In High School chorus one year we sang a "Holiday Medly" accompanied by the orchestra. One of the songs in the medly was "Deck The Halls." And for some reason, we could never come in right. In retrospect, I completely blame the conductor, who should have come up with some secret signal to help us out. It wasn't just one or two people, it was a hard entrance, the orchestra fumbled the intro, and we were, after all, just high school students.
Needless to say, the day of the Winter Concert, we all stood there in front of everyone, the orchestra played the shaky intro, and then... Silence. For what seemed an eternity, until I realized we were messing up. So I started doing what I knew how to do, which was sing. We had already missed the "Deck" part of the song, so I just started singing "THe Halls With Boughs of Holly." The irony of being the only one doing what I was supposed to do is that I looked like the only one making a mistake. Nevertheless, I kept singing, and I even had a few people singing with me by the time we reached "Fa la la la LA, la LA la LAAAAAA."
I'm sure we could have covered it up, that if the conductor / orchestra director had just kept going we would have found our footing. But unfortunately he stopped, turned to the audience, explained that we sometimes didn't get all the kinks ironed out of our performance in time, and to just let us try it again.
Which was great, except it made me look even stupider. And that's all I can think of when I hear this song, except during the "don we now our gay apparel" I picture a bunch of men cross dressing to look like Barbara and Bette.
Anyway, while our neightbors are Decking their own halls, putting up decorations and lights and blow up lawn decorations and illuminating reindeer, I am busy tearing our house apart, taking everything out of my kitchen and putting things where they won't get broken, or dusty, or in the way, puching our dining room table against the wall, wondering if the washer and dryer will fit in the front hall, and if we could keep a trash bin outside without the dog getting into it... The Floor People come Monday.
This photo, by the way, was taken 2 years ago - it's NIck. I took about 178 photos of Nick in that santa outfit, trying to get one where he was smiling and looking at the camera. All it took was Steve walking in the room (just after photo #177) to get Nick to give us the smile we ended up using. This is NOT THAT picture. This is one of the rejects.
4 comments:
That's an amazing anecdote from your dwight englewood performance history. At least you never dropped a curtain on someone's head like I did in the 11th grade.
What century was the deck the halls song written anyway? Would you call that Shakespearean English? I hear the tune of that song and I think of the Fruity Pebbles commercial where Fred finally lets Barney have some of his cereal.
Regarding "Deck the Halls" from Robert Joseph, The Christmas Book:
"The joyous energy of Christmas is perhaps best represented by this secular carol. It focuses on the entering custom that evolved over the years from age-old pagan festivities, such as bringing in the yule log and decorating the house with holly.... The tune is an old Welsh air that Mozart once used as a theme for a piano-violin duet."
(Don't you just love Google!!!!)
The picture of Nick is wonderful --I just love the look on his face --even better than a smile!!!
There had better be Santa pictures this year -- I don't care if you dress Nate up as Saint Nick & plop Nick next to him! Tradition is tradition!
Is that Nick? Wow! But I guess you can still see the resemblance :-)
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