All By Ourselves...

Recently, one of the beloved vocal teachers at my school passed away from a battle with cancer. To honor his memory, his wife put together a beautiful service that would acknowledge how much he has affected the vocal community. My choir, having several people that learned directly under this teacher, was asked to sing at the event. So, for the last few weeks, we have been preparing several songs (I even got a solo...one where I am supposed to sound like a dying bird....but still). On Friday, we got our tuxedos, dresses, and directions and left class fully prepared for the reception.

In an unforeseen twist of fate, our director suffered, this weekend, from severe kidney stones that eventually landed him in the hospital. Of course, he was unable to attend the concert. Still, we have two directors so it was not an entirely huge deal, except for the fact that the other director was moving into a new house that day. Later that afternoon, everyone received a panicked text message from one of our choir's members relaying the news. She told us that we should still come at the proper time and if we could not conduct ourselves, we should not perform.

At 2:30, our expected call time, the whole group was gathered and you could feel the tension in the air. We went on stage to rehearse and no one was really sure what to do. Luckily, a nice man offered to play pitches for us and the girl who had sent out the message counted us in and helped maintain tempo. It was not a train wreck. I had been expecting complete disaster, but, instead, we were actually pretty good! After running through all of our songs, we went and got changed. Now, here was the big question: could we perform the same way with a large crowd of people watching? We did. It was weird. If anything, I think that we had looked more impressive because of the fact that we had no director.

This entire situation makes me think of the old saying, "the show must go on." We had a large number of things work against us, but we persevered on and actually sang pretty well. I am very proud of our choir for having the guts to stand in front of a group of people with no director. I highly doubt that any sports team would do nearly as well without their coach...