Tonight was the annual Sietze de Vries organ concert. He's a great Dutch organist and improviser. As usual, the concert was awesome. My friend Stephen, an organ major and a huge Sietze fan, was sitting beside me pretty much drooling the entire hour and a half concert. At the end, the audience gave Sietze a standing ovation. Danielle, sitting on my other side, started clapping a rhythmic steady clap; the European encore clap. I heard her and immediately switched to clap along with her. Bryn, on Danielle's other side, caught on too. I nudged Stephen and pointed with my head to Danielle's clapping hands. He gave a huge grin and changed over to the European encore clap with great enthusiasm. Soon a good portion of the front section of the church was clapping in rhythm too. Sietze bowed a couple times and left the stage. We all kept clapping. He finally came back on stage, bowed again and then did an encore. We (Danielle, Bryn and I) all think he must have heard the European encore clap and appreciated it so much that he did the encore. Or maybe he was always planning to do one. Anyway, I just thought it was neat.
After the encore, as I was leaning back into my pew, I sat against this old man's hand. He had put it on the back of my pew (the pew in front of him) to stand up. I half-turned and said, "sorry" like any good Canadian should. He said, "oh well that's OK" and gave my shoulder about five good, strong pats. I turned farther around and realized it was a man I used to think was really nice until I learned some stuff about him and found out he wasn't all that nice. So that was interesting. And that's all the random facts I have for you today...
...except that just before the concert Danielle called a Southern Swingers club meeting. (Southern Swingers is the equivalent of Southern Striders, but just takes place on the Spalding swings instead of the track.) It was rather last-minute so we couldn't get any other Southern Swingers members together so it was just Danielle and I. We had fun. And now I'm really done for this post.
All of that was so incredibly interesting. I would join Southern Swingers...
ReplyDeleteNice! Southern Swingers sounds fun. :D I didn't know about the European clap. I could hear Stephen, but not the other three of you. I was sitting several rows behind you.
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