Wednesday/Thursday – Day 53/54
September 16, 2012
Wednesday’s significance was again to be found in the evening activities.
First up was the “whine and cheese” event and first rehearsal of the Penn Glee Club. This event featured newmen, oldmen and alumni, gathering together for snacks, socialization and, to complain about the drinking age. In the years prior to the subsuming of the Glee Club under the official university banner, alumni would bring wine to drink with the newmen. However, sometimes traditions must change and this was one that fell to the wayside.
After a good while of mingling, we sat down with newmen at the front, oldmen at the back, and listened to a few speeches about the club. The most significant of them being the talk from the president and past president of the Penn Glee Alumni Club. He talked about the how singing binds us together and how we’ll learn so much more than just performance during our time as members. Of how the friendships made never fade and of the tap-dancing to come!
We were then handed the sheet music to five of Glee Club’s most important songs but, before we could get started we needed to warm up vocally. Our director Erik who had been a member of Glee Club for thirty-two years, asked us all without humming, without talking or any vocalizing, to sing a concert pitch A on the count of three. Amazingly, we did it near perfectly, with very little note fishing. A few standard warm up exercises followed.
Following that, we sung through all the pieces, trying to sight read. Once the newmen were even asked to sing it by themselves! The rehearsal ended what seemed to quickly and I was sad for it to end thus begrudgingly I tramped back up to my room.
I returned to my room to work for a while only to later receive an SMS: “I hope you’re coming to the 9:30 dance call! – Sarah”. By the time I received this message it was already 9:28 and I raced down to Platt again without evening changing into dance clothes.
The dance call was contained a very faced paced routine that we were to learn on the spot, and unfortunately for me, my dancing has never been good and without the practice from recent performances, I was terrible. I felt quite embarrassed at my terrible execution or non-execution as it was of the routine and knew at that point that I was not going to be receiving a large role in the musical. Luckily, with all the time commitments I already had, I wasn’t desperate for one anyhow.
Thursday had two events worthy of being written about. The first was the Penn Engineering Careers Fair that I embraced with gusto. I met with representatives from many of the worlds largest technology and engineering firms (Google, Facebook, Hulu etc) but was most impressed by a start up called Twilio that handles some of the backend work needed to support Whatsapp and other internet-telephony applications.
The second event that I will cover in short was my bus ride to Toronto. After a stop by the Hillel for some smores, I left campus at about 7PM, not realizing how close I would be cutting it to get to my 7:30PM bus on time. I made it by catching a cab and soon began my twelve hour trip to Toronto, ON. First transfer was New York City at 9:30 where I went for a bit of a walk. Down past Penn Station, past the Port Authority to grab a bagel and revisit the O Neil theater, my old haunt from waiting for the book of Mormon. I briskly returned to get caught in the maze of the Port Authority Terminal and again, only just made my bus.
That bus ride was long and uncomfortable, with the seat next to me taken up by a lovely Chinese student from NYU. A 4AM stop off at Dunkin’ Donuts woke me up from a half hour nap, and the visit at 6AM to Border Control didn’t help. Finally at nine-thirty I arrived at Toronto and was most glad to see Steven Silverberg, Sarah’s dad, waiting for me.
Dunkin stop at 4AM
Protected: Tuesday – Day 53
September 14, 2012
Sunday/Monday – Day 51/52
September 13, 2012
Sunday I intended to get down to a bit of work, however Penn had other plans. Sunday to Wednesday marked audition season for the various groups at UPenn. Things started out well, tutoring a few Jewish girls in my Ruby class, helping them to set up their computers for the class, however flipping through the F/Penn program I noticed that auditions for The Penn Singers, the Broadway and light opera company at Penn were at twelve. Plucking the day, I headed off to the Platt Student Performing Arts House, just off main campus, where auditions were being held. Along with me I brought the music to “Some Enchanted Evening”, my personal audition favorite, and was soon met there by a good number of friendly theater people. I was then presented with a monologue to learn in the few minutes before the audition, playing the part of Leo Bloom from the producers. The audition consisted of me singing my piece, which went well. Vocal exercises, which went decently, and the monologue, over which I stumbled a few times. Further than that they taught me a few bars of the cast song “Hail Poetry!” which I didn’t quite get but I felt decent about it. Following that I saw that the ‘Off The Beat’ acapella auditions were in the same corridor, feeling a bit plucky I decided to audition for them too. However after a twenty minute wait outside I was informed that they would not take an exchange student due to the lack of worth in investing in my training. Remembering that other auditions were on that day too, I wandered over to Irvine Auditorium where the ‘Penny Loafers’ acapella auditions were being held. For them I sung ‘Under the Bridge’ by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and was made to do a good few minutes of exercises and vocal dictation.
I won’t tire you with the details of every single audition, however, The Glee Club auditions deserved a special mention. Testing both my rhythmic and melodic sight reading, along with my ability to box-step, I had a lovely time in the audition interacting with both the director and the other members of the club.
Monday was much the same, running back and forth between clubs and classes. In the evening I met with Google representatives and listened to them give a recruiting spiel. As if anyone needed to convince me that working there might be a good idea. Following that I raced off to the University Choral Society, a half credit class I was taking. At the entrance to the rehearsal room stood a mostly older crowd of between forty to eighty, all waiting to rehearse. This was a slight shock for me given my expectations of a student choir. However, I soon settled in and had a lovely evening singing. Towards the end of the class my friend Thea ran out and came back a little sullen. A while later my phone buzzed too and I check the transcribed voice message to find indecipherable garbage. Listening to the original I found a message telling me I had been accepted into the cast of Penn Singers and their production of Legally Blonde this fall! I raced off to meet the cast at a meet and greet in Platt and following that headed back to my room to work a little before, finally, sleep.