History : Part II
SEASON TWO: 1981-1982
Seattle Men's Chorus made its first Bumbershoot appearance the Friday of Labor Day weekend, and printed up a handbill with the program and our new "primarily gay" identity statement. Despite the Food Circus acoustics (we could barely hear the piano), the audience was great and stayed with us. I still have that handbill on my bulletin board.
A gay athletic group in Seattle organized a daylong festival at Volunteer Park for September 27, with booths on the lawn for various community organizations as well as entertainment on the stage, and we agreed to perform. The Friday before, it started to rain in Seattle. And rain. And rain. And rain. Buckets.
Amazingly, it cleared up late Sunday morning and got mostly sunny, so nice that I walked up to the park without a coat. Our brand-new risers and Chet Forward's piano had been delivered that morning, and left covered with plastic. We began our set, and got about 2/3 of the way through when it started sprinkling. On the next song, it got worse, and two guys went and got a big piece of plastic and put it over the piano and pianist Scott Warrender, who kept playing away! We finished the song and dashed to get our nice new risers into the truck, and then headed under some trees to wait out the rain.
The next morning, I got two phone calls before I got out of bed to let me know that I was on the front page of the PI! There we were, the basses and some baritones, with Scott's feet showing under the plastic. And... a big article identifying the event as a gay event. At this point, some people who were closeted decided the time had arrived to leave Seattle Men's Chorus.
For many years, the phrase "Remember Buckboards?" meant something special to long-term members. Buckboards To Bernstein (great American music) was our first attempt at a fully-staged, lighted, costumed, choreographed show with sets, lobby decor, and (partly) memorized music. Needless to say, we learned a lot from our mistakes!
The biggest problem was simply that we needed about two weeks more rehearsal to learn the music. The other was the movement: Our choreographer had never worked with our size group before. At a Saturday rehearsal, he asked the guys to group themselves into "good dancers" and "uncomfortable". In theory, the good guys would be downstage and the others hiding behind. However, in the course of wheeling long lines of guys around, he got them reversed, and got the klutzes downstage for most of the set!
Partway through the show, it was raining outside, and the roof over the stage at the "historic" Moore Theatre leaked on us. Just a fine mist, but it seemed to be our fate that Fall.
The group that eventually became the Emerald City Volunteers was formed that fall, doing a 45-minute all Cole Porter show with three performances at Broadway Performance Hall. Really good, though they reportedly had over 30 rehearsals!
We'd felt rather guilty about charging our audiences the grand sum of $7.50 for Buckboards, so we charged just $3 for our first true Holiday concert! One night at Meany, not sold out.
In late February, we did our first-ever joint show, Roses and Rainbows, with the Portland Gay Men's Chorus, once there and once here. The visitors did a slightly longer set in each city, for the benefit of audiences who didn't normally get to see them. At the end of the show we joined ranks and we sang Over the Rainbow, then they sang The Rose. It was pretty tough doing choral singing that way, with somebody standing between you and the next singer, but neat to listen. At the end, the Portland guys all unpinned the roses from their vests and turned and pinned them on ours. A magical moment, which we never thought of a way to match.
In June we were back at Meany for a Pride show. We had the white cyclorama curtain upstage, for various colored lighting effects. At that time, a bunch of guys in the community who all went to the same gym had formed a little "Disco Drill Team" with red shorts, white tank tops and gloves, nice tans, and army boots. For the show's finale, we did Strike Up the Band, with ECV, some flag twirlers, and the drill team. And at the end, red, white and blue streamers dropped from the loft behind us being blown by a hidden fan. The audience went nuts!
We had little time off that summer. The Organ Historical Society was having their national meeting in Seattle, with a big do at St. James, and we'd been invited to do a double-chorus work that was for a men's chorus and a mixed chorus. Difficult.
Then it was time to prepare an appearance at the first Gay Games and West Coast GALA festival Labor Day weekend in San Francisco, with 12 choruses performing for each other and then singing at the closing ceremonies of the Games. We had two well-qualified professional bus drivers in Seattle Men's Chorus, and we rented a yellow school bus for 40 of the guys to go very cheaply to San Francisco. A little bit too cheaply as it was not a pretty sight to see pairs of grown men trying to sleep on kid-sized seats! Many of the guys took advantage of an airfare sale and flew back!
We had to spend all day at Kezar Stadium, an old outdoor football stadium, to have our rehearsals for the two combined numbers we would perform for the closing ceremonies of the gay games (many sunburns!) When the athletes made their final entrance, country-by-country and city-by-city, we all stood and cheered for about 10 minutes solid. But my fondest memory is that when we started to sing, they got up from where they were seated out on the field, and moved over close to the corner of the stadium where we were, so that we were singing directly to them.
