Martin Spitznagel Pianist. Composer. Writer. Filmmaker.

The Great Pipe Nothing

24 inches of snow fell in 12 hours! Ah!

The entire reason I came to Pittsburgh this weekend was to perform in a theater organ concert with Bryan Wright and the Boilermaker Jazz Band. That was before anyone knew Pittsburgh was about to get 24 inches of snow.

Needless to say, my concert got canceled faster than a Joss Whedon series on FOX.

I was really looking forward to it, too. I was nervous – I’m not a theater organist and was about to pretend to be in front of hundreds of people – but I was also excited, the same kind of excited I get every time a new “Star Wars” project is announced: blind hope that it’s going to be awesome, and stark terror that it’s going to be terrible.

But after the sting of that passed, and the calls were made to family and friends that we wouldn’t be getting together after all, and after a day spent shoveling hundreds of pounds of snow out of Mom’s driveway, not to mention rescuing a few stranded motorists unlucky enough not to have new tires on their car (and who were, I assure you, surprised to see someone with Virginia license plates so deft with a shovel), I was shocked to find myself so energized at 11 PM that I had to go for a walk in the snow-blanketed neighborhood to get myself anywhere near ready to sleep.