Tears of a Cynic

I love Christmas carols and songs. I can't help myself. Christmas carols bring back warm memories of my childhood.

I have sung the Messiah no less than two times a year for the past five years, and George Hanson always uses the Hallelujah Chorus as an encore, turning and conducting the audience in a sing-along. When we stand and I see the looks on the faces of the audience members, thrilled to a person to be singing along with the orchestra, my eyes well up and I have to concentrate very hard to get back on task.

This weekend the Tucson Chamber Artists performed a lovely Nine Lessons and Carols, twice. Standing to sing "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" along with them, my eyes again welled up.

I may be cynical about many things, but this music brings tears to my eyes.

To continue with the cynicism, during yesterday's 3:00 performance by TCA, someone walked into the pastor's study where the women singers' purses had been stashed, and walked off with five singers' wallets, and one woman's car and apartment keys (along with her wallet and all her ID). How can people do that? I can't understand how people can do that! It was a very disturbing occurrence to the board, trying to figure out what we can do for these young people to make things right worrying about liability for this fledgling, struggling organization, and trying to think how we can prevent a repeat occurrence at future concerts.

As the director and two other board members and I were discussing this at a party last night, I heard a story about the Sunday Messiah performance that I was unaware of. It seems the first chair second violin had shown up drunk to the performance. When he was confronted about the situation at intermission, he quite vehemently said "FU" to the orchestra manager. At the end of intermission, he came back onstage, found someone else sitting in his chair, and approached the concertmaster to repeat his admonition to "FU", on stage, not quietly, in front of the audience.

Ah, the drama of the arts world.