After not nearly enough practice, today was the day for my church choir to sing our Christmas cantata. Twice. Normally I go to the 10:30 service, but there’s also an early service. So today I had to be at church at 8:00. I’m sorry, let me say that again, slowly. I had to be. At church. At EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING. On a Sunday. When I like to be sleeping.

So the good news is that I dragged myself out of bed and made it there on time. Barely. And the other good news is that most of the people who go to my church are old and mostly deaf, so the cantata was very well-received. (Hey, there was nothing wrong with the music that about three more weeks of rehearsal wouldn’t have cured.)

The bad news is… well… maybe you should go grab a snack, first….

Okay. First of all, we wear black and white for concerts. In theory, this makes us look all professional and snazzy. In reality, I suspect we look a lot more like a travelling band of drunken waitstaff. Who actually walks around in a white shirt with black bottoms? Waiters and waitresses, that’s who.

Plus what people choose to wear varies so wildly that (in my humble, yet snobby, opinion) we end up looking less like an ensemble and more like people attempting to demonstrate the many different possible interpretations of formal. I always thought my favorite parts were the overly-embellished fakey-silk polyester blouses the older women in the choir tend to favor, but today I’m pretty sure someone was wearing pants that were navy blue instead of black. Definitely a new favorite.

It’s possible that I–being rather Snow White-ish myself–abhor these outfits even more than is necessary, because I never, ever wear white tops. I already look like I’m dying of anemia just because my natural skin tone is somewhere between “locked in the basement” and “dead.” I will wear cream. I will wear ivory. I may even wear bone. I do not wear white. Except for these concerts. I own 3 white blouses that only see the light of day when the choir performs.

[Yes, three. I bought one with long sleeves, and one with short sleeves. Then I found another long-sleeved one on sale. Shut up.]

Anyway. I managed to get myself out the door, on time, sickly pallor and waitress uniform in place. I realized about two minutes after I set out that I’d forgotten to take my morning meds which–at this point in time–include a large dose of advil to allow my neck semi-normal mobility. There was no time to turn back, or to stop and buy some. Gah. Well, no matter, someone at church would have some advil for me. Right?

I wove my way through a sea of older women who all carried purses larger than the average suitcase. And NOT ONE of those bitches had any advil. (Side note: What the heck do women carry in purses that size? Why do women get smaller and smaller as they age, but their purses continue to grow?) I was starting to panic, and the woman who sits next to me offered me some Tylenol. Better than nothing; I accepted and tossed them back seconds before we got started.

After the first service, I ran out to the nearest convenience store for actual ibuprofen. $1.79 for 4 caplets. A little piece of me died, paying that. But a larger piece of me–perhaps the piece that likes to be able to MOVE–demanded that I do it. (Speaking of which, I’m so glad no one had a strong opinion about the whole chiropractor thing in the last post. *snort*)

We sang again (recovering some of the blunders from the first service, and exchanging them for whole new flubs!) for the second service and then we were done. Huzzah! Time to go home and do all of the things I should’ve done the previous day while I was either stuck at the chiropractor’s or sleeping. Except that I’d promised to help a friend prepare for a party that afternoon. Damn my generous nature!

I headed over to my friends’ house, where I commenced chopping vegetables and doing other party tasks. Everything was fine until my friend–who is also in the choir–went and changed her clothes. Could I change my clothes? No, I could not. Because I didn’t have any other clothes to change into. Because it hadn’t occurred to me to bring any. Now I was at someone else’s house, helping to prepare food, in my waitress outfit.

Once people started arriving, I continued refilling dishes and helping out… vowing to myself that if anyone made a waitress joke I might accidentally spill hot mulled cider in their lap. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that.

By the time I escaped and made it home, I’d been out of the house all day and realized my weekend of chores wasn’t going to fit into the remaining hour before the kids got back. Most notably, there was still a mountain of clean laundry in my room. An entire day of good deeds, and I still had three weeks’ worth of socks to pair up.

And I didn’t get a single tip. Hmph.