Good, Good Concert

On Saturday, I got to the Josephinum at about 12:30 to begin the day. I wasn’t perfectly sure where I was supposed to park and come in, only that I needed to drive around to the back, but I saw a door that I thought Julia and I had let Tim in through last month and I was right! It lead up into the chapel. I was a bit pleased with myself.

There wasn’t a whole lot to be done. As before, Julia and I are supposed to be present at rehearsals, but there’s really nothing—hopefully—for us to do. I listened to the first half of rehearsal. Second half, Julia and I went into a back room and watched an episode of the Colbert Report on her computer. When rehearsal was over there was still more down time until Joe, Ashley and Arianne arrived with programs. Even that didn’t create a whole lot to be done, until we realized that some of the programs we had stuffed were the January programs and not the Josephinum programs. That got taken care of though, so when people started coming life could run smoothly.

For this concert, the orchestra was in the back of the chapel where the organ is instead of in the front since the goal of the program was to show off the Josephinum’s new organ. What this meant was that we didn’t want patrons using the main doors in the front of the chapel to come in and instead intended to direct traffic towards a side door. The only problem with this plan was that the elevator only goes to the main doors, so anyone disabled or unable to use stairs had to be able to enter through the main doors. I got stationed there.

Let me tell you, at first I tried to turn people away. That is to say, there were people coming up the elevator who just hadn’t caught on that they were supposed to use the stairs and I sent a few back. But I couldn’t keep it up. I’m really glad a… police officer? Security guard? Offered to go downstairs and redirect people at the elevator because right before he asked I had resolved to stop arguing with people even if we didn’t want people going through that way. We also didn’t want angry patrons, and people are just frustrating sometimes.

I was reminded of this summer when I worked food and beverage at Zoombezi Bay. My little restaurant was right by the wave pool and got the most customers in the park—but that’s not what whoever set things up predicted before summer started. Surfside (my restaurant) wasn’t made to serve as many people as came up every day, and we always had obnoxious lines right around lunch. There were times I wanted to go running out into the line waving a hot spatula screaming furiously that there just weren’t any fries. Really though, the hard part was the looks people gave me when I couldn’t just magically produce the food they wanted instantaneously (we were supposed to run cafeteria style). And I got the same looks Saturday at the Josephinum.

The concert itself was great, though. This Elgar piece… absolutely lush and gorgeous sounds from the strings and organ. It was a really good concert.