642 Things to Write About: Titanic Musical Talent!
As you should know by now, I’m going through the book 642 Things to Write About, picking out some gems, and, well, writing about them. Badly!
Today’s prompt:
The orchestra on the Titanic famously kept playing as the ship went down. Describe the sinking of the Titanic from the point of view of the musicians playing in the ballroom—from their interactions to the sights, sounds, and sensations they experience as the ship sinks.
Well, right off, did you all know that the names of ships are italicized? I had no fucking idea.
I asked google why this is, and here’s the answer I got:
Ship names are italicized to distinguish them from the rest of the text, similar to how titles of books and movies are treated. This formatting helps readers easily identify the specific names of vessels within a sentence or paragraph.
Gee, thanks. Because I guess there are often times when I am not sure whether we’re talking about Titanic the boat or Titanic the movie…which, wait, is also italicized.
I guess I can be certain when we’re not talking about Titanic, the ironic name I gave to my schwanz. It’s a funny name because it’s opposite in terms of size, but accurate in that it does sink a bit more quickly than a young, boastful me would’ve thought possible, plus, ice cold temperatures are a problem.
By the by, how often do we need to distinguish the names of ships from the rest of a text? How often are we reading texts laden with ship names, and how many ship names, and how hard is it to know that Buoyoncé is a boat? Ship-Faced? Boaty McBoatface? Row V. Wave?
These are all names I found, by the way, none I made up. If I had to make one up…I’d probably go with Titanic II: This Time, For Sure! That way, when I sank it, which I almost certainly would, people would focus on the irony and the way I cursed myself with the name as opposed to the gross negligence and complete lack of boating knowledge on my part.
Well, diary, I’m on a sinking ship.
I never thought this would happen to me. I selectships to play on based entirely on sinkability. Most people don’t know this, but when you go to a major port, there’s a chart, and each ship has to rank itself based on how sinkable it is. Most ships are somewhere around “Marginally sinkable,” but you will see lots of ships with ratings like, “Pretty sinkable,” and “Miracle it’s floating right now.”
And you might wonder why people would go on these ships. I don’t know. Some people do crazy things in 1912. I mean, we just admitted a new state, Arizona, which seems like useless parched desert that I can’t imagine anyone living in by choice, and some guy just made the first ever recorded jump out of an airplane using a parachute. 1912: Craziest year on record if you ask me.
Titanic was rated as 100% unsinkable, and although I only have a 1912 4th grade education, that seemed like the most percent of unsinkability possible.
Anyway, fast-forward, apparently the ship hit an iceberg. You’d think that it’d be easy to avoid an iceberg big enough to sink a whole ship, I’ve never just walked into a huge snowdrift when I’m outside, but I guess it’s more complicated than that, which is sort of what the crewmember who I grabbed by the lapels told me, plus some swear words added in, which is fair because I was slapping him a lot and swearing almost as much as he was. I mean, he’s a sailor, they’re kind of known for swearing, whereas I’m just a trombonist, or maybe a tromboner(?)
Tromboners are not known for swearing, but that doesn’t mean we’re not good at it. Tromboners are not necessarily known for panicking as a boat sinks, and I’ve just learned I’m GREAT at that.
The bandleader made a decision once it was clear that the boat was going to sink, that we’d play as long as we could in order to try and calm people down.
Which makes almost no sense to me. Who is calmed by that? Is music really going to make people forget that the boat is goddamn cracked in half and sinking fast? What kind of person can forget that because they’re listening to a sweet jam?
The bandleader keeps saying, “They’ll tell stories about us, about how we played to try and keep people calm while the ship went down.”
And I said, “Who!? Who, the dead deadies?” I said as I pointed around at everyone on the ship, who could definitely hear me. “Are they going to get stories out of all these corpses, these walking dead, if you ill?”
A couple people were a little offended by this, but when they approached, I gave them a good old-fashioned tromboning blast to the face, which always shuts people up.
I went on, “Also, don’t you think maybe people SHOULD be a little panicked? I’m not saying we have to, I don’t know, put mops on our heads and pretend to be women so we can get off the boat first, and not saying we should select the largest fruits we can find to stand in as breasts in order to increase our chances of being on a boat, on some old man’s lap, ignoring that he’s rock hard while people are dying all around him, thanks to the huge fake cans stuffed in our bras. I’m definitely not saying that if we ran into someone while going to the bathroom to put these outfits together, just in a moment of sheer panic, we should clobber them over the head because, eh, fuck it, we’re all going to die, so maybe I wanted to feel what it was like to kill, just once — I’m not saying any of those levels of panic, but maybe a little speed-em-up style of panic is okay?”
The band mostly ignored me. They’d already been easing into a classy tune while I talked about the boobs part, and by the time I got to the murder part, they were at full “Drown out the tromboner” volume.
It DID take my mind off of the boat sinking, briefly, because whenever the band plays songs like that, I get a little sad because there’s really no place for trombone. Who decided that classy, nice music can’t have trombone blasting in it, you know? I feel like the trombone has been sidelined as an instrument played by unserious goofballs who kick open doors and blast people in the face with silly, punchy brass notes to wake them up because someone paid them $5 dollars to do so, and when you’re a professional musician, $5 bucks is $5 bucks.
I waited for my time to come into the song, but as I turned the sheet music book, I saw there was almost ZERO trombone. All my sheets were just blank except for the black bars running across the pages and some notes I made to myself about not doing embarrassing things on stage like panicking because, hey, it’s not like the venue was going to crumble and kill everyone, so just relax, buddy!
I leaned over to the cymbals guy, who at least had SOME stuff to do, and he was like, “Oh, yeah…sorry, man, we don’t have any trombone notes in our songs. We actually thought you played the French Horn. We sort of forgot which thing was which. It’s 1912, not like we can, I don’t know, type the name of an instrument into some sort of box and instantly see what instrument it is. We just have to go on best guess for a lot of stuff.”
So I waited and would occasionally put the mouthpiece up to my lips as though I was about to blow out a note, and sometimes I’d wiggle the slidey thing on the trombone back and forth, then put the trombone down. I think this little drama did distract some people who were like, “When is this trombone going to kick in the metaphorical door on this sleepy concert!?”
But then, my moment came: The boat tipped up, and a bunch of people, me included, fell in the water. Somehow, I managed to hold onto my trombone, and, damn it’s cold, but I managed to blow out a final “Womp womp,” which really summed up the situation nicely, if a little dismissively.
I don’t know if I’ll be remembered as a band member who bravely played as the ship went down. But at least I got to experience the sensation of watching the light leave that guy’s eyes as I clobbered him outside the bathroom with my trombone. Which is like a 6 out of 10 experience, so probably not worth it if you have time left to live, but if you’re on your way out anyway and find it convenient, I say give it a go.