22 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
22 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
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You are not, it turns out, supposed to sing in an airport. If you and your choir gather around in a loose semicircle with your director standing in focal point and begin to sing, however quietly, they will let your choir finish the song and then one of the gate agents will come and gently request that you stop immediately. Your directory will then smile sheepishly at you --- as sheepishly as a man such as he can manage --- and explain that oops, we were not supposed to do that.
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And yet your sense of camaraderie will not be diminished. You will find yourselves sharing those perennial in-jokes all throughout the flight, wherein one of you will remember a song that you sang and say a few words and then others will complete the line, and then you will bust out giggling.
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You will find yourselves making your way out of the San Antonio airport to gather around the bus to head to the hotel and then you will find that you are one ticket short after a newcomer to the choir joined in time for the trip, a delightful tenor you are thankful to have, and so you, lucky you, will pile into your partner's car and you two will drive to the hotel, because he lived in Waco and was excited to come up and see you anyway.
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You will find yourself falling in love with the riverwalk and will spend as much time as you can down there, because the restaurants are good and the walk is pretty and you can feel the tension building between you and your partner after so many strained conversations as the sensibilities you bear around him clash with those you bare around your fellow singers.
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And you will find yourself on Saturday listlessly watching the various choirs performing at the festival and thinking, gosh, some of these folks are not as good as I thought, because there are the BYU singers, whose recordings of Eric Whitacre's music helped solidify your love of choir music, and they are far rougher here in the concert hall than they are on their recordings, and it's not that pleasant sort of rough that younger voices have that leads to a velveteen sound when they join together, but instead an unpracticed or tired sound that makes you feel almost sorry for them.
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And when you go back to the hotel that night where your partner has secured a room with a king bed so that you can stay with him, you will find yourself unable to truly feel the bed beneath you, because there is a thin space between you and the sheets, perhaps only enough to slide a piece of paper through, but you suspect that it is a space borne of your excitement for the next day.
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Because the next day is your time to shine.
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The next day is your day.
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The next day, you are the last choir to hit the stage, and you will close out the entire festival, and you are finally at the point in your career when you can allow yourself to feel a sense of pride and readiness, after all of the countless hours that you practiced. Is there risk? There is always risk.
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And yet you know you have this.
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And so you get up the next morning and you and your choir miss the first performance and lecture of the day solely to practice once more, and then you hear the second-to-last choir from behind the acoustic shell
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