LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

spch

There and back again

by 6 Comments

We had a whirl wind trip down to Concordia Missouri last weekend and Lauren only let me go if I promised to make a post about it.

My high school choir director is retiring at the end of the school year and the last home concert of the Singing Saints under the direction of Bill Gasau was on Sunday. I drove the Prius down along with Beth, Sam and Ben (who shall not be mentioned in the remainder of the post).  We left at 1:00pm drove down to Concordia and had dinner at the Smoke House Formerly Known As Biffle’s. We ran into a number of former classmates there, so dinner was interesting.

image

Then we headed over to the church for the concert. There were a fair number of other former classmates at the church, so a good time was had by all before the concert as well. I would estimate that there were 600 people there. It’s a really big church.

Mr. Gasau had been directing the choir for 47 years, and they had people who sang in the choir stand up by decade. Lots of alumni. The oldest alumni would have been 65 years old. They also recognized former accompanists (always students), former choir presidents, bus drivers, people related to Mr. Gasau. It was swell.

image

I’m not sure who that guy is.

image

There are Muellers, Wisenborns and Mannings in that photo.

The choir sounded good, and all of the choir alumni went up to sing a couple of songs. I think it took longer for everyone to find a place than it did to sing the songs. I’m 95% sure that Mr. Gasau looked up during the first song, noticed me smiling at him and pointed to me and smiled. I knew I was his favorite.

alumni

Here’s what the whole big group sounded like. Sorry about the sound quality. No, wait. I take that back. I think it sounds pretty good for just sitting my phone down on the pew and letting it record. click on the little play icon at the front of the link…

[wpaudio url=”http://laurenandlloyd.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/20150315-195951.mp4″]

Afterwards there was a nice reception where I saw even more people that I knew. Following that we went to Kent’s house and then spent the night in Biltz.

Singing Saints in Concert

by 14 Comments

Last night Lauren had parent-teacher conferences, so I went alone to hear the choir from my old high school. The Singing Saints go on a choir tour each spring and this year they headed north. Nebraska is north of Missouri and so they ended up in Seward.  Mr. Gasau was the choir director when I was in high school and he is still the choir director today.

The choir sounded good, and about a third of the songs that they sang were songs that we sang when I was in high school. Toward the end of the concert I remembered that I could record things, so I recorded a couple of the pieces that I sang twenty some years ago. The first one, Hallelujah, Amen and Choral is a song that I really liked back in the day, and it turns out that I still really like it. Unfortunately, it was the next song after I decided to record a few and I missed the first couple of measures.

Mr. & Mrs. Gasau spent the night at Beth and Harold’s house, and so Curt and I went over to visit. There is something especially satisfying about throwing a couple back with an old teacher and reminiscing.  We talked for a couple of hours about old teachers, old students and old songs. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend it.