damont

I'm finally caught up with LJ for the first time in two weeks. Time to actually post something.

Easter tends to be a busy time for church choirs. I was recruited to ply my Amazing Mercenary Bass Skills (TM) for both my mother's church choir (First Presbyterian, Allentown PA) over Easter weekend, and for

blaisedec and

nostasia's (All Saints Episcopal - Sharon Chapel, Alexandria VA) prior to that. So on Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday we sang an anthem and four or five hymns. Then on Good Friday, in addition to the three hymns, there were five (count them, *FIVE*) anthems. (Counting "And With His Stripes" and "All We Like Sheep" separately.) As

nostasia has already related most of that (including the derailment) I'll skip it here.

Off to Allentown for the weekend. It was a good thing that there were no churchy things planned for Saturday, as Tony's computer thing took considerably longer than expected -- but we had a wonderful time with

giselle0002,

kyleri, Istvan, Jodi and Dakota (aside to the cats: sorry about that last one). After not enough sleep, got up and went to the Catholic church for the 0730 service. I got the very last legal spot in the parking lot, and the church was SRO. For the EARLY service, the one nobody goes to! The singing was, predictably, pretty icky. Nobody's really awake, including the organist, at half past 7 in the m%$#!ng. And whose "bright" idea was it to pick a Communion hymn with the same range and tessitura as "The Star Spangled Banner"? It's not even really Easter related! Fought my way out of the parking lot, got home in time to warn the folks going to the 1030 Mass about impending crowds and Parking Hell, ate breakfast and headed off with Mom and Tony to Mom's church. The music was better there. I was far from the only mercenary in the choir there (Easter being a big travel weekend of course)... but the basses want me to sing there regularly. Er, that's a bit of a commute, y'know?

The "Hallelujah Chorus" is an obvious choice for Easter, both in the thematic material and in that most choir mercenaries can sing it in their sleep. I will say that training by singing around the pool at Darkover helps a great deal.

The music director at Mom's church remembers me from when I was 12-13 years old. I wanted to weird her out by introducing her to Tony, but she escaped early. Oh well.

And now it's time to go home and pack for East Kingdom Coronation this weekend.