Awful Carol Gig
Carol gig today was spectacularly awkward. At 8 mins to gig start time, I messaged all 3 other singers, asking them where the fuck they were. One texted back “Oh shit, it's at 5. Oh god, I'm still at home, sorry!”, and that he was 30-60 mins away. One other walked in the door a few minutes later, the last, when I called her, didn't think she was rostered on today. She was.
So, we are contractually obliged to provide 4 singers, and had 2 - one bass and one alto.
With the aforementioned contractual obligation in mind, we started singing, and found that because we're both decent singers, it actually worked pretty well. A few songs sounded pretty hollow, but anything harmonised with flourishing lines worked very nicely, and having only 2 decent singers, we could just lock in, use rapid tempi... all good. Also, I adjusted all the pitches down for the alto to sing melodies, which made everything easier on our voices.
So when the 3rd guy turned up, more than an hour late, it was mostly a bit of a shit, because he's crap. Not only could I not improvise harmonisations, but even when I'd support his line, he'd still wreck the tuning.
Nonetheless, from a breach-of-contract standpoint, I think it's better to provide ¾ singers than 2/4 .
Oh well, so I put up with it for the remaining near-hour. Then when walking back to centre management, he explained why he couldn't attend one of the other gigs - going to the WikiLeaks rally. I commented that a friend had attended a Wikileaks rally and found mixed messages - rather than “we support Wikileaks”, there were posters for every cause and its dog. He didn't seem to understand the complaint. I used the example that at some rallies, you get people hi-jacking the rally for their pet cause, and this dilutes and damages the message of the rallies - for instance, promoting the socialists at, say, gay marriage rallies. He said that the socialists had been the major drive behind the equal love rallies. WARNING! WARNING! BELIGERENT TOOL ALERT! So, I provided the hypothetical example of someone having a “Israel out of Palestine” banner at a pro-gay marriage rally. He didn't see the problem - “they're all connected” and “there isn't always time to create new banners for every rally”.
*HEADDESK**HEADDESK**HEADDESK* Foolish me, for arguing with a dipshit socialist.