It's gonna be the future soon...

Hey everybody!! Sassafrass, the a cappella singing group I joined a couple months ago, is going to put on a holiday concert. It would mean a lot for me for my friends to show up and be supportive for my debut!

By concert, I mean we're five women singing fewer than a dozen songs, the whole thing will take less than an hour, and we're (likely) singing at a local food pantry and requesting people make a donation there as the price of the show. So nothing huge, formal, or requiring tons of your time. That said, the songs are gorgeous and the cause is good.

The concert is currently slated for Sunday, December 20. More details when they're hammered out, but I wanted to semi-date-grab now.

So the sight-sing I referred to in my last post occurred tonight. We didn't find a second male, but we had a soprano (quantumkitty), two altos (myself and siderea), and one flexible tenor/bass (luckylefty), and siderea was able to switch to tenor sometimes, so we did a pretty passable job. And I had a GREAT time! My voice is one of those things I surround with some weird baggage, but I figured what the heck, I love the song and I like people and it has been too long since I made music. The result? While my breathing is absolutely horrible, and I need to figure out how to make register changes smooth, and sometimes I get the wrong note or word stuck in my head and just. can't. shake. it. out, overall I did not feel completely out of my depth and luckylefty suggested I do more sight-singing! And, more importantly, I got out of my rut for a while and had a good time. So all in all, A+++, would do again.

siderea has, in celebration of the Apollo 11 anniversary, written a SATB arrangement of Leslie Fish's "Hope Eyrie" and wants a group of a cappella sight-singers to sing it with her tomorrow (Wednesday) night somewhere in Camberville, likely MIT at this point. A soprano and a male (I'm not sure if it's T or B) are still needed to have a full set. Is anyone available/interested?

The Sassafrass Concertino 2009 album "Eclectic" (made up of life tracks recorded at the Club Passim concert as well as a few new studio tracks recorded in usernamenumber's room) is, at least in reference to the three songs I immediately had to listen to ("Somebody Will," "My Brother, My Enemy," and "Sundown"), extremely satisfying. Major props faerieboots et al!

It's hard to figure out how to start this post. So I'll go with the trite and simple: today something momentous happened to me. It was a fairly normal day as far as actual events go, but as far as me internally, this day needs a big black X on the calendar. I don't know if relating it will make sense to anyone else, but here we go:

My Sunday D&D game ended early, meaning I could show up to faerieboots's a cappella group's concert only a little bit late instead of missing most if not all of it. I got there about 30-45 minutes in. There was a song or two, and then two of the members, the lead female and the only male, stood up front and announced, "This song is about the future," and began singing.

It's hard to describe the next few minutes. At some point early on I realized there were tears running down my face. Someone took me and who I am and my hopes and dreams and worldview and understood it all and wrote it into a song. I write and erase over and over here, and maybe I should just stop there with that description and link you to the song.

http://adapalmer.com/sassafrass/somebodywill.html

When the song ended and I had dried off my tears, I turned to usernamenumber and said, "Well, I'm done." I consider the $14 I paid to get into that concert to solely to be paid for that song. (I still stayed for the rest of the concert, and it was pretty awesome stuff, but I had been put through the wringer by that track and nothing else got as close.) When the show ended, I checked their CD's tracklist, saw the song on it, and ran out of the venue to find an ATM so that I could have cash to purchase the CD. After I returned, I found out from faerieboots that the female vocalist of that performance was the one who wrote the song. I approached her. I told her that the nearly-$30 I had just spent I considered solely for the purpose of that song, and that it was not nearly enough in comparison to what that song existing means to me. She responded immediately with, "Would you like the sheet music?" So now I have the arrangement for alto and tenor. Just... bampf.

I am sad to find that the album cut is a solo version and not as powerful as the live duet, but I can still sing along to it, and with the music and Ada's blessing I can take it and make it my own, and I am a different person for having this opportunity.

So that's what happened to me today.

As a small step towards resolving the conflict within me after last weekend, today at lunch I spontaneously sang a short ode to my burrito. Being NOT Twitter, I can share the lyrics with you here:

Oh, I'm so glad I have you, burrito / you please me in such a tasty way
My stomach was growling / so I went out prowling / and saw people crowding / your cart
And now you're much closer to my heart
...my stomach.
Oh, I'm so glad I have you, burrito / you please me in such a tasty way!

Sure, it could use some tightening up, but it was spur-of-the-moment, and I'm proud of it.

I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle.

You see, there was a portion of this weekend where I was sitting down with some of my best female friends, dishing about boys and the pressures of Western society's expectations of women, and when it was appropriate, we expressed ourselves in song, with minimal self-consciousness and maximum respect for the others when they were singing.

Why can't life do that ALL the time?! It was excellent!