We performed for another Knights of Columbus dinner last night at the Swan Club in De Pere. That was fun.

The dinner was held to honor our local clergy who dedicate their lives to serving God and our community. So it follows that there were many nuns and priests in attendance.

A great moment in our set was when we sang In The Still of the Night, and Chris proceeded to serenade a nun, “I remember, last night in bed, the stars were bright…”

It’s true what they say about performers. We do indeed feed off the response from our audience. And the Knights are always a great audience. As a 3rd degree knight myself, I look forward to the next time we can perform for my brothers again.

what a great time we had singing for the people at the Meyer Theatre. Singing before in the theatre and the balcony and after in the lobby was awesome. The patrons for this once a month free show given by the Allouez Village Band were treated to a wide variety of entertainment from the MC to the radio announcer to the Andrew Sisters, Abbott and Costello, the band, and our barbershop songs.

lookin forward to our next outing and ringing more chords for our enjoyment and maybe yours!

kelly

We had some fun at Marquette University tonight. We’ve actually made the drive down to Milwaukee a number of times to sing the national anthem for the Bucks, Brewers, Admirals and Marquette basketball. But this was the first time we sang for the Marquette women’s basketball game at the Al McGuire Center. The game was great, with Marquette beating Cincinnati 66-48.
Since we were right there on campus, Chris showed us around his old stomping grounds after the game. The coolest building we encountered was the Gesu Church. Unfortunately, it was locked; we had hoped that maybe we could go inside to ring a chord or two. But we settled for the steps out front. This church is a beautiful building that’s been around for 112 years!

Marquette is a 125-year-old school supported by the Jesuit order of Catholic priests. The Gesu Church was named in 1893 for the church in Rome where St. Ignatius (founder of the Jesuit order) is buried. All four of us were in awe of the steeples, the stone walls and the overall beauty of the building. Singing The Lord’s Prayer right there at this house of God was very moving. I hope we get back there sometime soon, at at time when we can see what it looks like inside.

Holy cow! What a blast! We’ve been delivering Singing Valentines for years, and this year was no exception. We all burned a vacation day at work on Tuesday, and met at Chris’ house at 7:15am to get the day going.

We met with the other quartets at a restaurant to pick up our cards and roses and balloons, and off we went. First Appleton, then Neenah, over to Menasha, north to De Pere, back down to Appleton, and back north to Lambeau Field for our final Valentine of the day at 7:30pm. All told, we delivered 17 Singing Valentines.

The most fun visit had to be at Howe Elementary school, in downtown Green Bay. We sang for one of the teachers in front of a combined class with about 80 kids. Strange thing was that they were about to watch the movie, “March of the Penguins”, then four guys in tuxedos walked in. As we sang, the teacher had tears in her eyes. And when we were done, we took a photo of us with the teacher and all 80 kids. They were pretty excited, what a blast!

Can’t wait to do it again next year.

If you wanna feel those good vibrations comin’ from the joy that His love will bring, get in touch with God.

Yep, we’re learning a new song. Turn Your Radio On is a peppy gospel song that Kelly brought in. He knows it pretty well, so Brian and Chris and I are trying to catch up. It’s 72 measures, so it’s not too bad.

When I need to get up to speed quick on a song, I like to notate the sheet music on my computer. Then I can selectively play any or all of the four voice parts and rehearse it on my own time without the other guys around. I use Print Music for notation; it works very nicely for barbershop arrangements. Brian then takes the notated document and creates MP3s to help him rehearse. You know, we’re an old fashioned quartet…I’m sure this is how they did it 50 years ago.

We plan to debut the song at the Meyer Theatre on Feb 20 when we perform at the Allouez Village Band’s monthly concert.

We sing the national anthem at a lot of local sporting events. Last Saturday, we performed at the hockey game between St. Norbert College and Hamline University. It was our 32nd anthem performance (since 2000), and our 9th since Kelly joined us in August. We’ve only done St. Norbert College a few times, and it’s always special for a couple of reasons.

First, I work at St. Norbert, so it’s cool to see a bunch of folks that I know. More importantly though, it’s the only game we do where we also sing “O Canada“. At first this seems strange, because neither team is from Canada. However, of the 28 guys on St. Norbert’s hockey team this season, 20 are from Canada!

“O Canada” is a beautiful song, and our arrangement has some great harmonies. This year, we added some French lyrics (in place of a couple of English phrases) and we got a lot of nice comments about it.
St. Norbert College is ranked #2 in the nation right now in Division III hockey, and their games always provide some good, hard-hitting action. I look forward to doing it again soon.