MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Me on the left, Janis DeLara on the right; she and Jose and I went to The Messiah that evening.

Finally the night of the cantata arrived and we all got through it and everybody liked it. The last two measures of O Holy Night — for altos — is impossible but we did it.

Friend Woody of Lennard Island Lighthouse (with whom I used to sing in a choir years ago) e-mails, “Oh the nerves, the director thinking it will never pull togather, the soloists disdainful of the back-up crowd, the people who are too deaf and too far gone in the larynx department to pull their weight and the interminable practices, but somehow manage to come through when it counts…”

And, I might add, the sopranos gossiping in  muted tones while the pianist drills everybody else on their parts  (I mean what do they have to worry about?) until finally the pianist slams out a big dissonant chord: “Sopranos shut up!” and the director says mildly, “Sopranos please hold it there…”

Our soloist Jim Boyd who is also the high wire man for the electric co-op (the guy who goes up in the thirty-foot bucket and fixes the transformers) is a stunning baritone and so saved the day, or night.

As Connie Willis, sci-fi/fantasy writer (The Winds Of Marble Arch) once wrote, “Everything I know about human nature I learned in choir”.

PHOTOS BY JEFF GEORGE, LENNARD ISLAND LIGHT STATION

Two stunning photos from Jeff George’s calendar, which I got in a christmas package. The first is a rough day at the Lennard Island landing, the second is ‘tideline during the herring spawn’. The North Pacific is full of endless variations and surprises and Jeff manages to capture every mood with his camera.

And to think I managed to get ashore on that landing — but it wasn’t that rough! I love these colors. The one of the herring spawn looks like some distant Celtic fairyland — the realm of the perilous Glamourie.