The kibbutz celebrates 75 years of existence

The real birthday of the kibbutz is at the beginning of December, but last December no one was very much in the mood for this kind of celebration. The national mood hasn't improved significantly since then, especially in the days since Remembrance Day (last Monday, i.e. three days ago). But as they say in Hollywood, the show must go on and tomorrow night we will celebrate 75 years of Tzora. The programme consists of people giving their recollections of the early days (or how they came to Tzora), filmed interviews (some of which were filmed over a year ago when some of the interviewees were still alive) and some songs.

I was approached to accompany these songs about ten days ago. I pointed out that I was in Italy and didn't know the songs; no matter. Since Saturday we've had rehearsals most days. I'm playing 12 string acoustic guitar, and am joined by the rest of the musical group's rhythm section albeit playing different instruments: the bassist is playing acoustic guitar and the drummer is playing tenor recorder, her primary instrument.

As I say about the 12 string, it takes more time to tune it that I play it. Fortunately it's kept its tuning quite well, unlink the Stagg, so it doesn't take much time to add fine tuning (the guitar bag affects the machine heads). We're playing three songs and none of them feature open chord shapes, due to their keys (there are a few open chords such as E and A, but even the G chord is played as a barre). In rehearsal, we generally play each song three or four times and I have to admit that this is quite painful: the metacarpal bones of my left hand have to perform no small amount of pressing. I've discovered that moving my thumb up from the back of the neck to wrapping over the bottom string reduces the effort and pain somewhat. Fortunately in the show itself we'll only be playing each song once (of course), meaning that there shouldn't be much pain, if at all.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
75	16/05/2007	The 'theta' join and SQL arcana	Programming, ERP, SQL
708	16/05/2014	Friday night	Personal, Maccabi Tel Aviv
849	16/05/2015	Florence log 2 - Siena	Holiday, Florence, Italy
1133	16/05/2018	Tom Wolfe, RIP	Obituary, Tom Wolfe
1216	16/05/2019	Greece (0)	Holiday, Andros, Greece