On A Lighter Note

Sometimes when you are angry with someone, it helps to sit down and think about the problem.

(no subject)

Ottawa's not the biggest city in Canada, but it's not the smallest either. Over half a million people live in Ottawa proper and its suburbs. I've always had ambivalent feelings about the place--the result of a less than idyllic childhood--but one thing that Ottawa does well is not to feel its size. I haven't quite figured out how it does this, but it just doesn't have a big-city air to it.

And sometimes it seems like a very small town.

I sang with Atlantic Voices: The Newfoundland and Labrador Choir of Ottawa for four years before moving to Peterborough. I was its president for the first three of those years. They say that choir directors come installed with big egos, and they might well be right. Our first director, N, was a micro-manager with an expansive personality that clashed just enough with mine that we always rubbed each other the wrong way a little bit. We kept our interaction civil for the first couple of years, but things began to go awry in the third year. In the end, N had upset enough members of the choir and its executive that he resigned, which saved us having to fire him, and we began the search for a new director.

Our second director, K, was an amiable and cheerfully disorganized man. I had retired from presidency by then, and our new detail-oriented president was more or less driven up the wall by K's lack of planning. Things held together fairly well for a year and a half, then deteriorated rather rapidly. K reduced our tough-as-nails president (a two-time cancer survivor) to tears more than once, and his contract was not renewed. The choir once again has a new conductor as it moves into its fifth season.

My mother sings with the Ottawa Choral Society. She discovered last week that N has joined the OCS this year as well. It is therefore possible that he may be going on the Italy trip with the OCS (and me) next spring, which just fills me with feelings of ::gulp::. We haven't really spoken since the fracas that eventually culminated in his resignation.

The OCS is currently preparing for a joint concert with another Ottawa choir--one that K happens to be a singing member of. During a break in rehearsal last week, Mom rounded a corner and found N and K deep in conversation with one another.

And here I'd thought that ear-burning feeling was the fever accompanying my current cold.

Ottawa is not a small city, at least by Canadian standards. Ottawa's singing community... well, I just wish it were a little bigger.