She played a mean trombone

There are more consequences to being 58 than just having an unreliable memory and the beginnings of hearing loss. We middle-aged folks also have to deal with the interesting results of having grown up in a different era.

I remember well how our Seder host, some twenty years ago, after having mentioned the words "dentist" and "she" in the same paragraph, took us aside and asked us not to act surprised that that her daughter’s dentist was a woman—she didn’t want her daughter to think that that was unusual (which it certainly was, in the mid-80’s). And I remember ever so nonchalantly pointing out to our son both the male and the female “motorworkers”—I refuse to call them motormen—beginning probably within a week of having seen a woman in the “driver’s” seat of a subway for the first time.

Which brings us, you may be surprised to know, to the reason for this post.

When I joined a college student organization, my mentor told me that she’d given up playing the trombone because it wasn’t an instrument for a woman.

Imagine, then, my pleasant surprise when the brass rock band—bass (?) sax, tenor (?) sax, trumpet, trombone, and drum set—that I heard playing in the subway tonight turned out to include the first female trombone player I’ve ever seen (to the best of my recollection).

So I listened to a couple of their songs and did a wee smidge of semi-discrete dancing on my way to an Israeli folk dance session. ‘Twas a most pleasant warm-up.

Call me silly and I’ll plead guilty as charged, but I still get a kick out of seeing women play musical instruments that "girls" just didn’t play when I was growing up because they weren’t consider appropriate for “girls” (which, in those days, included 90-year-olds)—electric bass, electric rock guitar (as opposed to acoustic folk guitar), trumpet, trombone, and drums (and maybe a few others that my so-called memory can’t remember).

Did I happen to mention that my son’s favorite physics teacher is a woman? We’ve come a long way.