Looking Back on the August 26th Dog Days Event

The sing-together-with-our-barbershop-brothers was a huge success.

 

The hall at Sacred Heart Catholic Church was packed with an excited audience.  The host chapter, the Bull Run Troubadours from Manassas welcomed us all and provided great refreshments. The Harmonizer guys brought the risers and sound equipment – thanks to Bob Blair, Dennis Ritchey, Doug White and Mike Kelly. Thanks to regular pitch man, Jim Lake and to John Pence for bringing the song board for the show.

 

Our chorus packed the risers after an effective warm up session conducted by associate director Tony Colosomo.  Director Joe Cerutti fired us up to perform and exceed our own capabilities. Our presentation was great and the audience loved it.  Tony’s solo on “Bring Him Home” was likely a highlight of the nite for everyone there.  Chris Huber used a prepared script to relate our package of songs to the trip to Normandy.  Producer Greg Tepe and crew had developed a slide show also to share some of the great scenes from France and Germany.

 

Dick Dangel helped “warm up” the audience by leading the early arrivals in singing folks songs as he played his accordion.  Christina Ammerman represented our FRIENDS IN HARMONY group and sold scrip cards.

 

It was great to have BHS Foundation representative KJ McAleesejergins in the hall to meet us and spread the message.

 

Great to see all of our members who sing with other chapters in the area such as Harmony Heritage singers and Fairfax.

 

In other news, Joel Golden reports: eight of us Harmonizers, just got back from the Harmony Brigade this weekend in DE which was AWESOME! For example, singing push-out quartets with OC TIMES! If you have questions about the Brigade you can ask the guys that went - including Dick Dangel, Drew Fuller, Calvin Schnure, Dean Martin, Frank Fedarko, Edris Qaeghah, Brian Miller.  Joel brought two German barbershoppers with him to the Dog Days event who also were at the Bridage event.

 

Joel reports further: The Harmony Brigade has been called "Polecats on Steroids" or "Extreme Quartetting". For this event everyone learns 12 challenging barbershop arrangements, as sung by champion quartets. Since I've been doing this for about 6 years in Carolina as well as DE, I now know over 100 champ arrangements. About 120 guys attend the rally, 30 on each voice part. We get together at a hotel near Wilmington, DE. Attendees come from all over the east coast. Some came from Germany. Since everyone knows these 12 songs, we mix-and-match quartets, singing in all parts of the hotel. Guys who sing with every other person get a special award, called the Brigade Tramp Award, and they get a discount on the fee for next year's rally (~$200 for music & hotel). Our own Edris won that award one year. The Harmony Brigade is growing, and now has rallies in 9 different regions. The guys in Germany want to start one there.
See the Brigade web site at http://www.harmonybrigade.org/ahb/

And a special request from uniform chairman Tom Kern: The Harmonizers would like to keep the red / gray tie in the current uniform list for the foreseeable future…however…they are no longer available from any known source. In order to continue to outfit new members…we would like to try to recover as many extra or unused ties as possible. If you have a tie for the cause…please bring it to Durant and hand off to Tom at one of our upcoming Tuesday chapter meetings. If you can’t make it to Durant…you can mail your tie to him.

YeEd just learned that Josh Roots has written two books that are on the market.  Here’s what he shared about his books: I have two books in a series out at the moment. The genre is Urban Fantasy and the series centers around a character named Marcus Shifter who can perform magic, but not very well. Despite his limitations, he tries to follow in his family's footsteps of protecting humanity from the creepy-crawlies that prey upon it. A lot of hilarity and calamity ensues during the process. UNDEAD CHAOS came out in October of 2013 while the sequel, SUMMONED CHAOS, came out three weeks ago. Both are available for all e-readers through any online distributor (i.e. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, iBooks, etc). – Josh.

 

There was a lot of email traffic on Monday and Tuesday about the tickets sales for the 2014 holiday show. Great to have our tech guys (YeEd knows that at least Nick Leiserson and Josh Roots were at the ready to respond) monitoring the website purchases to help customers using the site for the first time.  In short, there are tickets left for Friday nite, some for Saturday afternoon but just a handful for Saturday nite.

 

Until next time – editorjack!

(This message is prepared for your review if you were there, for your information if you had to miss, and as a historical record of the great things going on each week during the 66^th year of the Alexandria Harmonizer Chapter. —YeEd.)