Bori meets America: Heritage Music Festival

25th of April, Saturday

Today, we had to wake up insanely early, breakfast was at 6 am. We got back at midnight, so no one got a good long night of sleep. Today was competition day. This is what we came for. This is what we prepared for the entire year. But I didn't feel nervous at all. I don't think I'm taking this year very seriously. I don't consider myself in jeopardy, if we loose. But we won't, because we're awesome.

The competition was held at the Riverside Church in E Manhattan. It's a huge cathedral, with lot's of space to create a beautiful echo. We unloaded the buses, all the equipment and dresses made it off
The string orchestra started the competition with a flawless performance. They got great comments from the judges too. Then came the symphonic band and jazz ensemble. All of them were great. The jazz ensemble was especially praised.

Before we knew it, it was noon already, and I had to get ready. That meant putting on makeup, hair, gown. Not all of these are easy tasks, especially for someone, who doesn't wear makeup or fancy hair often. We watched the women's choir, sitting in the church, in full preparedness. The girls sang beautifully too. After Ms. Dyer was finished with their performance, we went to the chapel to practice, and before I knew it, we were standing on the risers ourselves, ready to sing by our best skills. It felt surreal. We prepared for this moment the whole year, and now, we were ready to finish our journey. And I wasn't even scared.

Our first song was Noel, a Nigerian Christmas song. This one is the most exciting, because there is movement in it. The girls are on the floor instead of the risers, and we turn and clap, and sing. All to a wonderful rhythm and melody. I think Noel is my favorite of the three songs. And thankfully, I didn't mess up the clapping and the turning.

For the second song, the girls went back on the risers to sing Mozart's Lacrimosa. I thought it went pretty well. The third song is a morbid song called Clementine. It's about a girl, who wears the wrong shoes one morning, and she falls in a stream and drowns. But instead of being faithful to her, her lover forgets her, and settles for her sister instead. It is a very strange song, but the melody is beautiful. And really hard to sing as a choir. This is definitely the hardest one. I don't think it went as well as the others, but we did well.

The judge commenting on our performance didn't say one negative thing. Usually, the judges point out the mistakes they recognized, but not this time. She talked about how moved she was, because her family's printing company printed the copy of Lacrimosa we used, and how fun Noel looked. Ms. Dyer was very glad to hear these.

And then, we left the risers. What are we going to do now? No competition to practice for. We're done. But hey, we got over our shock and the minimum of fear we felt. We took pictures with the group outside of the church. We changed back into our regular clothes, and packed up. We had a few hours to kill until show choir's turn.

Other than the show choir kids, everybody went to Grand Central Terminal for supper. I've never been there before, but I've always wanted to. Instead of going down to the food court, I just stayed up in the lobby, and took pictures of the clock. We couldn't stay for long, we had to hurry back to the church, and the traffic was horrible.

Show choir delivered a wonderful performance. The judge however, didn't give such nice comments like to our choir, but I knew everybody was impressed.

Two hours later, we were sitting in the nave, waiting for the award ceremony. All the trophies were lined up in the front, and 1200 people were trying to fit into the wooden benches. Finally, after a long long wait, they started it. All of our groups did very well. And this could be seen from the six gold plaques we took home. This is just an individual achievement, it means we were great. Then came the big trophies, with even bigger names, that nobody remembered. All we knew, is every time Greece Athena was mentioned or called out, we started screaming and shouting, clapping our hands off while jumping up and down. The orchestra didn't win a lot of big trophies, those were taken by a rich prep-school, but we all knew how good Athena was. The choruses however! Select choir and show choir received the exact same best score, therefore we tied each other for first place! We found this quite funny, because nothing like this has ever happened.

Immediately after the award ceremony, we got on the buses, and at 8:30 pm, we headed back to Rochester. The road was long, and uneventful. Everybody tried to sleep, but the constant rumbling of the bus kept us half awake. It was 3 o'clock in the morning, when we finally arrived back to Greece. Kim was a hero, she came to pick me up in the middle of the night. It was 5 am however, when I finally fell asleep.