Spinning Plates
Plodding along the Welsh countryside, March 2025.
No work seems to be getting done at my desk as of late. I flick through the tabs of the many windows open on my computer at great speed, but in reality I am flitting between nothing, anxious ideas and blurry lines written on a to-do list, but really, truthfully, a whole lot of nothing, if I am honest. The nothing happens, and then I get stuck, and then I am stuck between the plates that I seem to keep spinning to no avail.
This is an over-exaggeration, one that you know, and I know, and that you know I know you, someone would say. But that is what it feels like, these micro-shifts between my clarinet stand and my work tabs and my other work tabs and the thing I keep feeling called to do, which is to write about the feeling of both, making sense of minding my spinning plates while the sun is finally out in London.
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I am not so unique in thinking of duality so often, of seeing myself in multiple lights. I think so heavily about my musical and creativity identity that it freezes me into place at times - am I a clarinettist even though I like to write, am I a good cook even though I can’t get my omelettes to flip neatly off the sides of the pan, what is the difference between this point and that point of dedication, of sacrifice to the thing that I want, how do I make it make sense on a weekday afternoon versus a slow weekend in bed?
When I was a kid I dreamed of being on tour, like rockstars on big buses travelling around the world, sleeping in bunk beds and making snacks in the kitchen. The idea of touring was the supreme form of flattery. To be a musician was to travel in my eyes, to float in the allure of being booked as an instrumentalist, to be called, to be wanted. In the wake of spinning plates I too have done such tours, a tour with long flights and a tour with even longer flights and now, in essence, I am thinking back to the long car rides across the hills Wales this past March where it all happened, the realising of such a world that I was a musician, with other musicians, doing the ‘musician ‘thing and pinching myself in disbelief of the life around me, the thing I have made and will make again someday soon.
In the moments before this tour I wondered how I would do the tour, and in the moments during the tour I wondered how I would do the bits that were waiting for me when I got back. I thought about the rules of being a musician, first as a musician full-stop - to show up early, at least 20 minutes, with instrument and pencil in hand. To say hello but not chatter too much, to warm up, to play and speak when you are spoken to, to play under your principal, to let him, probably him, guide the music. These rules morphed before my eyes into the rules of the musician who doesn’t want a full-time orchestral job, the musician who wants to do who wants to do many things, the rules of the musician-turned-artist spinning many plates. the artist spinning plates in a double life that turned into me looking in the mirror - touring while life takes its courses, emails flooding the inbox, finding out that my Baba has died and I have pneumonia and a grant application, and another, and one more before I can think about taking the clarinet out, I say to myself, just one more until I can make the magic happen.
In Cardiff, on the second leg of our trip, I roamed around town before rehearsal with my cases and stands glued to me, like a clumsy version of a one man band crossed with the Leaning Tower of Pisa. My bass clarinet stand seems to dangle from my left hand at all times, nearly clobbering into a lucky person’s knees, while my fat clarinet case digs into my shoulders. The time between trips makes me forget this, keen to put my case back on as my identity badge, and then take it off as soon as possible. I found a market tucked away between alleys and stumbled upon a red fluffy cake next to a stack of Welsh cakes coated in coconut flakes. Something awoke inside me.
Can I have a coconut slice, please? And two Welsh cakes. I asked. The baker nodded and put one in a bag for me and placed the card reader in front of me, £2.80.
Something told me I knew this dessert and as soon as I tasted it it hit me - čupavci, lamingtons. Big squares of soft coconut cake with a line of jam running across the center, the Croatian but Australian cake looking at me in the face to say, “I know you”, decorated as a bright red square in the display case, a not-so-popular variation on a theme. This thing knew me in my kitchen in 2018 was right in front of , baking this Australian cake to impress my then-boyfriend while chatting my mom and Teta to come to realize that čupavci was our cake first, leading me to daydream about the crinkling plastic packaging sticking out of my Dad’s suitcase after flights back from Zadar to be put in the fridge, its bubbly font thick in the back of my mind. It belonged to him but even moreso to me, to our supermarkets and our old Croatian cookbooks, the running list of kolači coming to mind, when was the last time I had čupavci, anyway?
One of my fondest memories of Croatian kolači, or cakes, is my Baba Gordana, with hair the color of Ariel’s long lusciou mane which she dyed and washed off in the Adriatic Sea, making murva kolači / mulberry cake for me and my friend Josipa. She instructed us to go out to the trees near the front of the house and pick to our hearts delight, our fingers stained with ink like pomegranates with little raspberry-like bulbs in our hands, giggling, laughing as we ran through the thick grass. She took our berries from our hands and after rinsing them, poured them into the cake mixture which was fluffy like my Teta’s blueberry cake, made in a long sheet tray like lasagna, and cut into elegant squares to eat with a fork. I can still feel the apples of my cheeks wincing at the tartness of the mulberries, a look in my Baba’s eyes that I only recall a few times in our complex history, something worth remembering, I told myself.
My high school band director was famous for saying the show must go on - you’ll have a baby crying at home and a wife you’re angry with and a mortgage that needs to be paid, and you’ll still have to go on stage, Michelle, and do the job - something to this effect, in an effort to remind me of the work aspect of the job. He is right in some senses, the need to show up despite the air of grief that lingers in the background, I say this as I found myself juggling Baba’s unexpected passing in the back of cars from Wales to London, running into women who looked like her, with bright red cars and bright red hair pinned in its alarming red fashion, needing to draw my focus back to the plentiful ink on the page.
Our magical tour had a pit stop in a town called Pucklechurch near Bristol, where the three of us pulled over at The Old Dairy for lemon and blueberry scones bigger than our heads with clotted cream and jam. On a later leg of the tour, we chatted to eccentric old man at his antique shop who offered to play us an original song in the deep trenches of his house. Somehow this intimate performance melds seamlessly into the last notes of our performance that were savoured for just a second longer before packing up our instrument and slipping pints into our now empty hands, moments that feel near perfect when I think of them now, tiredness forgotten, sadness put somewhere else for the meantime. I can only think of this tour and think of a beautiful haze between talking and playing and forgetting all the other things I needed to do in between.
The nuance, I realise, is where I want to live, even if that means spinning plates like I do, embracing a level of chaos that begs to be tamed, in my grief there is also the sun shining back at me, giving me the space to let it be tamed.