring down my project pitch summary (see yesterday’s post) from 1'50" to 1'35" while making it crisper and zingier. Or specific spur-of-the-moment performance suggestions, like singing Pete Sutherland’s “Robin Hood” with the audience in Sharon in his honor as he lay in hospice, or having Katie Oprea, who spent many years in Romania, play along on oboe to Bartok’s Romanian Dances (with zero preparation or rehearsal) in Bakersfield, both of which were concert highlights.

Some are more pervasive. The “about the piano” feature was Annelies’s idea, and is the most popular part of the concert writeups—and my own favorite aspect of them too.

The title of the project was all Annelies too. This is embarrassing to relate, but we came within days of launching the project with the perhaps lamest name in the history of project titles. 

I was looking for something short and sweet for a URL. The project title was already clear: 251 Community Concerts for a Cooler Climate. But that is of course too long for a URL. I admired the lean modernism of pianist Adam Tendler’s name for his play every state project: 88x50. That model was probably too much in my mind when I came up with (drum roll please)... 

251CCCC

which on further reflection got abbreviated to 

251C4

...I know, I know.

In my defense, I knew better than to act alone: I workshopped the name with my little team of interns. But even a group is susceptible to tunnel vision. We had been using “CCCC” and “C4” as informal texting shorthand for long enough that it sounded perfectly sensible to us. Never mind that the first connotation of “C4” is a military explosive. (We actually thought of that, but convinced ourselves it was not a problem.) Or that it’s not common knowledge, and therefore not memorable, that there are 251 towns in Vermont—hardly the same as the 50 states of 88x50. Not to mention that this number would change within two months of the project launch. Or that every damn time anyone said the URL out loud, they would have to add “That’s 251, followed by the letter C, followed by the number 4.” I thank Annelies for sparing us this fate every time I hear an ad for a company whose name is based on a cutesy trademarked non-standard spelling of a common word: their URL is announced in 1.5 seconds...and then spelled out, usually twice for good measure, for the following 10.

Anyway, there I was, working on my project logo or website within days of our launch, when Annelies looked over my shoulder, saw the 251C4, and said “What the hell is that?” I proudly explained it, she gave me the one-sided lip curl, and said, without a second’s pause, “Play Every Town.” Just like that. Damn.