The best part of my day has been coffee with Barbara Orland, the SLSO assistant principal oboe. Barbara’s 30th anniversary with the orchestra was last season. She was hired while she was in the midst of her master’s studies at Temple University. The Dean of the Music School wondered if she was really sure she wanted to go to St. Louis. She told me she “happily packed my bags and left Philly” in 1976.
I interviewed Barbara for the first "Meet the Musicians" page of the season for Playbill. Among the things I learned that made my coffee with Barbara the best part of my day was: she once lived on a boat off of the Great Barrier Reef and scuba dived night and day for three weeks; she has completed the Escape from Alcatraz swim twice, which is once more than Clint Eastwood pretended to do it; and when she was a child she wanted to be a pathologist, collecting dead animals she found in the Pennsylvania woods and taking them home and dissecting them -- her ideal present was a frog in a jar of formaldehyde.
