Random thoughts
I sang at a wedding today…it was a beautiful ceremony, lovely couple, gorgeous day. But after having gone through my own wedding so recently, I now notice all the things that could have gone better had the bride & groom (or maybe the wedding planner?) thought the details through just a little bit more.
The ceremony took place outside, and the bridesmaids and brides had to traverse a very long lawn to get to the site. They did so in 4-inch stiletto heels, all of them. I almost wanted to say kudos to them, but I was too busy laughing (on the inside, of course!) as their heels accumulated rose petals like those pointy canes that pick up trash while they marched down the rose-carpeted aisle. The bride had to be held up by her parents as she walked because she kept falling into the soft ground. NOTE TO ALL FUTURE BRIDES: if you are going to get married outside, make sure you (and your bridesmaids) choose appropriate footwear.
The ceremony music was untraditional, for sure, which made me happy, because I got to sing something other than Schubert’s Ave Maria . Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for a bride who knows what she wants with regard to music, rather than the standard, "What do you suggest?" Because that’s when I end up with Ave Maria or Panis Angelicus or one of the oldies but goodies. I do like a little change now and again, just to spice things up. But whoever picked the music didn’t really think of the timing or the appropriateness of some of the selections. The groomsmen entered to a somewhat menacing Janá?ek piece played by the string quartet, and they were lined up at the front and ready to go before the piece was even halfway over. And my solo, "Ich habe genug" (Bach Cantata, BWV 82), would have been 8 minutes long before we cut it down to a mere 3′50" during the rehearsal immediately prior to the ceremony. SECOND NOTE TO FUTURE BRIDES: make sure you know what all your music selections sound like and how long everything is going to take.
Other than that, everything else went pretty smoothly. There were some problems with the wireless microphones, but I didn’t need a mic in that intimate setting, so I personally didn’t care one way or the other.
In other news, I’ve actually had enough time on my hands that I’ve been surfing around Digg.com (dangerous, I know) and came across this picture , which had the title "Never piss off an engineer." Priceless.
Getting all crafty
So I made a new friend over the past couple weeks. She’s a new addition to The Crossing, and she is fantastic! We have tons of things in common, especially the fact that we both really like to play with arts and crafts.
Anyway, she’s got this blog, and I’ve been following it and marveling at all the stamps she makes, when I realized that I make stuff like that too! Only I did a whole lot of it for my wedding, and then I stopped because I got busy…like I always do.
I showed her a project I did for my wedding last year, and she really liked it. She said she’d post it on her blog, so I said I’d put the template up on my blog for any of you who might want to do this project yourself.
This project is a wedding program that I turned into a fan (I originally got the idea because I knew it was going to be hot out there in Hawaii, and I thought, “Hey, let me stick the program on a Popsicle stick, and then folks can fan themselves during the ceremony.” But the more I worked on it and researched it, the more I liked the idea of a folding fan with panels. So I modified a template that I found on DIYBride and played around with it on Adobe Photoshop until I could get the right width and angles. It was actually tricky coming up with something that was thin enough to fold down and wide enough to hold all of the text.
Here is one panel:
I then played around in Quark Express and figured out a way to fit three panels on an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper so that I could print it out on my printer. The font I used is Aramis, which is a free font.
This is the Quark file.
Once I printed it out on card stock (it’s been a year since I did this, so I can’t remember what weight I used! I do know the thickest weight will not go through a standard inkjet, so go at least one step down), my husband and I went through the arduous task of cutting the panels out and arranging them in order (as a side note, I didn’t think this was going to take very long…after all, we only had 35 guests! But I didn’t take into consideration that each fan had 9 panels each, so there was a lot more cutting going on in front of the TV than I’d care to admit).
We punched a hole in the bottom of each panel and then used a brad to attach all 9 panels together. We originally tried to use a grommet, but all that did was hold the pieces so tightly together that they didn’t move at all. So the next best thing was a brad, and we also threaded a little ribbon through the hole as well so our guests could swing them daintily from their wrists, if they so desired.
So there you are! Have fun.
Some people call me Maurice
What a surreal day I had yesterday!
