My Story: Handbell Concerts and Missing Gloves

 I couldn't think of any piano-related stories to share with you today. So you get to hear a little more on some of the handbell mishaps that I briefly referenced in the post Bells are Ringing. Namely, mishaps involving gloves.

   Of course, if a mishap happened during practice, it was no big deal. When the director would look up to see what had happened, the person could just shrug and say, "Sorry, I grabbed the wrong bell." But naturally, most of our mishaps didn't happen during practice. They happened during concerts. 

   We wore gloves to protect the bells from getting tarnished by our skin's natural oils. This was all fine and good, as long as you remembered where you put your gloves right before the dessert intermission. During practice, we just left our gloves at our spot. During concerts, there were two choirs playing, so you couldn't just do that as easily. There were several mad scrambles as ringers tried to find both their gloves following an intermission. The one I remember most clearly was one of the times I was also playing piano. So I took my gloves off and put them in a place where I would find them when I needed them. I think I put them by the piano, on the side away from the audience. Wouldn't you know it -- one of my friends found my gloves. And she moved them. 😮 It turns out she had moved back to my ringing spot, so when I got onto stage, flustered and panicked... I found my gloves. 

   The other major glove incident that none of us will ever forget happened at a nursing home, where we were giving a pre-concert performance. Except when we got there, we discovered that all our equipment had been loaded up, except those gloves! Our poor white musician's gloves had been left behind. But we were at a nursing home, so there were plenty of disposable latex gloves to save the day. 

   Did you know that, after almost two hours of ringing handbells with latex gloves on, your hands will be really clammy and uncomfortable? 

   Oh, and then there were glove-choosing days. Our director would, at regular intervals, take all the gloves home and wash them. (As you can probably guess from the comment above, cloth gloves need a washing at regular intervals!) Then she'd bring them back, and we'd all go through the process of sorting through the glove box. First off, there were different sizes. I had trouble finding a pair that wasn't too large. Some of the others, the boys especially, had trouble finding a pair that wasn't too small. The second, more serious problem was that most of us were right-handed, so we wore holes in the right hand gloves much faster. Finding a left hand glove wasn't a problem. Finding a right-hand glove could be a challenge! 

   I'm glad you don't need gloves to play piano.