One wedding short?

 As many of you know, I spent almost the whole two years we were in Scotland singing with a women's singing group officially called "Women's Singing Group" but affectionately known to almost everyone as "Loadsaweeminsingin."  Over the course of my two years with them, I became a part of the singing family, and that meant I was brought along to sing at occasions that I wouldn't have been part of as a regular American expat. 

Magdalen Green from the gazebo

In the two years, I sang at three weddings and a funeral with Loadsaweemin - hence the title of this post, homage to the 1994 film that launched Hugh Grant (at least in the United States), and indeed, according to mentalfloss.com, launching the British rom-com as an American genre. 

The first wedding was for someone I did not know, but she was a community organizer in Dundee and wanted a real "community group" to sing at the wedding, so there we were.  In typical small-town Dundee fashion, although I knew neither the bride nor the groom, it turned out that I had recently met the best man at a University event, and I knew one of the (approximately 30) wedding guests from church.

The second wedding was for the son of one of the long-time group members, and it was held at the gazebo pictured above, just down the block from where we lived in Dundee. Of course we were not lucky enough to have such a clear day for the wedding - it was threatening rain, and it finally did start raining as the guests arrived.  Everyone took it in stride, though; we singers pulled out our rainbow umbrellas, and the ushers carried umbrellas in one hand and champagne in the other as they directed people to their sitting and standing spots.  After we sang our song, the groom turned to Loadsaweemin and said "I love you" - we told him we loved him too.

The third wedding was for one of the group members, held in the lovely government chambers of the city of St. Andrews.  She was marrying a man named Bill, and so in addition to our traditional wedding repertoire (The Rose), we also sang Da Do Ron Ron, which, as you may recall, has a lyric that says, "Yeah, my heart stood still. Yeah, his name was Bill..."

Finally, the funeral was for another member of the group who had been declining for a while - she went into a hospice-type facility, where we visited one Monday evening for our usual rehearsal and sang with her in the chapel.  A little while later, she passed away, and there we were.  It was January and the nondenominational chapel was quite busy - folks for the next funeral had to wait in a holding area; then when your number was called (not quite, but pretty close) you walked across the garden to the chapel for your funeral.  We waited, we walked, we listened, and we sang: an arrangement of James Taylor's "Close Your Eyes," and "Think of Me, Forget Me Not." Although I remember this as a sad song, it could go either way - sad for funerals, or happy for the togetherness of a wedding:    

Think of me, forget me not,

Remember me wherever you go.

I am yours and you are mine,

Remember me wherever you go.  

Think of me, forget me not,

Remember me wherever you go. 

 When I think of these events, where I was included as one of the "ladies from Dundee" it makes me nostalgic for this group and how much they were a part of my world in Scotland.  I guess weddings tend to do that, and funerals too, perhaps; although I've been lucky that my attendance at funerals has been more limited than my presence at weddings. 

Facebook, with all its birthday and anniversary reminders, makes me nostalgic too - though I rarely remember the exact dates of anniversaries outside my immediate family (and even then I usually have to consult a cheat-sheet for all but my own) the reminders on Facebook bring back memories of the wedding - like on this date in 2003, when I was part of the wedding of Katie and Beej - Katie's daughter Laura, now a lovely college student, was seven years old at that event - the same age Audrey is now.  I remember all the red bridesmaids dresses, Katie eating grapes in her wedding dress, and the flames on Beej's jacket...surely not his tux, that must have been the rehearsal dinner. Time flies.

One wedding short? Nah, I've had plenty. I've not sung at them all, but at each one I've played some role, and who knows, maybe in 10 or 15 years, someone will look back at a picture or reminisce about who was there and the small details they remember - a song, a red dress, a rainy afternoon, an adorable seven year old who's now all grown up, or a groom named Bill.

Dundee Flower and Food Festival 2014

This morning I started my day tromping through the grass and mud, trees and gravel parking lots of Camperdown Park in Dundee.  The group I sing with, Loadsaweeminsingin (previous blog about the group here) has a regular gig at the festival.  After the aforementioned tromping, I (and Paul, and the girls) finally found the parking lot we were meeting in, and moved on to warming up (both vocally and physically - although it wasn't raining this morning, Scotland in early September is not exactly warm).  When we got to the stage, my fan club were the only ones in the audience.  The audience did grow once we started singing, but this experience reinforced what I suspected - 10:30 on a Sunday morning is pretty early for Scots.

I'm about third from right - Paul's camera image

 After we finished singing at 11, we explored the flower and food festival.  Well, okay, first we let the kids ride the rides. 

On the ubiquitous merry go round ride - driving the bulldozer this time.

Finally getting big enough for the harnessed-trampoline-jumping ride!

