Chris Tune's Blog

Well I could not make the Church Christmas concert. My pastor joked (I hope he was joking. . .) too bad Chris has to find another Church to go to. . . You see Pastor Wade is an excellent trombonist in his own right, and now, with me stuck in Mobile, AL . . .or actually flying somewhere over the great U.S. South or Southwest on my way to LAX. . .well, Wade had to go it alone on the Christmas concert. I'm going to really have to make it up to the man. . .to all the guys and gals at the concert. Maybe I can fix them some kind of great dinner or something. At least a representative of the Tune family was able to make the concert. Adam played clarinet on the performance at 5pm Sunday. He thought it went well. I know the choir is sounding great, so I had every reason to expect a great concert. I've learned what happens when you try to stuff a lot into a complicated weekend of air travel and musical performing. Things can go very, very wrong indeed.

This is the worst I've yet experienced with airline travel in doing music. I accepted a gig to go with Direct From Vegas - The Rat Pack and, of course the gig part of this trip went very, very well. However, the airlines and the connections were very bad: In setting up this blog entry I should explain that the flight out was provided by the producer and this involved getting to LAX Thursday morning. I was told by my company, however that I absolutely could not be out Thursday. So I first figured that I could get a separate leg flight out from Burbank airport and would be able to fly in to Chicago later and join the orchestra and cast in Elgin, IL. I was able to pull this off with an arrival in Elgin at around 2am Elgin time. So far so good. . . Now as we flew from O'Hare to Mobile, AL the really bad things began to happen. The set of flights purchased as part of the Rat Pack gig, were designated by the airlines as "use all, or lose all". This was NOT OBVIOUS f