A lovely memorial

This afternoon, we made about a 18-minute drive to the village of Montague, MA, to the Montague Retreat Center, where we sang with a group composed of members of River Singers and Greenfield Harmony (both led by Mary Cay Brass) at a memorial service for Paula Green, a very well-known and much beloved peace activist. We arranged for Dusty and Dorothy to come be with Savanna while we went to this service, which they were glad to do. However, we told them we would be gone about three hours, and since we had to be there at 1:15 to rehearse before a 2pm service, we had to leave right after we sang to get back in time. So we missed at least half of the service. But the first half was quite moving. Paul's brother, a rabbi, and her husband, both spoke before we sang, and they were both quite eloquent about Paula. We also were introduced by a woman who explained what our music meant to Paula, who had heard us sing many times at the CONTACT program at the School for International Training, where Paula was on the faculty. I doubt that we have ever received so effusive an introduction. Our singing went very well - the space we were singing in was quite nice acoustically. I led Angels Hovering 'Round and managed to stay in tune and remember all the verses. We got back about 4pm, which was a bit longer than we said we would be, even leaving early, but that was ok. Now we have just had a lovely supper of creamed chicken on rice, carrots and broccoli, and Ellen and Savanna are watching TV while I blog. I also did the Spelling Bee on paper.

Montague Retreat Center from a drone

The interior of the building from their website.

Rehearsing outdoors before the service - doing hand motions with the South African Song.

Another section of the group, rehearsing

Before the service began, there was a slide show about Paula Green's life

A shot of the interior as people were gathering***************************** We didn't get to Guilford this morning in person, but we did watch on Zoom. For some reason, the audio was terrible today. We could understand most of what Pastor Eliza said, but the music wasn't very good, simply because something was wrong with the audio system. I wonder if the YouTube recording is the same? I assume it sounded good if you were there in person. LATER I did check YouTube - the recording has fine audio. So the problem was just the live stream. Or, maybe, it was us. Who knows?