Mardigirls and other Adventures

O Greening Branch
The Mardrigirls concert (or music and readings for advent, if you'd rather) went beautifully.

It was very cold--it snowed earlier in the day--and it proved tricky for me to dress in enough layers not to freeze to death and still look like I was just in concert attire of black. (One pair of dying thermal underwear, one pair of socks, one pair of too-small hose cut off above the knee, one pair of garters snitched from Ron's kilt attire, one pair of too-small black shoes purchased that day in a charity shop, one long black skirt, one long-sleeve casual knit dark gray t-shirt, one black up corset, and one nice long sleeve black blouse later....Getting the top line of the corset not to show through the blouse was the trickiest bit. For anyone curious, pulling it up a bit works far better than pulling it down or other things up.) Anyway, I wasn't freezing, although I certainly was not at any time over-warm in all that.

My solo started the second song. Which was good--I didn't have to fret through half the concert before getting there. Everyone says it went beautifully. I'll believe them. It seems like I faded out a bit at one point but maybe that just seemed like a decrescendo and crescendo that weren't in fact in the music (it was, after all, plain chant; there aren't any dynamics markings at all). Anyway, everyone seemed genuinely impressed with the solo and the performance as a whole (some of my friends admitting they had expected something far more amature...but this was amazing). So, Yay!

And it was all great fun. It's been so long since I was a part of something like that. And even then, I don't think the music was ever so tailored to all be things I liked! Not all of it was medieval and Renaissance but the rest was in more or less the same style. We had a brand new piece. We were basically the sneak preview before the world premier a few days later! He came and heard us rehearse and said it sounded amazing (and stayed for the performance too, but I didn't talk to him after that). I was also grimly pleased that when the director asked him something about a crotchet note he replied that he didn't know all this English terminology! He's American too. I've been stumbling over "crotchets" and "quavers" and the like for months now! Oh, and the "Finnish-ish" Ave Maria that I mentioned in the blog earlier as being odd because it was in Latin, not Finnish? Johanna said it did sound Finnish in style!

It was an amazing experience and I'm very glad I did it. I think, if anything, the music was more fun than choir as a teenager. It had more of a sense of a group of colleagues putting together something beautiful. My choir directors as a kid--and even some of the church choir directors I have known--have had something of the feel of beleaguered artists trying to herd cats to do their bidding and create the effect they are looking for. Well, and as I said, it was the sort of music I would have picked. All that lovely Latin and Middle English.

Now I have to go back to California before I forget it all, and teach the other kittens the ones that can be done with three voices...

Aftermath
After the concert there was mulled wine. Yummy and welcome warmth. And birthday presents (cookies which Ron kept snitching; and a journal with a pointed demand that I finish my story about the water man.) My friends and I were dispatched to the Postgrad Club to grab tables for the Madrigirls to come over after cleanup. So we did, rather effectively too. Once the Madrigirls actually arrived, Ron and the rest cleared over to a table alone leaving the four tables together we had staked out for the choir and guests that had come to town especially. I hung out with the choir for a while, before rejoining friends. We really need a separate social night when we don't all have guests, though.

Then Monday, now that I'm safely through the performance, I've come down with my second cold of the season. Yuck. Not nearly as bad as the flu last month though.

Hogwarts Updates
Well, the day after the concert was the final installment in the Harry Potter game Molly's been running. Wow. Good finish. We even ended up in the Forbidden Forest at last, and solved, well, most of the mysteries set before us.

It is interesting, but I think Hetty Cowell is one of the most complex characters I have played. I always try to make complicated real-feeling characters, but 11 (well, 12 now) year old Hetty puts shame to most of them. From the very beginning the Sorting Hat had trouble placing her. It considered everything except Hufflepuff. Finally placed in Slytherin, she was wishing she was in Ravenclaw by the end of the second week. Even Gryffindore wouldn't be all that bad. She went so far as to ask Dumbledore if there was any chance of transferring houses, but he turned her down. Did I mention it was 1940-41? Well, but the end of the adventure, the only people in Slytherin still speaking to her are Edgar Sullins (another player character that Hetty does not at all trust, with good reason) and, wait for it, Tom Riddle. Oh, our GM fights dirty. Hetty has absolutely no reason to distrust soft-spoken Tom, so she's even been helping him with a "side project" of his. Meanwhile, by the end of the year, cowardly Hetty has managed to find herself swearing an Unbreakable Vow to protect an adventurous Ravenclaw while they're at Hogwarts (I really don't see how she's now going to survive Hogwarts). She's already given up a last swallow of Filix Filicitas to help Artemis rather than herself. Meanwhile Hetty is rather jeaulous of said Ravenclaw (Artemis) and her close friendship with the half-goblin she swore the Vow to (Flitwick, but not the one who will become a professor). Her own best friend is a Griffendore whose been disowned by his all-Slytherin family, but he occasionally falls back into bad habits and can be a bit mean while also distrusting her Slytherin smooth-talking ways. Oh the mess. With all the conflicting pulls, it really is rather uncertain what Hetty will do from one moment to the next. However, I think she may be the only player character to have gone the entire school year without a detention.

We've decided to all take turns GMing a year. Molly will take over one of the NPCs from our year, and will GM 7th year if we make it that far. I really doubt we will unless the subsequent years go much faster. Ron's got 2nd year and I've got 3rd. Third Year will be especially tricky since that's when the Chamber of Secrets will open and one PC is friends with Moaning Myrtle and two others are friends with Hagrid, so keeping them from solving that mystery will be tricky indeed. However, it will be useful having that be my year to GM since Hetty would be best placed to find out what Tom is up to, but will conveniently be an uninquisitive npc that year, more interested in acing all her classes than solving mysteries (and thank goodness the person she has to protect is "pureblood"!)