Sing!

Welcome, tuneful reader, as this week I bring you glad tidings of great joy. Yes, not only is it the season of Yule, but also last week we got to celebrate a return to live, in-person music making. Or put another way, Helen's choir did a concert for the first time since March 2020!

In fact they did the usual full roster of performances: three different concerts over three days, in various Bay Area locations. The last of these, pictured above, was in San Francisco itself.

To be in the company of people like this didn't feel as unusual as I expected, despite us really not having done it at all for the last couple of years; it felt entirely natural and didn't have the slightly frightening overtones that I expected. As you can see in the picture, our performers were masked throughout, and I'm sure they breathed very carefully indeed. Our audience kept its distance, and fortunately our venues were big enough that there was plenty of room.

The singing itself is very high quality, and the level of challenge is high too: here you see them performing with their (ahem) collaborative pianist, but more than half the repertoire is a capella, with all the challenges that entails. I have to admit they're really good.

I managed to find myself a pretty nice coffee place to go to while they were rehearsing through the concert, where I took a photo of this archetypal San Francisco scene:

Hipster coffee shop that's trying to pretend it's in Southern Europe: check! Person outside in shades pretending they're reading Hemingway: check! LED bulbs impersonating old incandescents: check! You've got it all, here, reader. Sadly, they forgot to bring me my macchiato so I had to drink it in a hurry whilst walking back to the concert, but I got some work done, so everything's good.

Overall this made such a change: it's been so rare to get out and genuinely interact with other people without a sense of fear and dread that it was even more enjoyable than usual. That said, given Omicron, perhaps there should have been a sense of fear and dread, and we'll be safely locked down again in a few weeks. Let's see, dear reader, let's see.