After coming home and falling into bed at 11:30 or so Saturday night (I was up in NY helping my brother with his Tisch audition material), I was awakened at 4 AM by Scratchy , who was meowing at the door wanting to be let out. Usually when he does this, I don’t even remember his meows because I instinctively get up as soon as my subconscious registers it, but this time I kept dreaming about being in choir practice and having one person in the choir who just couldn’t quite hit the note and was scooping up to it. After about three takes of the dream, I finally realized that this person sounded way too much like a cat meowing and, oh, yeah, I guess Scratchy wants to be let out.
A more portentous dream I could not have had.
The morning started out as a usual Sunday morning: the alarm went off, I hit snooze a couple times, and then finally rolled myself out of bed and into the shower so I could to church. I was still a little groggy from lack of sleep, so instead of wearing black tights that would have matched the black blouse I was wearing with my burgundy skirt, I pulled on a pair of dark brown tights. It wasn’t until I was walking from my car to church that I looked down at my shoes and realized my mistake. Too late now, I figured. Of course, there was also a big run in one of the legs that clued me into the fact that I didn’t have the mental capacity today to dress myself properly.
Church itself was pretty normal. We have a new assistant rector with abysmal writing skills, and I’ve recently taken to counting the number of times he repeats a word or a phrase within the sermon…today the word "life" came in first with a whopping 35 repetitions, with the word "priority" a far second with only 21. I think it wouldn’t be so noticeable if he didn’t use the exact same words in a different order to fill three sentences in succession. He’s fond of phrases like, "We all prioritize things that matter in our life; in other words, things that matter in life get prioritized." Uh, did anyone point out to you that you’re not using other words at all, but the SAME EXACT WORDS? I might forgive him his redundancy if he created a chiasmus with them (like The Sphinx in Mystery Men : "Learn to hide your strikes from your opponent and you’ll more easily strike his hide"), but he’s not nearly that clever.
After church, we had to sing in an evensong at another church in Asbury Park. It was several church choirs combined to sing at this one church — they’re hoping to make it an annual event, which by itself it not a bad idea, but they’d better put someone else in charge next time. The whole affair, from the rehearsals up to the concert itself, was infuriatingly disorganized. Asbury Park is on the Jersey Shore (some people recognize it as Bruce Springsteen’s home town), but it’s a good hour’s drive away from our church in Moorestown. By the time we were done with the second service at church, I barely had enough time to scarf down a sandwich before all the section leaders piled into one car and headed out to the shore.
Asbury Park should be renamed as Ass-bury Park. That town is a real dump. The church is smack dab in the middle of a pretty bad neighborhood, and we all agreed if we never had to return it would be too soon. When we got there, the airhead in charge was unable to answer a lot of questions and had clearly not communicated what needed to be done in the rehearsal with the other church choir directors or with the clergy from her own church.
We were also dealing with the added bonus of children’s choirs. Our children’s choir managed to behave themselves, thanks to one of the moms who sat opposite them in the choir stalls and glared at them the whole time. But the other kids didn’t have that type of oversight. One kid sat in the back and didn’t even pretend to sing; another one didn’t have any music because some of the other kids had stolen it. There were no parents anywhere; I assume they must have thought with 40+ adults around, there was plenty of supervision. Boy, were they wrong.
The concert itself went surprisingly well, with the exception of the tone-deaf priest who really wanted to cantor. He had been practicing all month, you see, and was really nervous about it. Too bad his chant didn’t have any resemblance to the notes on the page at all, and our harmonized responses would have crashed and burned if it weren’t for the quick-thinking organist, who played our chord before each response.
When the concert was over, I couldn’t get out of there quicker. On my way home, I called Ray, who asked if I could stop and get some pizza for dinner. Pizza sounded good. And beer. Lots of beer. But when I got to the pizza place, they had an order ready for me under the name "Maurice." You have to be seriously not listening to an order if you hear "Maurice" from "Maren." Ray even spelled it for the dude. So I guess now you can call me the space cowboy or the gangster of love if you want…
What a perfect end to my wacky, crazy day.
Filed under Bizarre, Cats, Cranky, Singing | Comments (3)