Having been influenced by an elder director friend of mine to give back to the community as much as you can ("you and your students have a gift that needs to be shared") it sounded like a great opportunity to expose my students to a world they often do not see (myself included) and musically, it is good for sight-reading and brushing up on our bass clef.
So, this year we took a crew of 12 (or largest number in this our fourth year to do this - last year was snowed out, but I still count it) to three different locations. The first place was probably the best performance and experience all around: Childer's Place at the Bivins Home.
I was a little apprehensive when we got there: our program was scheduled to be upstairs and when you are dealing with seven keyboard instruments, the "upstairs" is not your friend. Alas, the two elevators we were instructed to use were big enough to take up a 4 1/3 octave marimba!
After playing at Bivins, we headed over to the Craig Retirement Village. We were set to play in the Alzheimer's Unit. Well, this was a little more eventful. Eventful because I pulled our truck up under an awning that is not meant to have a truck our size driven under it. With caution, I sized up the awning and decided that our truck could in fact fit under it. I was mostly correct, because all but the last foot and a half of the truck cleared fine. The last little bit made contact and caused a little damage.
After carefully backing the truck up (and exchanging insurance information with the head Environmental Services man) we played an abbreviated version of our program, then got the heck out of there. I'll admit it, I was really embarrassed by the whole thing! But, I have to mention that the employees there at the Craig didn't make a big deal of it and were very nice to me.
Now, I can't seem to load photos into my blogs in the correct order, so I'm going to talk a little bit about our party afterwards before I talk about our interesting experience at the third location.
When we were all done caroling and dropping those keyboard instruments off at various student's homes, we went over to the Prater's house for a little after-party. Mrs. Prater was gracious enough to host us and to prepare a small feast.
Here is Regan with Mrs. Prater:
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A few of the students enjoying themselves:
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Regan warmed right up to Amanda!)
Disclaimer: Sorry about the quality of these photos. I was only armed with my cell phone, so I'm not going to pretend that these are of a high quality.
Now, I said earlier that our third stop was an interesting experience. Rather than tell the whole story, I'll give a brief account of what happened:
Upon arriving at our last stop, we realized that there was no hope of us getting all of our keyboards through the tiny front door. Since there were no large service doors elsewhere, we had to make due with only getting a student line marimba and a xylophone through the doors. What to do?!? Amanda jokingly suggested that we could sing -- a suggestion she would come to regret! That's what we were forced to do: sing. Three of us manned the keyboards: myself, Joel and Wesley W. and the rest of us sang out of the hymnals.
I had to make sure the residents knew that we were not representing the Randall Choir. Our choir has a fine reputation and I'd hate for a bunch of band kids to ruin it!
So, here are a few pictures of our unusual consort: a xylophone, a marimba and a hodge podge of talented (or untalented) vocalists:
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I don't think we caused much damage with our voices... at least not as much damage as I did to the awning at the Craig...
