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catsittingstill ([personal profile] catsittingstill) wrote2013-10-28 09:17 am

OVFF

So I am home from OVFF.

Thursday night Alice drove up to stay at my house, which is about 40% of the way to OVFF for her. It is always good to see her. I played my arrangement of "One Small Boat" for her and it 1) went well with a human listening; you can't get too much of that kind of practice and 2) she liked it. We also spent a bit of time talking about the prejudice issue that had been bothering me. She talked about growing up in the South and watching the reaction of the people around her--different generations in her own family in many cases--to the gradual loss (to some extent) of privilege and increasing status of blacks over the decades. She talked about how well the push for gay rights was going. She pointed out that the civil rights struggles have been slow and have taken generations, but people have made real progress and it is still going on.

And the theme for the OVFF song contest was "Once Upon A Time."



And I went off to bed and woke up at some crazy hour and tried to go back to sleep, and about 4:45 am I got an idea, and along about 5:30 am I gave up and got up and wrote a song. I sniffled all over myself even as I was wondering if anybody else would like it or if they would just think it was stupid and preachy. It is not my usual kind of thing--more vague and obviously political, less of an obvious story and not much in the way of vivid images.

But I couldn't let go of it and this melodic riff atttached itself to "once upon a time" that kept suggesting other places to go--places that seemed to me both unexpected, and then once sung, deeply necessary.

Alice got up around 7 am by which point I was done with the lyrics. The tune was a vague sketch in my mind but I have been practicing singing in key around vague sketches since I was in high school. So I sang it to her. Well, I started by saying "I wrote a new song do you want to hear it?" but it's not like I didn't know what the answer was going to be so I'm not sure that counts.

Alice liked it even though I could barely choke it out. She said absolutely I should enter it in the song contest.

On the road we had about seven hours to kill. We listened to my new mixes in the car--a vital step in my opinion. Everything needs the instruments mixed hotter, because they disappear or are present only as rhythmical noises with no particular pitch under the car noise. One song is starting too abruptly and another seems to have some weirdness in the beginning vocals and another seems to have lost its reverb somewhere.

I worked on the new song; stitching together pieces of melody and putting them in my voice memos. I discovered that if I thought about physical input--whether my socks had wrinkles for example--I could step back from the emotions enough to be able to sing better.

We arrived at the con about 4:30 pm and I got to the song contest sign-up sheet at 5--only to find that the main slots were completely full, and the alternate "if there is time" slots were completely full, and so I wrote my name in the bottom margin but I kind of expected nothing would come of it. But I figured I could do my new song at the open filking or something and that would be okay.

The Pegasus Concert rocked. Heather and Ben rocked the house with "Joan," right before me. And when everyone got done roaring "They will know me as Joan" in five part harmony, I picked up Lark and we walked on stage to sing, just the two of us, two little voices, about one tiny boat.

And it worked. It totally worked. My knees were shaking and my fingers felt like boiled baby carrots, but there was only one wrong note, and I got to the end and Lark skipped through g, e, g f# e, gentle, gentle C chord... and it was very quiet and someone said "ooooh..." and I knew it had worked before everyone started clapping.

So I was pretty satisfied that I did my very best and did a reasonably good job by a very good song.

Saturday morning there was a very interesting workshop on the mandolin, and I have got the accompanying CD and handout and some good ideas for exercises to work on to increase my skills, I hope.

Saturday afternoon I sang my new song for Steve MacDonald and partway through he started singing this beautiful harmony with the chorus and when I got to the end he said it was a wonderful song and I should definitely sing it in the song contest. Which should totally be long enough to let everyone who had signed up sing in it. Both the harmony and his encouragement made me change my mind about going back and crossing my name off the list.

Saturday evening Douglas promised to come get me from the Shallow End Filk Circle which Mark Bernstein and I were hosting together, if there was time for me to sing at the end of the song contest.

The Shallow End filk circle went very well; we had a number of new people and some people who came back from last year--one of whom said she had been looking forward to this event all year. Some of the songs were very good indeed and some just middling, as is normal for a filk circle. And toward the end of it Douglas showed up and said there were two people ahead of me and I should come. So I excused myself and let Mark handle the last part of the circle for a while and went to the big room with the stage.

