“When I did the Debut Atlantic tour it was with violinist James Ehnes.  I would read from my plays for half the show and James would perform solo on the violin for the other half.  We rented a car and toured to eight different locations as I recall in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. James, who was a wunderkind with the violin, a virtuoso, was a very down to earth young man.  He was in his twenties at the time and I was in my forties. We got along very well as it turned out and we discovered that we had many likes in common including sports. The odd thing about the tour, from my perspective anyway, was the instrument that James was traveling with.  It was a Stradivarius on loan from a collector in Seattle and was worth 4 million dollars. I was so nervous having that violin in the rental car. I was worried that one morning I might get in the car and spill my Tim Horton’s coffee all over it. Or I might be putting my seat back to accommodate my long legs and inadvertently crush it as it sat on the floor in the back seat.  I recall James and I going into a Harvey’s restaurant to get some take out burgers one day.  There we were standing in line and James has got the violin case in his hand with the 4 million dollar fiddle inside and I whispered to him, “Aren’t you worried about carrying that thing around like that? What if somebody steals it?”  James said the key was not to draw attention to it.  If he just carried it around like it was from some high school band room, he said, then nobody would care about it. A good point, but that didn’t lessen my worry about traveling with it.”

-Norm Foster (July 12,2014)