E-mail to Dad regarding the Percussion Ensemble concert for public schools...

AHH! Our first elementary school concert was today....that's 570 kids between the ages of 5 and 10 in the auditorium...

It's a good thing I said a quick prayer before the concert.

The fire alarm system in the Fine Arts building was replaced over the summer because they were outdated. Apparently they are REALLY sensitive, and the fog machines on stage set them off. The fire marshal came and disarmed the system, then had some people standing on each corner of each hall for safety reasons if there actually was a fire while the system was off. We thought everything was fine after that, but it wasn't...

Around 12:55, we went to turn on the music stand lights, and it didn't work. The concert was scheduled for 1:00. It turned out that the alarm system had locked the light control board, and the house lights in the auditorium were locked ON and our stand lights were locked OFF, which was really the opposite of what we needed. The light and sound crew figured out a different line of power for stand lights, and came up with a way to flip the breaker for the house lights. We couldn't sync anything when the curtain was pulled, because all of the manual flipping of the breaker. Thankfully, the fancy lights were on a different circuit.

It turns out that the fire alarm and circuit confusion also had an effect on the computers and internet. The Fine Arts building has wireless, and the signals on everyone's computers were high, but the internet was not working at all. Buddy (the bluegrass guy) was compiling a bunch of pics of percussion ensemble from the past 30 years to put together a slide show, but when the alarm went off, the computers went off and we think he lost everything he has worked on for the past few days.

We also had to order a marimba bar because one of them was cracked. Those are very replaceable, but expensive because they are made out of rosewood and we had it overnighted from California. We got the package today, but they sent us the wrong note. AHHH!

Music was pretty good. We almost fell apart on some songs, but not because we didn't practice....

Those bright flashing lights were set up yesterday, so today at the concert was really the only time we had to play with them in our face. It takes a while to get used to playing with the lights going crazy every where...That was part of the problem. The other stuff we messed up on was because of repeats in the music and people getting lost. I got lost once or twice, and while I was playing bass, I almost went to the wrong section of the music (which would have confused everyone in the ensemble). I swear something grabbed my mallet and moved it to the right spot.

To beat all, we started almost on time, and finished without stopping in the middle of a piece. This was the most "Murphy's Law" concert I have EVER been in, so I believe I witnessed a miracle from God.

Some kids get sick from the lights. Most of the time somebody pukes, but thankfully nobody puked this time!

Can't wait to see you guys Friday. Hopefully everything that is supposed to go wrong happened this afternoon or tomorrow and not Thursday and Friday!