What A Turn Around

CHAPTER ELEVEN: UIL Competition

Remember how I was talking about UIL? Well, This is the last month we have to perfect everything we possibly could for it. All of those hours spent during AND after school, the amount of times we had to start over because of small details, all of the frustration and suffering it took just to make it sound as beautiful as it could be. The whole month of March was just stressful in general. There was no goofing around during this time and if there was, we'd get snapped at. It's completely understandable since this is a very serious thing to be doing. Especially with the pandemic still being a thing! Just because there was a deadly virus going on in the world doesn't mean we got out of it. I remember one week we had to stay a little extra due to a clinic which is where someone comes over to our rehearsals and gives us tips to improve on our music. It was so tiring and I would've rather been home. For a practice before our actual competition, we practiced at a church Andre sang at which wasn't very far from the school and so did all the other choirs. I gave my homie a ride and we were pretty stupid at my house. We got dressed and ready to go to the concert to perform. Some of the other choirs went before us and then we were up. During this time we weren't doing so well on one of the songs and while we were singing it, we all just kind of looked at each other. You could tell Marshall, our choir director, was a little... Ok maybe not a little... He was generally upset and I honestly just felt bad. UIL was next week and this song was just not the best. The next day we got a long lecture on what went wrong and worked our asses off to get it right.

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It's now April 1st... everything we've prepared for is now coming together to perform one final time. All of us were either feeling like we had to throw up, or, wanting to go home. We had to be at the school by 6:30am because we were performing at 7:45am. After warming up we started loading the buses and headed off to another school. We had to wait our turn for a bit since they were already behind schedule and it was the most boring shit ever. The other school before us finally finished their songs and we were up next. I was shaking so much due to the fact that this was my first UIL in high school since COVID-19 fucked it up for me last year. We walked onto stage and had a few minutes to go over a few things in our music before we actually performed. Five minutes later the judges came in and we were ready to perform.

We finish our songs in about 10 minutes and make our way to the sight reading room. We get 2 minutes to look through the music, then we sing. Our first reading went okay, but definitely could've been better. We got another 2 minutes to look through the music to see where we messed up and we were ready for our final attempt. We sang and once we finished, there was a huge weight lifted off. We had to wait on the bus for a while since getting our scores took a little while. We were all fucking shaking because we didn't know what we got and were so eager to know. As Marshall starts walking out to the bus we don't see any reward of any kind and we're all just kinda disappointed in ourselves. As soon as he gets on the bus I see something shiny behind him. THERE IT IS! THERE'S OUR SWEEPSTAKES! He did a really good job of hiding it and there were tears and screaming. Everyone was hugging someone and we were all filled with excitement. The whole bus ride back to the school we were just so jumpy and couldn't stay in our seats. We arrived back at the school and Marshall decided to make a speech dedicated to us. For my sake and others, I won't mention the speech, but it was emotional for a lot of us... especially our seniors. We went outside to take pictures with our prize and it was so much fun. All cheers to our sweepstake.