Ahhhhhhh. The Midwest Convention is over. This one ended up as really hot stuff. Usually, the Sunday session of a convention is more sparsely attended than the Saturday session, especially in the morning when people want to go to church. Not our Midwest this year. Half an hour into it, the singing room was already as packed as it was on Saturday, and more people kept coming in during the day. I would guess that, by day's end, there were two hundred or more people stuffed into that room. And the vast majority of them were singing at the tops of their lungs.

This is the kind of singing that pretty much moves itself. We of the arranging/secretarial committee did not have to remind people to move efficiently and not dawdle in the square; they did that themselves, bouncing up to lead a song, and hurrying down to let the next leader in. Chop-chop. So the accumulated energy really built itself up to a major head, and the room was ringing even before dinner.

Dinner, which is usually heavy on carbohydrates and sugars*, only added fuel to this fire. From where I was sitting as Secretary, I could see the Convention literally pulsing as the after-dinner singing took off. It was the kind of singing where, if the song was fast, it was really fast, and if it was slow, it got intense. In the middle of all this, I led Easter Anthem, because someone had requested it. It was the perfect time for an anthem, and the class roared it out with amazing gusto.

Sometimes, a convention will start to flag towards the end, as people get tired, but that did not happen here. At the time we called a halt to the proceedings, the singing was going on just as strong as it had all day, and the room was at its fullest. We could have easily kept on going for another hour or two, if we'd had a mind to. Definitely a Midwest Convention for the ages.

I got to host an acquaintance who is another old girl from the Fairest College, which was fun. We were never at the Fairest College together, but we "met" on an alumni message site, and we primarily keep in touch through that (though we did attend the New England Convention together a couple of years ago). It was great to see her in person again, and she makes a very nice houseguest.



*I wonder, now, if anyone has ever managed to eat an entire slice of the mile-high coconut cream cake that one of the Chicago singers brings every year. It's so good, but so rich that most people, including me, only take fractions of slices so that we can sample the other goodies as well.