Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7
I take full responsibility for depriving the world of Soon Rae Suks’ talents. True, she was certainly not in the pantheon of the cellists like Yo-Yo Ma, Pablo Casals or Jacqueline du Pre. Yet coming in second to those luminaries is nothing to be ashamed of. And that was the track she was on until I came into her life and imploded a promising career. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of what she might have been, had our paths not crossed.
I was hired to escort Miss Suks’ four-week New England tour. I was a part-time culture critic for the Portland Press Herald. The Roberts and Loeb Agency, her West Coast management team, had called my paper to drum up publicity for her appearances and, by the by, wondered if anyone locally could act as her cicerone, saving them travel expenses for someone on their California-based staff.
So there I stood on a Wednesday afternoon in late April near the baggage claim area at the Portland International Jetport, holding a cardboard sign that read “Suks” which, after too many double takes, I changed it to read “Miss Suks.”
When I first spotted her, I thought she was closer to a teenager than the thirty-something her publicity sheet advertised. She was barely five feet, her moon face dominated by huge sunglasses. She wore diamond print stockings, a crushed velvet hat, an artsy hand-painted scarf decorated with a silver antique pin shaped like a musical staff. My first thought was that I would be spending several weeks with a diva for whom I would never be able to get the correct latte order. We shook hands tepidly and headed for the baggage carousel where, to her credit, she made modest strides in trying to yank her oversized duffle bag off the merry-go-round before I interceded. After a good ten minutes and some anxious looks on her face, her cello, encased in sturdy aluminum and with a decal of the South Korean flag, slid towards us.
I didn’t know what I was up against with respect to English. Her bio indicated musical training and education in South Korea. She had, however, studied in the States under Madam Ospensky and referred to graduate courses at Stanford. She tended to the cello while I lugged the duffle out to the parking lot, where I made room for all in my Ford Escape.
I’d booked her in the Holiday Inn by the Bay on Spring Street. Many rooms above the seventh floor look out over Portland Harbor and the price, during the week, is under $150. She had the rest of the day, Wednesday, to recover from the flight. Rehearsal time was scheduled for Thursday morning and Friday afternoon, with concerts on Friday and Saturday evening at the Merrill Auditorium.
We said little on the drive from South Portland to the hotel. I pointed out the sights, basically chain stores and shopping malls. I double parked, toted the bag in and registered her. I explained I’d be back at eight tomorrow morning to drive her to the auditorium and began to leave. At the revolving door, I waved. She looked like a lost dog I was abandoning on the shoulder of a remote highway. I went back.
“Did you have anything to eat on the flight?”
She shrugged, which I would soon learn was her answer to most everything and could be interpreted as a “yes” or “no,” whatever was most reasonable.
We took her belongings up to the room. She used the bathroom, and then we strolled down Congress Street to a Thai place with a varied menu and great prices. Once she got some food in her, she opened up a bit in a very animated way. I liked her. She had a round face, pale but with muted makeup, not gaudy like the Matryoshka nesting dolls, just the right artistic touches on the cheeks, eyes and lips — idiosyncratically cute — especially when she shoveled in the noodles using her chop stick like an oar.
She had toured Arizona and New Mexico a few months ago and didn’t like it. The air was too dry, and unsophisticated audiences clapped between movements of the concertos. While she was raised in South Korea, where temperatures were cold in winter and spring, she was nonetheless worried about dressing properly for New England this time of year. I promised a trip to L. L Bean in Freeport if she wanted anything to keep her comfortable.
About D.E. Fredd
