Fat Conductor Took a little piano job playing with a small orchestra for a Summer Pops kind of thing. Several of the players are really fun people I already know and love and most of the pieces are fairly new and clever arrangements of familiar songs. Two rehearsal, five performances, done and done. First rehearsal, the fat piece of shit conductor saunters into the rehearsal hall and the entire energy of the room changes. Every musician in the twelve member orchestra is slim except for a slightly chubby percussionist. Conductor is about 5'10" and about 400 lbs.    Great. This is what we get to look at. For hours at a time. And I'm the assistant conductor to this pile of garbage. I have to work more closely with him than anyone else--taking notes, passing on information, etc. But it gets better.  After we talk through the score for an hour (and JFC he was slow, it should have taken about 20 minutes), and take a short break, the playing finally begins. And it's a disaster. We can't see his downbeats. We can't see shit. We can't tell what the hell he's doing because he's so damn fat. His arms are like little stubs just barely poking out from his blob of a body, so there's no negative space. AND he's so stupid that he's wearing a light colored shirt for rehearsal so the baton blends in with the background of his wall of shirt and fat. We stumble through the first few numbers, starting and stopping way too many times.  Fatshit conductor is getting impatient, begins scolding us because it's our fault, of course. At one point he actually said in an exasperated voice, "Just catch my downbeat!" and the percussionist said, "I'm sorry, but where on your downbeat is your downbeat?" We take another break after a tortuous hour and twenty minutes and Fatshit pulls me aside and asks about the players, are they really professionals, etc. I told him it was a roomful of symphony players and we'd all played together under various circumstances for years and years, decades even, but he wasn't having it. We were obviously idiots. I suggested it might help if wore a darker shirt for the next rehearsal. We'll see what happens. Longest afternoon of my life.