club night

Jason Young looked over at me last night and said, "This is my Christmas Day." I knew exactly what he meant. It was 6:29, which meant that Baylor's All-University Sing was about to begin. On the first night, Club Night, when the performers from all the clubs are allowed to see the show in costume, there's a buzz like no other. For one evening a year, Waco Hall is a world capital. You look up on the stage and see twelve hundred or so students singing and dancing their hearts out; you look out into the crowd, and it's like that shot in the opening credits of the Muppet Show where the audience is all muppets too. Bright colors, outlandish figures, top hats and spats, fairy princesses, bugs, bums, school kids.

The lights go down, the crowd volume goes up, the emcee comes out and says something or other, the curtain rises, and suddenly I realize that my face hurts from smiling so much.

Later on in the evening, I looked over at Jason and said, "My anniversary is coming up." We were one act away from Kappa Omega Tau's show. In 1987, I played synth for the KOT act, my very first experience in Sing. So, twenty years. When the time came, I got up onto the piano stand (as in Baroque days, the pianist is the conductor), sighed a satisfied sigh, and thought, "Twenty years."

Twenty years ago I was nineteen. I've done this just a little over half my life. I've seen somewhere over three thousand five hundred curtainrises in performance. It never gets old.