This may come as a shock, but I do love to sing. This love of singing is both a blessing and a curse. This year, on December 7, I will once more be invited to sing in a concert as part of larger choir, 59 members this year, at a local church. As near as I can figure, 13 churches will be represented.
And then there is me! I am the only one who does not sing in a church choir, and when asked every year, I tell them that I am a member of the Reformed Druid Church. For the uninformed, the Druids worshiped oak trees, we, the Reformed, we worship plywood.
Our repertoire this year will be nine songs of the season, some new, but most ones are from our archives. There are 3 songs this year which require a little more than our voices, one has a three-part trumpet solo, another needs a flutist, and one has a great calypso beat, so it needs percussion.
As we have a certain number of new members every year, they are often uninformed as to the history of some songs. Not the religious history, but the local history. Two years ago, a major newspaper, (The St. Paul Pioneer Press) in putting in our concert in happenings of the area, made a great typographical error. Their little free advertising stated, ‘The Ecumenical Choir will be presenting their 11th annual Christmas Concert, Sunday, at 4 p.m. Being featured will be a new finale number featuring bras and percussion!’
Yes, they put in Bras instead of Brass. With this public pronouncement, I was expecting SRO crowds, but I was disappointed.
Last Sunday, at our choir rehearsal, we were getting our line-ups settled, and we so had some time to talk. One new singer asked us why there was always some snickers when the conductor mentioned this one song, and so we told her.
"How did Brenda take it?" the new gal asked, as Brenda, our director is sort of ‘straight-laced’ . Well, Brenda took it relatively well! Hysteria, panic, frenzy and crying not withstanding! (No, she did take it surprisingly well!)
It wasn’t two minutes later, when we went back to singing, Brenda asked us to take out our Calypso song and then she asked a rather well endowed young lady who once played drums in our local high school band to come forward, to play the maracas to give us the beat.
The girl, maybe 20 or so, was standing up in front of us all, directly in front of my bass section, and then Brenda turns to her and says to her, "Sally, I really want you to shake your maracas on this number!"
Thus another local legend is born, and another song we cannot sing without snickering.
Copyright 2008 George G. Motz
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