At last, the final installment of the grand narrative!
We arrived at Minnehaha Academy (I apologize to that tribe, but the name of the school just makes me giggle!) around six o'clock and changed clothes. The choir rehearsed quite a bit, and it was at this point that we all realized that we were rather tired from our travels and the services we had done that morning. My good friend Kate and I were especially worried as we were each performing solos at the concert that night--she a movement of Haydn's Missa Brevis, and I the ninth movement of Bach's Magnificat in D. I decided during the rehearsal to refrain from singing until I had performed the Bach, after which it no longer mattered how I sounded!
Despite our exhaustion, the choir performed beautifully. The classical pieces were fantastic, and the contemporary literature was fun and clean, if not incredibly beautiful (voices can only have so much energy after such a long day). Our last piece was FABULOUS! We sang Moses Hogan's "I Can Tell the World," one of his wonderful spirituals, and we even did it memorized after Rollo told us to put our music down. After the concert we schmoozed (yes, schmoozed, it's a word and it's one of my favorite parts of being a performer) with all of the alumni who were there who loved to tell us about how they met their spouses at our school. If one more alumnus tells me they met their spouse while at college I think I may just walk away!! =)
The ride home was by far the most painful portion of the trip. We departed freezing Minnesota around nine in the morning, and all was well until lunch. We stopped very quickly and got our food as soon as possible so that we could resume our travel and return to the city. Once we got back on the highway, however, we hit the thickest traffic I had yet seen in Minnesota. For six more hours we traveled in this detestable traffic, with all kinds of snow and slush and ice mucking up the roads. I would have thought that in a place with so much snow, the people would be a bit more organized about cleaning it up!! And around three o'clock I started to feel ill, a sensation which does not leave one alone until they've been sitting perfectly still for a very long time. As I was still on a bus, this feeling did not go away until I was about to go to sleep that night.
We arrived back in the city at six in the evening, and I immediately went upstairs and finished what homework I had not been able to finish on the bus, and slept like a baby all night. The next day, we returned to class.
That is the rather tragic story of our tour to Minnesota. The End.
Peace
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