UD‘s nervous and excited about singing in a Messiah chorus this year.
She’s done plenty of singalong Messiahs at the Kennedy Center (The night I brought my mother to this event has become one of my best memories.), and has sung bits of the thing in school and church choirs, but she’s never been in a big actual chorus that sings the thing through (not all of it, but a lot of it) with soloists and orchestra and all. She’s already described her first rehearsal.
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Last night at the Garrett Park Town Hall
UD didn’t sing anything from Messiah.
This was the annual Garrett Park holiday singalong
(here’s a post about the 2007 singalong),
and she sang a little solo from I Wonder as I Wander.
She wondered as she wandered whether she’d
actually hit the F sharp. And she did, she did hit
it, twice, thanks to the three sips of Nalewka
Kresowa Orzechowa she took before leaving her
house.
As always this event got UD going emotionally.
Even more this year than earlier years. Not sure why.
The very large audience sang its heart out, so that was
part of it. The accumulated years of the event, the deeply
known faces in the chorus around me, and in the audience
in front of me, all of us moving right along timewise, sharing
a long town past…
Pile on top of that the deep holiday memories everyone
sang from, the way you could stand there and look at
their faces and see exactly what this modest village event
meant to them, and you don’t have to read Thomas Hardy
to understand the dimensions of the thing.