Showing posts with label sing-along. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sing-along. Show all posts

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Sing-along


I attended a very enjoyable dinner party yesterday evening; a friend invited about fifteen of her good friends to share her birthday celebration with her. Get a group of women together, and you know the evening won’t lack for enthusiastic and interesting conversation, and it didn’t. But this evening ended up being a heck of a lot of fun in a whole new way. The hostess sings in a choir, as do a number of her friends. In other words, she loves to sing. So she invited us to a sing-along, in this instance, to the film The Sound of Music. In between eating dinner and dessert, we watched the film from start to finish and sang the different songs as they showed up in the film. We had been dealt out our respective roles, many of which overlapped with others at the party. For example, I was dealt out the singing role for Rolf, the nun, and Gretl, along with two other women at the party. I had never done this before, so naturally I was a bit skeptical (as I always am) to anything that might place me at the center of any unwanted attention. I also love to sing, but reserve it mostly for when I am puttering around at home alone or in the shower or in the typical places one might sing—mostly alone when no one is listening. I have been told that I have a good singing voice, but I don’t sing in a choir and am unlikely to do so at this point in my life. But I have to say that this sing-along experience was an incredibly uplifting and fun group activity, with no particular focus on any one person, and that made it all the more enjoyable. At different points, I found myself listening to us as we hit the high notes, and how our voices all soared in unison, and it was a rush. I sometimes get that feeling when I am in church and the entire congregation sings and the united voices lift you to a whole new place. It’s a wonderful experience and one that will move you out of yourself if you let it.

I was very young when I first saw The Sound of Music; seeing it again was a moving experience, because Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer and the children were wonderful to watch. All of us watching the film shared our memories of the time in our lives when we had first seen the film. Some of the women had been taken to the theater by their parents, some by their schools—but all of us had been touched by our original experience of the film. And I have to say that it was like being at a teenage slumber party again listening and watching grown women hoot, holler and comment when Maria and Georg kissed for the first time, or when the Baroness tried her best to keep Georg and Maria from being together. It made me realize that there is a common bond among women that transcends cultures, if allowed to surface, which is what this film was able to accomplish for us last night. There was a lot of laughing as well as singing, and it was all a great deal of fun. I’d love to do it again. 

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