Many Doswell residents get home way past their bedtimes
The Dick Gillis Middle School Spring choral festival greedily consumed an entire Friday evening from Doswell parents eager to just get home, kick back and do nothing, according to numerous eyewitnesses to the event.
The concert kicked off with the 6th-grade mixed coeds, who performed a marathon tribute to the old “Up with People” road show, complete with marching in place and raised hands before an errant sparkler set the soloist’s hat on fire. That atonal endurance test was followed by the 7th-grade coeds performing what must have been the entire “Jesus Christ Superstar” soundtrack at half-speed, accompanied by Mrs. Musser the librarian on the piano because the regular piano player called in sick with a stroke and a car accident.
And on and on it went, with too many selections, kids and choruses to count: the 8th-grade concert choir performed tone-deaf, ear-splitting selections from “Phantom of the Opera”; then the 7th and 8th grade mixed chorus, after an unendurable costume change, mangled a 30-minute rendition of “Stout-Hearted Men”. An 8th-grade barbershop quartet sang “Dorm Room Party” by Doswell’s own pop combo, the 5 College Guys and Larry.
At the first intermission numerous panicked parents could be heard in the school atrium desperately asking their children if they were singing in the second half – which they were, thanks to clever scheduling to prevent such second-half AWOLs by the choral teacher and concert organizer, Miss Wonderley. So it was back to the stage for the kids and back to their rock-like folding chairs for the dejected parents as the second-half got underway with a show-stopping tribute to the flapper era, with middle-schoolers dressed in 1920’s style clothing and crooning what must have been every Rudy Vallee song ever written.
All the groups and choruses started bleeding together midway through the second half before the 2nd intermission, and by midnight parents were having a hard time staying non-comatose through the awards and recognitions, before a surprise solo by the school janitor soon brought cries of “that’s enough”, especially when the computerized light system killed all the lights at 1 AM. When principal Bob Scotch got them back on, almost every parent and child had vanished into the parking lot, leaving scattered chairs, loose programs and a skeleton crew of befuddled pre-teens to mutilate the “Fantasticks” finale for a handful of either resigned, drunk or masochistic parents.
