So...this past weekend two of us drove from Atlanta to Pensacola, FL without issue...the other two from Nashville, TN...were slightly misdirected by their GPS, but arrived safely...and that's what matters.
Back in July, Jen mentioned that (as the Region 23 YWIH - Young Women In Harmony - Director) she would be (again) directing the girls' portion of the Santa Rosa County choral festival in Navarre, FL (just east of Pensacola) on Monday, Sep 20, 2010 and invited us (her brand-spanking-new quartet) to join her if we wanted to. A chance to educate??? To share barbershop??? A road trip??? You betcha!
We cleared our schedules, made arrangeme
nts for our children and husbands. One of our husbands was even left with the daunting task of shopping for a swimteam swimsuit (one-piece - not-sexy, please) for and with a 16 year old girl...because his wife would be out of town. Aren't you all so jealous of him? Signing him up for sainthood for all parties having survived that - including the marriage. Dream Momma (Stacy's Mom) even took a vacation day from work to supervise nerf-wars, lego-creations & Wii competitions for three of said-children! Amazing people!!
Atl arrived around noon and promptly took up residence on two of the Marriott's lobby couches for a little nappy time whilst Nashville strolled in (kidding!!!) around 1:30 - very harried. Even though the original plan was to arrive at 1:30 CST. We were greeted by Tara Smith and Susan Adams of the Pensacola Sound Chorus with a HUGE gift basket of waters (YAY!), candy (big YAY!), salty stuff (Bigger YAY!), lip balm (awesome!) and 4 miniature bottles of HAND SANITIZER - YOU GIRLS ARE THE BOMB!!! What a welcome!
Dreams need to be fed, too. We found a Fridays, ate and caught up. After yummy lunch, back to the hotel for rehearsal, and oh what a fantastic one that was!! Three hours later, it was time to head to the lobby to meet up with Tara and Susan - hostesses/chauffers extraordinaire - to take us out to dinner at a yummy seafood restaurant with some other PS members. We had the pleasure of meeting Jackie and her daughters, Penny and Pam, then Dorie (89 yrs young, but looks and acts not a day over 60!). What a great time! What a treat! Having requested a song, Dream performed for the first time for fellow barbershoppers. There is no better audience, people!!
Back to the room for GAME time! Bananagrams was okay. Susan won EVERY time - yeah, that was fun. I still like to play, but she needs to get a life and QUIT practicing so much. Jen brought out HER poison - Dutch Blitz. Totally addicting...not even kidding!! She was much more sportsman-like - she let Susan and me win occasionally (or so she denied again and again). That girl can throw some cards. Robin simply declared she will be bringing a game of her choosing next time - one that she can win.
Sleep came around 1-ish...shocking, eh? This is only following Robin aka Tag Mistress teaching a few more tags - all of them with all of us laying in our respective beds. There was one tag I kept trying to remember, but couldn't remember the words or notes...so I said, "It had a western, barn in a field, gun-slingin' feel...and that my part goes up, down, up, down twice then I do a little thingy." then came the sound of crickets chirping...then peals of laughter...a collective, "What???!!??" Turns out (after 20 or so minutes) it was "Linger". "Oh let me linger, in the shelter of the nah-ah (up down) ah-ah (up down) ah-ah-ah-ah-ahhhh-ahhh-ahheet (then I do a little thingy)." Whew. That's 30 minutes we'll never get back!
The alarm went off at 6am and we were all on the road by 7:30a, arriving in Navarre right at 8:30a. The meeting was to begin in the sanctuary of the Navarre United Methodist Church, so we headed on in. With no one else around, we climbed the steps to the chancel area (risers had been set up already). There we sang our ballad in a beautifully acoustic house of God. It was an incredibly spiritual experience. That was our first 'stage' performance. We couldn't think of a better place to first publicly, raise our voices in harmony. Amen and Amen.
Bus-loads of high schoolers and middle schoolers began pouring in around 9:15. Let the chaos begin! No, really, it was quite an organized and productive day. Prestige Quartet (men's 2010 collegiate second-place winners) served as faculty for the boys only lacking their bass who had surgery recently, but Dr. Bill from North Carolina dusted off 3 or 4 numbers in the van ride over for a real treat!! Good thing it was the bass that was missing!
We performed a song to open the festival, Prestige + Dr. Bill performed a song, then we split the genders for rehearsal. I don't know what the boys did, but Jen was AMAZING with these high school girls! She has such a positive way to get them to do exactly what she needs. They adore her as well. They look forward to this day every year and Jen said afterward it was so much easier with her quartet friends helping out. After lunch, she worked choreography, then ran the 'set' again a few times. Following that, we had an extra few minutes, so Robin and Jen taught the girls some tags and they had an opportunity to play 'double quartet tag'. They thoroughly enjoyed that...especially the Toy Story tag, "When She Loved Me" to which the tenor (that would be me) has the melody...to which the tenor (that would be me again) couldn't get my first note each 20 times we ran it...nice! It was beautiful though!
The boys joined us for a while and then we took the girls to the other room for Q&A. Many questions were asked about YWIH and how to get involved. That's AWESOME!! Then they asked us to sing for them....well......okay! Jen told them we were going to sing our only other two uptunes during the 'show' this afternoon so we would have to sing our 'slow' song for them...BUT they had to promise not to fall asleep ;-). We sang our contest ballad and, to toot our own horns a wee bit, they were hanging on our every chord, breathless! When we finished, they were completely quiet...then...cheers so loud, we thought they would disturb the boys' rehearsal! THAT was fun, but we totally forgot to record it. At least no one fell asleep, right?
At 2:00, it was time for the 'show'. Directors and parents were invited and there were quite a few who showed up. The MC talked for a minute to the audience, then asked the girls to sing their song to which we gave them the wrong pitch, twice, (ouch!), but they ended up recovering beautifully...to a standing ovation. Then Dream sang two songs...to a standing ovation, then the boys sang their song...to a standing ovation, then Prestige rocked the house (to which the girls were drooling!)...of course, to a standing ovation, and then the boys and girls sang their 8-part Lida Rose/Will I Ever Tell You? song and it was fantastic, earning yet another standing ovation. You could tell they learned a lot! They came very prepared, worked hard and had a great time.
[Somewhere in there, maybe before the 'show', Prestige and Dream sang the 8-part together to demonstrate how the two pieces fit together and that was certainly a highlight for me! Men just have this amazing instrument that vibrates everything around them. It certainly helped that I was standing in front of the baritone and bass. Heavy **sigh**.]
Following the mad dash for dismissal, we had a few minutes before Atl had to hit the road for home. We sang some tags with the boys, then the boys, well two of Prestige...Nick on bari and Drew on tenor, sang with Jen on Lead and Susan on bass, OUR intro to Blue Skies in OUR pitch! THAT was wrong on so many levels. If you want to hear it, it is posted on Dream's Facebook page under Videos. Wrong, wrong, wrong...just sayin'. Scary thing is that they pulled if off...barely ;-)!
I left there feeling so excited about how excited those youngins became about barbershop. This is the future of barbershop music...so God bless those amazing visionairies of the men's chorus who put this whole festival together...from convincing the county to participate, to obtaining the space for us all to meet, to feeding 300 people for lunch and for inviting the women to join in the fun.
Kudos to those dedicating their time and energy to sharing the gift of a capella 4-part barbershop harmony with future generations!!!