I went up on stage and started singing. By the second chorus I saw Batya and Merav singing along. I saw Raj sit up and look closer. I heard Steve take up his harmony again. By the third chorus it seemed like most people were singing along. I got to the verse about gays being able to marry now in fourteen states and I saw Elaine pump her fist yes with a little jump of joy. I got to the last verse. I had to take an extra deep breath before "I am an atheist" and I thought I was going to lose it on "I look back and live in hope."

And the voices of the room rose up around me and carried me through the last chorus in what Peter later described as "one big Koom By Yah moment" and I didn't cry after all until I got to the very end when I saw people stand up and start clapping, and I bowed and walked off the stage gulping.

And Lizzie was marching up the aisle with her arms up and gave me a huge hug and Peter hugged me and so many of my friends were there it was just one rosy teary blur. And I was like, who cares if there is the occasional jerk out there--there is a whole community here that loves me, or loves social justice, or both. Feeling isolated is just an illusion.

That was the high point of the weekend, and quite possibly of my entire con-going experience to date.

Judi Miller came later and told me she really really needs a recording for her civics class because so many of her kids think civil rights is something that happened a long time ago. Betsy Tinney said I really should record it, and asked if I would like a cello track (and I fell all over myself saying yes, because when Betsy asks if you would like cello on something that's what you do.) Lizzie Crowe told me I had to record it and that I had written an anthem for the community. Talis Kimberley said she loved it, and that she hoped I would record it, and that she was sorry I had been catching flak. Several other of my friends came up and said that they were atheists, or that they weren't but they loved the song.

And I am going to record it but not on this CD; it deserves to have a really proper job done with it and I just don't have time to do that this time around.

Then I went back to the Shallow End, which was morphing into a theme filk on creepy subjects--though I did manage to get in my filk of One Small Boat about building canoes. And had not been there very long when I got called away again to go back to the main stage room, where Mary Bertke was singing a song about "won't you help me wait for Cat Faber" and when I walked in, she looked up, gestured broadly toward me and said "There she is!" and the room started chanting "Cat! Cat! Cat! Cat!" and my song had won both First Place and Audience Choice. Which was, like, the cherry on top of my evening, because I would have been perfectly content to just take away the memory of the audience response to the song as my prize. It means so much to me that people liked it.

And on Sunday I went to the home recording workshop and picked up a few new tips--need to look back into Audacity when this CD is done. The thing is, I know what I can do in Reaper and I don't have a lot of time to learn something new, and I remember Audacity as being pretty damn counterintuitive anyway, but there are some things I do regularly that might just be more efficient in Audacity, so I will check black into that when I have time and perhaps the next CD will go faster. Then I went to the dealer's room and picked up two CDs and a book, that being about what the finances would bear, and then to the One Shots, and Chamberfilk (they did Word Of God!) and the Tricky Pixie concert which involved much audience participation, including by the mimmoths. Though Lizzie Crowe, plucky girl aligator-slayer, is what sticks in my mind. Well, that and the zombie horde.

Peter Alway and Jeffrey Cornish (I think) and Jeri Lynn and I got together during the Final Jam in a little room off to the side where we could hear ourselves think and also our instruments, which are not very loud, and played a few things together and that was a lot of fun. Peter's song contest entry which I hadn't gotten to hear because of hosting the Shallow End filk was "The Slightly Evil Waltz" so he played that for me so I could hear it, and Jeri played the cello (cool) and I strummed octave mando on the off beats, which is pretty challenging actually because I am very much a downbeat person; I need to work on that. And we did Dulcimer's Dance together and Clockwork Chicken, and played through a verse of Carousel so Jeri could do her cello part with it, which was great.

And we were going to get on the road at four but five pm came around and Alice and I realized we were hungry so we joined the general exodus to the Mongolian Grill before we went home. The two bottles of Diet Mountain Dew Donald gave me were useful for the last couple of hours of the drive, much of which was spent listening to various filk CDs.

I am very tired today but in a totally good way and I am feeling much better and stoked about the work ahead. I know I am not alone.

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