You haven’t played fiddle or sung into a mic or rehearsed with anyone except the car radio for maybe seventy years; the fiddle’s pegs have popped and unwound when you open the case, and you’re not sure a) that the strings won’t snap when you tune it up and b) that you even have any extra strings if they did (can you even play any tunes without a D string? Which ones? Does anyone even know what key any of the songs are in? Only Uncle Berto, probably, because he’s on bass— but there isn’t time to ask—)
It’s 4th of July weekend, and you’ve got one mother-in-law with a broken foot that requires surgery, one husband’s high school best friend’s family visiting from CA, one sister & co. visiting from KY, and you and your husband and kids are all staying in Nana’s one-bedroom house to care for the cat, clean out the fridge, take out the garbage, assemble the things she’ll need for the upcoming hospital stay, and stage the social visits to various friends and family who are all staying 50 miles closer to this location than your own home, which is now probably moldering since you turned off the AC before you left “for one night,” which has now turned into something like five (?)
You don’t actually know, despite the holiday, what day it is, so when you finally extricate yourself from the children and sneak out of your parents’ house, with a hot dog and some potato salad balanced precariously on a picnic plate in your husband’s car,