Thursday, August 14, 2003
Stage Mother From Hell (Part 1)
Island music and journalistic circles are a-buzz about a stream of abusive e-mails from what appears to be a prime candidate for All-time Stage Mother from Hell. Her son, a lad of some modest promise of whom you might say “Be a reasonable fiddler one day, but he needs to get rhythm” if you saw him at the school Christmas concert, is billed far and wide as an “Island sensation” and is now referred to by most working musicians as “the sensaysh”.
The problems arise when the young lad is not regarded and billed in every way as the young Mozart. A fevered e-mail threatens law suits and is CCd to one’s boss, one’s boss’s boss, directors and a presumably guiltless lawyer who shall remain nameless. The letters include large amounts of text in capitals with exclamation marks scattered around like machine gun bullets. The only reason whole passages don’t appear in red, green and purple must surely be down to her not having figured out HTML formatting in e-mail.
The joy of the e-mails is enhanced by the positioning she gives herself: a supreme marketing professional beset on every side by amateurism, negligence, incompetence and wilful thwarting of the spectacular career due the young wunderkind. And she is not remotely shy in exposing exactly where she believes that amateurism, incompetence and negligence lies.
Visitors to last year’s Orwell concert memorialising Wendell Boyle will have seen her in her other guise as self-proclaimed poet. The elderly ladies gathered under the trees must have been astonished by a poem which - if I penetrated the purple passages accurately (a doubtful proposition) - was a paen to her menstrual cycle.
There is some talk of creating a self help society and publishing her collected e-mail works so that others who have not yet been blessed can get a sense of the treat they have in store.