The Problem With Christmas Concerts

It's the winter weather problem

I was expecting to go with the chorus to serenade some folks at a nursing home this past Wednesday. Then it started to snow. It wasn't really snowing that much at our house, nor was it snowing a lot near the nursing home. Unfortunately, it was snowing more near our director's house. Besides that, one of our best lead singers doesn't care to get out in bad weather, and neither do I. I will modestly allow that I'm one of our better bass singers.

I had been watching the weather reports and forecasts pretty closely because I drive for about 45 minutes to get to most of these Christmas gigs. If the weather gets nasty, I could be stranded a long way from home, and it doesn't have to get very nasty for that to happen. Our house is up in the mountains, such as the local mountains are. Even though I have a hard time calling them mountains - I've driven through the Rockies a few times - the hillsides are pretty steep and the roads are hard to get over if they're icy and snow-covered.

So on Wednesday afternoon I got the car out and made a run into town. We hadn't checked our post office box in a few days, so that provided a good reason to make the trip. That way I could check out the road conditions and make a decision about whether I would be able to get to the gig. I already knew that one of the other basses wouldn't be going due to illness, so this was a serious question.

Happily for me, the roads into town were perfectly clear. No problem. So I was thinking that I would be willing to give it a try that evening. Then my phone rang. When I answered, it was our director asking if I thought I'd be able to get to the nursing home that evening. After exchanging a couple of comments, it became apparent that she was just looking for a good reason to call off the performance. The roads near her were icy and dangerous to drive on, and she had found out that our wheel horse lead would probably not show up.

What could I do? I agreed with her. We have to have Fab singing lead if anyone is going to hear the melody properly, and I wasn't all that enthusiastic about taking a chance with the condition of the roads holding up.

We'll try it again this week. We're enjoying a warm spell right now, so travel shouldn't be a problem for anyone.

This means that I'll be doing one performance on Wednesday evening, another on Saturday morning, and a third one on Saturday evening. Then it will all be over.

By the time we're done, I'll be very happy to quit singing Christmas songs.