Symphony Not So Fantastique

Do you guys remember that Julia Roberts movie, Sleeping with the Enemy? It came out in the early 90s, and it was back before she was straightening her hair. I remember seeing it with my sister on a VHS tape rented from Blockbuster.

It was about a woman who escaped her abusive husband and moved to a different state. Of course he didn’t accept that she’d drowned on a sailing trip and managed to track her down. When he got to her house he blasted this creepy classical music he liked, Symphony Fantastique by Berlioz. Of course she was in the bathtub when the music came blasting through her house. Then she looked up and had seen that the three hand towels on the rung in the bathroom were perfectly aligned the way he wanted her to do it. And she KNEW he was in the house! (Also, if you live alone, why put 3 hand towels up at once? I would put one up at a time and put the other two in the cabinet. This way I’d always have clean backups. But whatever, that’s just me.)

I had a similar moment the other day. Todd was traveling, and I was in the shower before work. All of a sudden music came blasting on. Thankfully it wasn’t Symphony Fantastique by Berlioz; it was Barenaked Ladies “The Old Apartment.” My heart raced just a little bit as I rinsed the shampoo off my hair. I didn’t really want to get out of the shower in case someone was in the house. Why wasn’t Potter barking at the intruder? Did they incapacitate him somehow?

I turned off the water and reached out for my towel. It was already spread out on the rung; so I didn’t have any evidence of some obsessive abusive mad man coming into my home to straighten it before murdering and raping me. Ironically BNL was singing “Broke into the old apartment” as I was getting out of the shower. I knew he wasn’t coming home early—he’s done that in the past where he’s surprised me and scared the hell out of me.

We have Sonos speakers in several rooms of our house. The music was coming from those. I could hear the music coming from downstairs too. I wrapped myself in the towel and pulled up the Sonos app on my iPad. That’s the cool thing about Sonos, you can stream music to these speakers from the app. It didn’t show I had music playing on my app. So, it must be from Todd’s device.

Turns out Todd had set an alarm to wake him up at a certain time by playing music from the speakers. And it happened while I was in the shower. And it would be an awesome April Fools prank to cue up Symphony Fantastique and scare the pants off of him.

BJ Knapp is the author of Beside the Music, available for purchase here. Please sign up for the Backstage with BJ Knapp mailing list to get updates on events, signings, dog pictures and so much more.