Oboe Consolation Pudding

"Hautbois, ta vie est pleine de mystères;
Un temps lointain a chanté ton pouvoir;
A tes accents les esprits des clairières
Autour de toi venaient errer le soir."

(apparently a traditional verse, pulished by Alfred Guichon in an 1874 article, 'Le Hautbois,' in Chronique Musicale, and quoted by Burgess & Haynes in their book The Oboe)

The mystère of the week is how a reed can work so beautifully for a few practice sessions, then just DIE. It must be something I'm doing wrong, a big beginner's blunder that's wrecking the reed. I sounded like a honkin' goose yesterday trying to do my long tones in the doctors' lounge at the hospital where I was on-call for the night. What a total bummer! And I think I was getting a headache from the vibrations of trying to get it to work better. I have a lesson today and I don't think she'll say what she said last week about showing a lot of improvement in a week...

On the up side, the reed-making stuff I ordered arrived, so when I got home from my call night, it was like mini-Christmas opening up the packages. I'm a little kid at heart, what can I say.

This was previously called Oral Board Frustration Pudding, but now that that's over, it's Oboe Consolation Pudding. Yes, I know, the worst eating offense is self-comforting with food, but it's so much FUN to use bread, chocolate, butter, & sugar this way once in a while, so everybody back off, lighten up, and join in:

Oboe Consolation Pudding

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Crumb 5 slices of white bread.
Place crumbs in a square baking pan or loaf pan.
Melt together
-4 oz semisweet baking chocolate
-1/2 c butter
-1/2 c sugar
-1 c milk or half-&-half or (yikes) cream.
Add 2 beaten eggs.
Add mixture to breadcrumbs and stir together.
Dot with pieces of a Godiva 1.5-oz dark chocolate bar (the kind they have at the Barnes & Noble counter where you're about to spend your last extra dollar on BOOKS).
Bake @350 for 45 min.

***

Addendum: just got back from a really enjoyable lesson. Thank God for patient teachers, the kind that allow beginngers to be BEGINNERS and don't resent them for it (a new experience, having come out of the medical world where you're expected to have leapt from the womb knowing how to be a doctor and people actually get physically MAD at you if you don't know everything the very first moment). After solving my reed problems (by simply replacing the two I was using), my teacher Kyoko and I did a couple of one-line duets together and even played through all of O Come O Come Emmanuel. I was shocked - this is going ok!

Kyoko, you're da best!