Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Trip to T.O.: The first part.

Friday, Apr. 6, 2007
8:01 a.m.
I am a very bad monkey. Back from T.O. for three days now, this is the first time I have actually logged into D-land. My buddy list is glowing orange at me, yet I dare not open it until after this entry is submitted.

The bus trip on Saturday was long. Even though we were split into two groups (the “quiet bus” and the “rowdy bus”), I was still unable to catch up on the sleep I hadn’t got the night before. The “grownups” were on the quiet bus, except they weren’t particularly quiet. One of them, a really nice person whom I like a great deal and who ended up being my assigned hotel roommate, has what we in the biz call “stentorian tones”. She’s an alto, a large woman who was once married to one of our highly-positioned administrators before he left her for a sociology prof, very intelligent, and talked the whole trip to her seatmate loud enough that the whole bus could hear her. My own seatmate, a young man of my acquaintance, was trying to get caught up on homework and I would try to get comfortable, using part of him as a pillow before he moved into another position, maximizing the sunshine coming in through the bus windows. After our first rest stop I moved to a seat farther back in the bus, but it proved to be just as noisy back there, and I arrived at our destination just as exhausted as I had left our place of origin.

The concert was a touch strained on our part. Sitting in a bus all day, being exhausted from the previous two nights, and not getting a proper warmup all took their toll. The performing space was totally different from what we had become accustomed to, as were the acoustics, but somehow we pulled off the show. The ensemble numbers were performed on the floor in the pit in front of the stage, we stumbled over each other in the dark during the changes (well, we did that in Centennial too), and the audience members seemed to really like it. They were largely family and friends of the choir, as well as alumni, former members and a tiny number of prospective students.

We were bused back to our hotel afterwards and partied in one of the conference rooms. Many of the kids had brought their own liquor and were drinking in their rooms prior to socializing. The bar was rather expensive. But we were given pizza and I had fun.

Unfortunately, my roommate with the stentorian tones also snored like a diesel truck, which meant I had to resort to the earplugs I carry in my purse. I slept very little that night. After breakfast with my fellow choristers, all rather subdued after the events of the previous night, I walked one of my colleagues to the bus station, then took the subway to my mother’s house. At this point, I think I’ll take a breather and pick up the tale later.

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