| 17-Mar-99 Bike to Work Day
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. It was sunny yesterday and the roads were clear of snow by the end of the afternoon, so with the temperature near 50 today it was time to get the hybrid bike, with its new tires, out of the garage and see how it felt. The first time there are always little problems -- finding the rearview mirror for the helmet, getting the right gloves, and making sure I have a lock and know the combination. It’s remarkable how happy it made me to roll on down the street, past the school, wave to the crossing guard at the corner, and zoom down the hill. You might have heard a loud “yeeehah” at the steepest (read “fastest”) part. My route avoids the main streets as much as possible, so I was almost entirely on residential streets. At bicycling speeds you get to look down the side streets and see how many snowmen are in the front yards there as well as along the street you’re on. Of course, temperatures warm enough for me to bicycle aren’t healthy for the snowmen, so I won’t see so many of them tomorrow. There’s another yeehah for today. The first rubber for three new sheets of stamps is off the vulcanizer, and we get to cut the stamps apart, mount them, and see how they print. There was a regular Temple Emanuel choir rehearsal tonight. In contrast to the rehearsal at Temple Emeth on Monday, at which we started warming up maybe twenty minutes after the rehearsal was supposed to start and there were only eight people twenty minutes after that, I walked into the building at two minutes after the appointed time and heard the choir warming up as soon as I stepped inside. Cantor Osborne is less predictable than Gennady about the warmups, and will do different exercises different weeks depending on what he thinks the choir needs work on. He is very particular about pronunciation and how to hold your mouth to make different vowels, and likes to emphasise technique -- breath, support, then sound, in that order. Put the consonant on the pitch, then the vowel will be there and you don’t slide to the pitch. Drop your jaw on the “oo” sound. Unless you know a lot more than I do, you don’t hear things like those individually when you listen to vocal music, but they add up to the difference between a really good sound and a so-so one. We worked on all the music that the combined Jewish choirs will do for the Project Manna concert. Project Manna is a combined concert with the Massachusetts Avenue Baptist Church of Cambridge which is a fund raiser for the church’s food pantry. It’s my only excuse ever to sing with a gospel choir and is the biggest reason I stay in the Temple Emanuel choir. The event started ten or twelve years ago and has been growing, with more groups participating as time goes on. The first (of two) rehearsal of all the choirs in this year’s concert is next Monday. The songs we rehearsed tonight were all in Hebrew except for one Yiddish folk song, par for the course for the temple choir. The Hebrew ones included three psalms, let’s see: 150, “Hallelujah, praise the Lord with all the musical instruments we have in the ancient Near East.” You can see the assistant priest at the temple in Jerusalem introducing the band 2400 years ago, everyone stepping forward when their instrument is mentioned: “Folks, we have a full orchestra today with two kinds of cymbals! Give a big hand to Eliezer on psaltery.” 92, “a Psalm, a song for the Sabbath day.” After all this time, it’s still part of the Sabbath service, because gosh darn it, people like it and it has a good tune. 122, “I rejoiced when they said to me, ’Let us go to the house of the Lord.’ ... for the sake of my kin and friends I pray for the peace of Jerusalem.” In Hebrew the psalm starts “Samakhti b’omrim li.” Cantor Osborne wrote a gorgeous setting of it a few years ago and if he ends a hard rehearsal by saying, “OK, Samakhti, and then we can go,” everyone is glad they stayed through to the end.
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