No, really busy.
Our activity sheet for this month:
December 1: recorded an alternative version of 12 Days Of Christmas for a corporate event. Then did a two-hour gig at the Richmond bicycle club's Christmas dinner.
December 2: did a lunchtime gig at the over-40s ski club in Dunbar. In the evening, Sleeping Beauty singthrough.
December 3: Chroma gospel choir rehearsal in the evening.
December 4: Broadway Chorus rehearsal.
December 5: High Spirits choir rehearsal.
December 6: retirement home gig with My Lady's Chamber.
December 7: FREE!
December 8: Saw Seussical: The Musical at the Waterfront Theatre.
December 9: Sarah went to see Beauty And The Beast: The Musical with Kim.
December 10: Broadway Chorus singing rehearsal.
December 11: Broadway Chorus dress rehearsal.
December 12: Broadway Chorus tech and dress rehearsal at the theatre.
December 13: Broadway Chorus show: Anne Murray Of Green Gables, opening night.
December 14: Broadway Chorus show, second night.
December 15: Singing carols on a street corner in aid of a women's shelter. Then Broadway Chorus show.
December 16: Sarah to a cast get-together for The Vagina Monologues. Then open mic in the evening at Urban Rush Cafe.
December 17: Chroma concert.
December 18: carlyle.4 singing at VanDusen Garden.
December 19: High Spirits Christmas singalong with carlyle.4 guest spot.
December 20: carlyle.4 singing at VanDusen Garden.
December 21: FREE!
December 22: carlyle.4 (or .3 as it turned out) singing at the Oppenheimer Park homeless benefit. Then singing at a private Christmas party.
December 23 onwards: FREE!
This list is largely a public reminder to me that we do too much. So: next year we're scaling back...
- We've left Chroma, at least for now (we might return, who knows)
- We're going to rely on Susan to manage us as Chilli & Sage; she'll make sure we get paid a sensible rate for our singing gigs, which, while not necessarily reducing our workload, will mean we feel better about devoting time to it.
- Broadway Chorus's summer show sounds like it'll be fun, and Kim / Susan / James might join up for it, which will be fun, but we'll try to skip the Christmas show.
- High Spirits is pretty much bulletproof because we like drinking with them so much, and the music is good and varied.
That list doesn't include two things which stretched over several days:
1) The presence in our apartment for seven days of Jacqui and Alexis Twine, on a super-short-notice trip to Vancouver. It was like having kids, listening to the sounds of Ambient Twineage in the spare room. We showed them the sights, took them to Kalypso, introduced them to the mob here, got them into Anne Murray Of Green Gables, and waved goodbye very unhappily after an extremely packed week. It was a thoroughly excellent time.
2) Filming the Take December Off video. I'd had the mad idea that we could do this in the last week of November, but we got swamped, and it dragged into the second week of December, and then took several days to edit (only a few hours of actual editing time, but it was finding those hours...) and so the video debuted on YouTube about the 16th. We've put it on several other sites as well, and across all of them, it's collected over a thousand views. Of course this isn't many compared to the stuff on the front page of YouTube, and, hope springing eternal in my breast, it's less than I'd kinda hoped for, but I'm not grumbling, as it's far, far more than we've ever achieved with anything else we've done, and we've learned plenty from that one experience which will inform our videos next year. Yes, more videos! Panda and Henry need videos! And we have plans, oh yes, many plans...
Shock apartment update: we have new furniture! And we're tidy! Slightly grumpy over being constantly referred to as bohemian, and aware that we had to redeem our second room for the Twines to use, we performed a mammoth act of springcleaning, and have kept the place somewhat neat since they left. We then went to IKEA on the 27th and bought two side tables, a bookcase, a TV stand, and a desk unit. I then spent most of the 27th and 28th building these things, with help from Sarah on drawers, and we now have lots of surfaces and places to hide things. And fewer boxes standing in as tables. And the place is still tidy! We're hosting a flatwarming party tomorrow night (because, er, we didn't have it ten months ago, because we didn't know anyone then), and we'll see how the unforewarned jaws drop at the sight.
Culture update: Seussical The Musical was brilliant - I was in tears for most of it because it was so satisfyingly innocent and ineffably bouncy and fun. They'd cut it a little as it's the child-friendly version - a little annoying, as it means The Military has gone - which includes Green Eggs And Ham played as a platoon-marching tune - but it was still excellent - one of the best things we've seen in our year here.
Further culture update: we finally got round to watching some TV and movies. The Bionic Woman was dreadful from the first episode, and no wonder it's been cancelled during the writers' strike. Fantastic Four 2 was utterly lamentable (as were we for watching it). I watched Irreversible, an uplifting French film about violence and rape (... OK, not really uplifting). We watched Mr & Mrs Smith, which we thoroughly enjoyed although it was a bit random. And I finally got Sarah to watch The Sting, but unfortunately the history of caper movies since then has rendered it somewhat predictable - I hadn't seen it in, like, twenty-five years, and I was occasionally wincing at the pace, but it's still very stylish. In a very, very slow-paced way. Point is, though, we've finally succeeded in making time for ourselves if we think we have time to watch TV and movies.
And today we finished off three new songs, because as Sarah said to Kim on the phone earlier, "We've got a party tomorrow and we suddenly realized we didn't have anything new to perform. Disaster!" We hadn't written anything since Take December Off a month ago, so three new songs feels about right. And, for once, these have mostly come from our 'song graveyard' document, rather than being conceived and written on the spot. Of course we've had a dozen new ideas which have gone into the graveyard in the meantime, so as with all true graveyards, this one is expanding.
My musical challenge for the New Year is to write an ironic hard-rock musical accompaniment for the depraved lyrics I've written under the title I Wanna Be Your Lawyer, Baby - a very raunchy big-hair-rock spoof about a lawyer who goes too far in appreciating a female client. Sarah's eyes nearly popped out as she read the lyrics. Muhahahahaha.
Tomorrow, more end-of-year rounding-up type stuff.
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