Nailing it Down

OK, so the Easter cantata is over and we are all breathing a sigh of relief, but something is missing from our lives . . . oh, yes! Practicing music or drama at every free moment!

I must say that one of the highlights from this year’s round of practice times was practicing “The Empty Tomb” with the other members of the quartet (no, practicing it by myself would not have been a highlight). First of all, the song begins with this echo routine of the word “empty,” so Es and I began calling it the “my head is empty, empty, empty” song. Just more of our typical goofiness. We can’t seem to help it—many things (especially the little things in life) strike us as funny. We drove our pianist nearly crazy with our fits of laughter during practice (though methinks he protests too much). Second, one of the phrases in the song goes like this: “my Lord was crucified, my God was slain; they laid Him in the grave, and all seemed vain”; however as we practiced, I kept thinking that one of the members of our group was singing “they nailed Him in the grave”! I couldn’t tell for sure until one time we were singing by the piano and I heard it loud and clear. I stopped the practice and managed, between laughs, to gasp out “who keeps singing ‘nailed’?” When Jason confessed to it, we laughed even more. So he corrected it, and then Es found herself saying it without thinking!—more laughter. Finally, I think Harrison (our pianist) had had enough of our laughter and decided he needed to get the last laugh. So on our next song, as we were singing our a capella part, he slipped from the piano bench and hid in pastor’s office. We finished our part, expecting the piano to come in and carry us off into the next stanza, only to be greeted by silence. Stunned, we all, as a unit, turned to the piano to find it empty, empty, empty. Harrison was rewarded for his joke by a shocked look on Esther’s face when she came around of the office and a bop on the head and, yes, more laughter. That ended the practice. How do you keep practicing after that? =)

The consolation and justification for all the fun we have during practice is that when we sang the songs in the cantata we nailed them—just not literally =)