Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Let it snow, Let it snow.... Please, Dear God, Let it snow...

Okay, so being a teenager and in high school and whatnot, I can't help but feel a strange compulsion this time of year: To hope and pray and do every single strange superstitious voodoo-esque ritual I can think of to try to make it snow and get out of school. (My particular favorite was that taught to me my my 7th grade history teacher: to wear a clean white sock on your left hand the night before you want it to snow. It always suspiciously seemed to work...) Yes, I know, you don't have to tell me, I know how pathetic it is. But  I can't help it. One day to relax? One day to spend time outside school not doing homework? One day to sleep past 6:00am? Hell yes! I'll take everyone of those I can get!

I even remember a specific teacher I had for science in middle school. He was my earth science teacher, so he did a lot of experiments with weather watching equipment and such things. So, because he had the proper resources, he started this little tradition. Whenever there was a rumor of bad weather coming up, he would pull out his gear the day before, jot down the statistics and throughout the school day he would put running reports on his chalkboard of the chances of a snow day the next day. Sometimes it would just hover around "35%" most of the day, but somedays, by the final dismissal bell he would have "99%" written in big colorful letters in the corner of the board. And the amazing part is, in all of his years of teaching (I would estimate about 16 years) he has only been wrong ONCE (cue the eerie Twilight Zone Music). In fact, in the three years I was in middle school he never inaccurately predicted a snow day.

Ahh memories.

So, why is this relevant, you ask? Well, I'll tell you...

8:15 A.M. Wednesday December 10th
I am sitting in the auditorium of Small Town High School, the day before the big choral concert at which all of the vocal music groups perform (all of which I sing in). Since first period is when the STHS Women's Chorale rehearses, we ran through a couple of our songs and then listened to the usual daily announcements from Mrs. Maestra. Today, in her list of announcements, she makes sure that we all know the snow-day policy: "If we have no school tomorrow due to weather problems, the concert will be postponed until next Thursday." Now, as far as snow-days go, the teachers generally don't talk about them too much, so when they are preparing their worst case scenarios you know it's serious.

So... Do I still wish for a snow-day so I can have one night of not staying up until 11:00 P.M. doing AP English homework? Of course. But do I want the concert to be next week, when everyone's schedules are more hectic? Of course not.

We have an amazing program scheduled. Including this gorgeous Enya piece, to be performed by Women's Chrale (accompanied by some student percussionists and a student flautist):


However, the STHS Concert Choir is scheduled to perform another piece, which, although it is just as gorgeous, just so happens to be in German, and guess how many people have it memorized? (I'll give you a hint: it's less than 3...)

So, do I want the weather Gods to give us an extra week to rehearse, or not?

For now, I'll make sure I have my white socks ready to go...

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