McKenzie Music Festival

On Thursday our choir and band went to a music festival at McKenzie High School (I'm in the choir). It's a music festival for small schools (like ours).

My mom drove our van with kids in it because with all of the ball games and the 6th graders being at out door school the only bus we could take was the little pup bus (which wouldn't fit us all in it), so we took the pup bus, and my mom and another mom drove their vans. So we had to leave our house at like 5 cause we had to be at the school by 6:15. We picked up the kids who live on the ranch and drove them. I really don't know why we had to be there at 6 cause we didn't even leave the school until almost 7.

We then drove to Redmond and stopped at Rays for people to get stuff to eat for breakfast and lunch (also to go to the bathroom). Then after we got through Sisters we lost the other car, so after we drove for a while we stopped and waited for them for probably about 10 minutes (we found out that one of the girls had gotten car sick).

So we ended up getting to the festival a little bit late, but it was okay cause some of the other schools hadn't got there yet either. The kids who were in our car and had been there before said that the school pops out of the trees and I had thought that they were just saying that, but it really does, it's like you're driving over the mountain and there's this little road that you turn on and then there's the school behind some trees.

After we got there we went to this other room to warm up and practice our song (cause it was already our turn to sing). Then we sang our song for a judge/ director guy (by the way the song we sang was Love In Any Language). And after we sang the director guy sang with us and told us things that we could do better. My mom thought that he just told us about how bad we are, but really he told us that we were amazing compared to the lady at the Western Festival who pretty but told us that we were a bunch of screw offs (we call her the evil witch lady, no one likes her). So, yeah, in my opinion he was pretty nice and I thought that the judging part went pretty good.

We then listened to a few other choirs. The choir from Triangle Lake only had girls in it, so one of the girls actually did tenor and they were pretty good. (We have 5 boys in our choir, but only 2 of them were able to go.) After all of the choirs had sang we went over to the other gym and listened to the last band.

Then we had lunch, but not until after 1, which at our school we usually eat at 11:30, so we were all pretty hungry.



After lunch we went back in the gym to work on our 4 mass songs. We practiced until about 5 (that means we were singing for 3 hour!!). It was really a lot of fun. The songs we sang were Sakura (which is a Japanese song), Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel (my favorite), Gloria in Excelsis, and Johnson Boys. The Johnson Boys song has this stomp, pat, clap thing in the middle of it (that was really confusing, the girl next to me and I kept messing up).

At 5 we got to go eat dinner and hang out/get ready for the concert for an hour. Then we rehearsed for the concert til 7. And then we started the concert. The band also had 4 songs that they played in it. The concert went really well and then when the director was shaking my had he commented on how I always smile when I'm singing (it's true I really do love to smile and to sing).

We then left to head home (after we had to jump the other car). And got home at about 10:30.


And now I really wish that we could still have choir next year (their cutting choir and band in the high school next year).