hitting those natural high(note)s

Oh gush gush - great choir tonight. Funny and arse and then sublime. Funny, in that it was a rehearsal for a little *gig* on sat night in an arty cafe up here so we all had to be good and run through in real time and yet kept wanting to gossip or talk songs and got frowned at good naturedly by our fabulous choirmistress (that sounds way more B&D than she really is..). Funny also that I have still completely failed to learn the words to one particular Sth African song but that I just sing the first and last few words that I do know extra loud as if that makes up for the mimebling in between. hey, works for me. Arse in that the other *performers* for sat came along too so that before we knew it it turned into a full rehearsal with everyone else doing their thang (hence us not singing for the full hour and half) and us feeling like aliens had taken over our choir practice. Arse in that the *everyone else* incudes, ahem, folk singer, poet and operatic singer. And I use all of those words at the very edges of their definitions in a very generous way... Arse as in the poet lady was so bad, like so so so so so so so so (getting the picture?) bad that at one point I almost got the giggles. Had to try very hard not to. It was so surreal, I felt like I was in the poetry equivilent of that Fat Boy Slim film clip with the dancing. As in - is this really for real and not a scene from a movie? I really can not do it justice here without getting the karmic equivilent of a potts point mortgage... so let me just hint at the horrors by saying: glasses on end of nose, pink satin neck scarf and long cardigan with slightly too short pants (oh oh, I've just bought a flat in mosman).. um... a poem about fairies and one about how hilariously self evidently wrong a non-creationsist view of the universe is by virtue of the stinging logical argument that goats don't spin spider webs. Delivered in shit eating smug manner as if somebody might actually find it funny or WITTY. A.R.S.E. We snuck outside and resumed practice when the folk singer started intro-ing his songs by cataloguing his psychic experiences numerically... So out we went through the spitting rain into a little verandah of an adjacent building, crowding in, like naughty kids, singing requests, dredging up things I could barely remember or had never done before - singing with our eyes closed to really hear it, singing a few people calm who had been cranky, singing us all peaceful, singing us all harmonic, singing us swinging and smiling and making good sounds, quiet and sliding, sweet and yearning, singing raw and roaring, singing silly and laughing and doing funny litle stupid dances, and singing close so we were bumping into each other as we swayed, and singing liking each other, and singing solidarity and singing improvised and singing singing singing sublime.