My Violin Hickey 🎻😽

And Finally Getting To Carnegie Hall

Welcome to Adam Rockwell’s Email-Enabled Blog! I’m an Oregon Coast-based writer, humorist (sure you are!) and chronic oversharer. This is part of my Offbeat Stories Series! A True Story!!

I’m a violinist, or more accurately, I was a violinist.

I began playing violin in the 6th grade. The SIXTH GRADE! Talk about being a late bloomer in the violining business.

6th grade was awesome. It was still elementary school and the Menomonie (WI) Public School System decided to reinstitute an orchestra program. I was the most excited kid you can possibly imagine. Probably the only excited kid about orchestra.

This was in the heady days of the mid-80s, but I knew the violin was for me. Why? That’s a great question. It was most likely due to the fact that I had a German mother. The only music we ever listened to was what my father referred to as “Long-Hair Music.” AKA classical music. While great music was booming out of synthesizers everywhere, I was transfixed by Itzhak Perlman.

Because of the Menomonie Public School’s decision, I knew I was going to be a star! 🤩 I was going to become a solo violinist and everybody would know me!! 🎻

Little did I know that my journey to Carnegie Hall was going to be a twisty, windy road paved in tears, straight to hell and back again! 👿

The Beginner Violinist

I have never been more excited to start something in my life than that time I began playing the violin. To be fair, I’m not much of a self-starter, but with the violin, WOW. I threw myself into it.

Aside: Little did I know, many violinists start their “Artist’s Journey” at the old age of two or three years old.

My mother was, naturally, thrilled at the prospect of her son playing the violin. Little did she know what this was going to do to my already precarious social life.

Once I got my rented violin from Schmidt Music, I was all set. I practiced seriously hard for at least twenty minutes per day, at least three days a week.

I worked and scratched away those twenty minutes, and as any parent of any beginning violin player will tell you, the screeching is brutal. Even to the player.

After each practice session, I was spent and needed a nap. But, before I knew it, I was playing Row Row Row The Boat like a champion.

I, was a natural.

Junior High And Violining

And then, quite suddenly—Menomonie Junior High happened. You will never find a hive of more scum and d-bags in all of Menomonie, or perhaps the world. I have nothing but bad things to say about that place, but it did make me into a really good violin player!

How?

Bullying. And not the funny, ha ha movie-like bullying. This was bullying on a different level. Violent, pre-pubescent male AND female bullying.

To make matters worse for a curly-haired, glasses-wearing, hundred-pound, highly sensitive introvert, I had decided to play the violin!! Apparently, this is a most hated of instruments of bullies in the rural areas of Wisconsin. Who knew!?

I was shunned. Cast aside by even the drama club!

So, I did the only thing I could do. I retreated to the Orchestra Room in order to avoid constant physical altercations with the anti-violin bullies.

I spent as much time as possible in the practice room. I also carried five throwing stars and a num-chuk in my violin case and everybody knew I’d use them so mostly, I was left alone.

At first, when I’d hide out in the practice rooms, I’d just sit there and read. BUT, reading becomes boring after you’ve gone through every Garfield book in the library three times.

So, there I was one day in 8th grade sitting in a 4x7 foot practice room and I did something I thought I never would. I practiced. And practiced. And then got a little into it. And then I practiced a little more.

By 9th grade, aka High School in Menomonie, I had become pretty gosh darn good at playing the old violin. No more scratching out Twinkle Twinkle. No, sir. I was playing some tough stuff. I quickly moved from Mozart Concertos to Paganini Caprices. If you know… you know!

Man, I had some nice hair back then! This was the 80s. This guy was about to get a nasty violin hickey!!

The violin became “my thing.” By tenth grade I was driving over to River Falls to get instruction from a “real violinist” and by the 11th grade I was driving over to Eau Claire to get violin lessons from the pre-eminent teacher in the greater tri-county area, Nobuyoshi Yasuda, MFA!

Amazing.

And then, it all came crashing down.

My Violin Hickey

In 1991, I was struck down with something known only as: “Fiddler’s Neck.” Everyone else called it a “hickey.”

I had received a full scholarship to study violin performance at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire when the god damned violin hickey appeared in eleventh grade. It wasn’t as fun as it sounded.

I had been told that I was going to be the next Itzhak Perlman, but I knew Itzhak Perlman didn’t have a freaking violin hickey! Or at least not one like this!

It turns out that my neck was extremely sensitive to the wood or metal in the violin. I developed the most embarrassing of high school developments.

A hickey!

In fact, my Violin Hickey was a form of contact dermatitis. And a bad case at that. Not dissimilar, apparently, to “My Stigmata” that I developed later in life from the metal in my cellphone.

My violin hickey was a painful red sore right where you’d expect a stage left hickey to be located. When I say painful, I mean PAINFUL! I could barely touch the violin to the violin necking area.

I tried all types of cloths and coverings and salves and lotions but nothing helped.

Finally, I went to my family doctor who informed me that “he’d never heard of anything like that before!” Honestly, I told him I played the violin, it couldn’t have been that big of a mystery. He did some non-internet research and came up with the correct diagnosis. Violin Hickey. I was like, “Duh.”