Then we watched Indian dancing.  Then we ate lunch. THEN we explored the festival.  It reminded Paul and I of a cross between the St. Andrews Highland Games (blog here) and the Royal Highland Show (blog here).  It was a bit like the Highland Games in scale - a small fun fair, a good bit of Highland Dancing (and the accompanying bagpiping).  It was a bit like the Highland Show in its several tents packed with stalls and displays.  In this case, the stalls were selling fancy food, including jam, cheese, beef and lamb, hard cider, Scotch whisky, and various kinds of sweets (most with samples!) and the displays were of flowers, plants and vegetables.  It was definitely much smaller than the Highland Show, and there were also no animals, which of course are the main point of the Highland Show.  The Flower and Food festival didn't have a single sheep or cow (at least a live one, though they were well-represented in alternate forms in the Food section).

The vegetables were quite welcoming

Did I mention Claire likes carrots, and wanted to pose with them?

You know you wondered where the took place...Ireland would have been my guess. 

Given the popularity of jam in the food tent, I should have taken a picture of (not kidding) the booth for the World Jampionships, which are sponsored by a Scottish jam producer (MacKays, pronounced McKies) and won by a man from Dundee in 2014. 

We finally did find flowers as well!

Prizewinning dahlias

Other prizewinning flowers

Even Audrey got into the flower (or rather, tree) spirit, and fell in love with a Bonsai tree.  She wanted a big tree, but compromised on a little one - this is her with "Rosie" - she's chatted to her all afternoon, trying to get her to break out in the promised white flowers.  And no, Audrey isn't looking a little green - she chose the "witch" face-painting at the festival, while Claire went for a glitter tattoo of a princess crown. 

Audrey and Rosie the Bonsai.

Loadsaweeminsingin, or my Scottish singing experience

One of the first things I did when I arrived to Dundee was to join a singing group.  After having not sung with any organized group since leaving Arizona in 2010, it was a priority for me to find a choir. Not only do I like to sing, I was (and am) pursuing some work-life balance.  Singing is for ME, not my boss or my husband or my kids. And I really lucked out.  Literally before we even moved into our rental house here in Dundee, I found a women's singing group (official name: Women's Singing Group) on the Internet.  The references to the group were a couple of years old, so I worried the group might not still be around, but the email address still worked and I was able to register over email, and get instructions to go to the local professional theater for a rehearsal the following Monday night.

I wasn't quite sure what I was in for. I had been in Scotland less than 2 weeks. But I wanted to sing, and these women were singers. So I walked in, to a room of approximately 40 women who all seemed to know each other very well, and who were not just "Women's Singing Group" but "Loadsaweeminsingin" (or Loads of Women Singing, for the non-Scots speakers :-). And then it turned out that all the singing was by ear, just a sheet of words in front of you, and no music. But a few ladies, especially Molly, a fellow soprano, welcomed me, and two hours flew by. I wasn't used to singing regularly, much less singing by ear, so I concentrated intently on parroting back what our tutor, Sarah, sang to us, and singing what the other sopranos (the ones who had been in the group for two or five or, in one case, almost 20 years) were singing. It was a lot of fun, and a lot of work.

Now that I've been in the group for seven months, singing by ear is a lot easier, though still frustrating at times.  I am amazed at the longevity of the group (we're about to celebrate the 20th birthday of this group in early June 2014), and how much singing with them teaches me about being Dundonian (from Dundee).  For the 20th Birthday program, we're singing 12 songs. Three are African, including Nkosei Sikeleli, the national anthem of South Africa, which the group has a history of singing. I actually even sang it with them shortly after Nelson Mandela died.  The other nine songs are Scottish, with an emphasis on the factory past of Dundee (Women O' Dundee, Alice's Song) and a local Dundonian singer/songwriter who recently passed away, Michael Marra. And of course, it can't be Scotland without a connection to Robert Burns - were closing our Birthday show with a song for which he wrote music and words, Green Grow the Rashes.

Without Loadsaweeminsingin, I would know far less about the history of Dundee.  I would know far less about the issues that concern Dundonian women, past and present. I would know far less about what a group of 40 (or more) determined women can accomplish with the help of an energetic tutor who knows each woman by name and brings out the best in everyone.  I still sing for ME, but with Loadsaweeminsingin, I also feel like I am singing for US, the women of Dundee.

To give you a bit of an idea of how Dundee's past shows up in our music (and to hear a bit of a Dundee accent), listen to Sheena Wellington singing Women O'Dundee   (note: I tried to embed this as a Youtube video but since I can only find it on Youtube UK, and Blogger only wants to go to Youtube.com...a link is it.  And if you can't figure out what she's saying, check out Words to Women O' Dundee, with some translation.