At my first audition for the President’s Own, I learned my very first lesson of professional auditions. The lesson was, don’t play too much before your audition. I went with a large group of trumpet players from IU and had to warm up in the dreaded mass warm-up room with 100 other individuals. In that room it was easy to be distracted by, “oh, she’s doing Clarke, I should do some of that,” and “that seems a lot faster than I am taking Variations on America, I better practice that faster.” By the end of my “warm-up” I was spent, going into the audition barely able to make it through the 3 minutes of repertoire on the list.