Here is the Wikipedia article on Fiddler’s Neck! Just to prove to you I’m not insane!

He tried all types of cortisone injections and creams and salves and lotions, but lo and behold, nothing worked to cure my violin hickey!

So that was my life for the rest of my high school experience. An unsightly, sometimes bleeding violin hickey caused by the violin that was supposed to turn me into an international violining sensation! It was a NO WIN situation.

I still took the scholarships, of course, and went off to violin school at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. I told nobody that I was having hickey difficulty. I just took the cash and hoped it would magically heal.

It did not.

At The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

I specify “The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire” lest you mistake it for the underperforming (in a violin sense) “University of Wisconsin-Madison.”

As a violin performance major, I found it difficult to practice much due to the blood running down my neck. It was as if I was being attacked nightly by an out-of-control vampire that couldn’t quite finish the job.

But still, I persisted. Well, I didn’t practice that much, but I kept showing up to orchestra so I could keep my sweet, sweet, scholarship money. I knew if I didn’t get more practice I’d never become a solo violinist, much less a second violinist in a second-rate orchestra. But I needed that money.

I was worried I’d be kicked out of the music program due to my lack of practicing. I had reason to worry, but not about my lack of practicing or poor performance on the violin.

Out of left field, I failed music theory the first semester I was there. The only “F” I had ever received in any class ever. Sometimes when you’re looking one way, it’s the theory class that gets you.

After being expelled from the music department unceremoniously, I was informed I could keep my various scholarships if I continued playing in the orchestra, which I did for a few years until I more or less stopped playing because sometimes you get the hickey, but sometimes the hickey gets you!

A Few Years Later…

After being rejected by the Peace Corps (true story for another day) I floated through a sea of despair. I was like a star quarterback who blew out his knee in the first game of his college life. But instead of football, violin.

I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire with an Applied History degree. I don’t know why I studied history other than the fact that I enjoyed reading and TikTok hadn’t been invented yet.

Violin Camp For Adults

A few years later I found myself married and childless in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thanks a lot K.L. Rockwell!

I always had violin on the brain. I still wanted to be part of the music world even though I no longer could play lest the hickey reappear.

So, there I sat scrolling an early version of the internet one day and decided to enroll in a Violin Repair Program at the Red Wing, Minnesota Tech School. I checked Mapquest and it was only about a two hour drive from our home. It was also one of the few violin repair programs in the country.

I wanted to open a violin repair shop, but in reality, I wanted to be a Stradivarius dealer and get rich! And meet Itzhak Perlman!

Somehow, I was accepted into the program. Mind you, I had no business being in any woodworking program, especially a fine woodworking program. I had never done any woodworking of any kind before in my entire life up to that point. But, I enrolled anyway.

I imagined myself sitting calmly in my Stradivarius dealership in Venice, Italy, (not Venice, Illinois) slowly and methodically repairing violins for famous virtuoso violinists worldwide.

It was anything but romantic and the commute was a killer.

I had to be in Red Wing, Minnesota, ever day by 9 AM. I needed to be out the door at 7 AM. BRUTAL!! And it hadn’t even begun snowing yet.

I won’t get into the nitty gritty of what K.L. Rockwell affectionately calls my time at, “Violin Camp.” Let’s just say, I had no idea what the hell I was doing and the drive completely stressed me out even though it was a beautiful drive along the Mississippi.

But it was too DAMN EARLY and I still to this day do not believe in morning!!

Everything Works Out And I Ended Up At Carnegie Hall!!

As you might imagine, I often listened to Minnesota Public Radio on my drive down to the Red Wing “violin camp.” By this time, I also had a flip phone.

Sweet.

One day while I was driving up a bluff south of Prescott, Wisconsin, Minnesota Public Radio was holding a drawing for a signed copy of a CD from the Minnesota Orchestra!

*Amazing!*

When you drive the bluffs of Wisconsin, you often lose cell reception at the bottom of each bluff. Therefore, when I heard about the drawing, I whipped my Chevy Cavalier onto a corn field tractor path and furiously dialed the Public Radio number.

And I won the contest!

I was the number ten caller.

And not only that, I was entered into a grand prize drawing. A trip to New York City. A trip for two! Just like on the Price Is Right! Except a nerdy public radio trip that would be awesome for somebody like me.

A week later I won the Grand Prize.

Double Amazing!

I won an all expenses paid trip for two to New York City where the Minnesota Orchestra was playing at Carnegie Hall.

K.L. Rockwell and I were whisked off to New York City to a suite of rooms overlooking Times Square. We ate at a true blue Italian-American restaurant just like in The Godfather and got to see Anne-Sophie Mutter play the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Minnesota Orchestra.

I may have never got to play with the Minnesota Orchestra, but I did get to see them live in concert at Carnegie Hall. For free, one of my favorite things ever.

PS: I dropped out of Violin Camp a month later and entered librarian school.

PPS: I STILL have a violin hickey! It lingers.

The End!

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