In Which Houses of Worship Are Encouraged to Buy Quality Espresso Machines in Order to Retain Excellent Employees

So…. this is the first time I’ve owned up to this matter in public. I guess it’s because I’ve been too busy furtively slinking behind potted plants and open doors whenever I’ve seen the Rector walking down the hall or anywhere else within 1000 feet of me. But then again, I probably don’t want to broadcast the fact that I apparently singlehandedly sent a music director packing simply by being a church choir member who showed up without coffee one fateful Sunday morning…and the rest is history, as they say.

This story begins quite early on a rather recent Sunday morning. For those of you who might not be aware, I’ve been singing 3 services every Sunday morning in 2 different sanctuaries throughout the last year, and I have found that coffee is a key factor that allows for consistently singing 1) the right notes 2) with the correct rhythms 3) in the musically-appropriate key 4) from the proper hymnal 5) at the appointed time 6) in the correct sanctuary.  (No, you do NOT want to know what trial-and-error circumstances allowed me to come to this conclusion. I will allow the mantle of oblivion to mercifully cover the past and its associated, er, “learning experiences”.)

On this particular Sunday morning, I couldn’t seem to get my usual morning routine together, including making and grabbing my customary cup of joe to go. When I finally managed to get myself out the door sans coffee, I was lucky just to have managed to get semi-proper clothing on in time to arrive at the church (I seem to vaguely recall my mascara and lipgloss being smacked on at stoplights, and at the rate I was already going, it’s rather surprising that I didn’t yet have mascara on my lips and lipstick on my eyelids).

After my husband dropped me off, I wandered into the choir room, where I thought I vaguely remembered that the special-music folks were supposed to meet up in order to run through our piece. As I was the only one of the quartet present, however, I thought I might be in the wrong location. As I stood there, slowly pondering where I should go next, the church’s music director showed up in the doorway to let us know that we’d practice upstairs. He then stood politely while waiting for me to follow him.

Now in order to understand what happened next, you should probably be aware that my brain without my morning cup of coffee operates in v-e-r-y slow motion (in fact, my brain’s processing speed sans caffeine bears a startling resemblance to slow and synchronized underwater dancing). I blankly looked at him, and after awareness had slowly dawned, I asked if I should make and put up a sign for the others so they’d know where to go if they came down here first. He looked at me rather carefully, and then he said cheerfully that they’d figure it out when they heard the organ upstairs and saw that no one was down here, so we didn’t need to leave a sign. Okay, I said. Then he mentioned that we’d just turn out the lights as we left the room, and he stood waiting for me to precede him. As the phrase “turn out the lights” slowly infiltrated my brain, I tried to remember where the room’s light switch was. And that’s when I turned around, mumbling incoherently about needing to shut off the lights, walked all the way over to the other entrance/exit to the room, and shut the lights off on him while he stood waiting there. I then walked the long way around to the main sanctuary (I was really struggling to find the usual doorway, which suddenly seemed to have gone mysteriously missing). When I finally arrived, I once again found his now-very-watchfully-and-carefully-polite self waiting for the rest of the singers to show up so he could rehearse with us.

Muttering something in apology about how I’d forgotten that there were two sets of light switches in the room (and no, I am not sure myself how this had any relationship to how I’d just left him standing literally in the dark), I set about to redeem myself by helping to set up the music stands in preparation for the rehearsal. I succeeded only in 1) telling him that the singers had requested one thing (they had), and 2) doing the direct opposite of what they’d requested. Once again I caught him observing me with a rather puzzled expression, but he said nothing and so the unnecessary, unwanted, and unrequested music stands were set up by yours truly in order to await their takedown by the later-arriving (and also rather puzzled) members of our quartet.

By now I was experiencing a vague and uneasy awareness that something was not quite “right” with my world, but since I wasn’t quite sure what it might be, I decided to let bygones be bygones and just pretend none of the above had happened. Perhaps, I thought foggily, I just needed to wake up a bit more. Surely that must be it…

The three other singers arrived, we did our brief run-through with the church music director/organist, and then we settled into our seats to catch up on each other’s lives while we waited for the Prelude to begin. Once the Prelude (a solo by another choir member) had begun, we sat in quiet readiness, preparing to stand as soon as the Prelude was over so that we could begin leading the opening hymn.

The music stopped, and I immediately stood up next to the soloist at the front of the church, hymnal in hand, while my three other compatriots followed my lead. But as the organ started playing again, I found it puzzling that nothing I was hearing remotely matched any of the musical motifs from the opening hymn. I continued eye-scanning the hymnal page, fuzzily noting that the church music director must have found a highly embellished form of the melody that bore seemingly no resemblance to the hymn itself to play for the introduction. And then I heard the soloist start singing again…and one of my (desperate) compatriots grabbed my choir robe by its voluminous sleeve and yanked me back down into my chair. Why? Because I had just stood up at the front of the church in order to attempt to lead the opening hymn during the middle of the soloist’s song. That break I’d heard in the music?  Simply the second movement of her piece.

The church music director’s face twitched as he kept on accompanying the (remarkably composed) soloist.

By now my cheeks were burning bright red, but in just a few moments we were going to have to stand up again (this time during the CORRECT portion of the service) and lead the opening hymn after this ridiculous false start, so I sternly told myself to get it together, fervently willing my body and mind to have finished waking up by now. I forced my attention to the hymnal at hand, and once our quartet had successfully managed to lead the congregation in the correct hymn from the right hymnal during the appropriate portion of the service, I breathed a deep sigh of satisfied relief. Things could only go uphill from here, I was sure.

Once the second service had finished, I made my way over to the other sanctuary in order to participate in the warm-ups for the third service. Once we were well into this service, however, the music director realized that his usual page-turner had gone home early.  Looking around, he spotted me and asked if I’d turn his pages during the Postlude. Did I imagine it, or did I see a flicker of fear in his face? Must’ve been my imagination, I decided as I walked over to the organ to get myself into position. Once he started playing, however, I realized that due to both where I was standing and also the light from the window, I couldn’t see a single measure he was playing. Since I would have no idea when to be ready to turn the page unless I could see what he was playing, I slowly leaned way, w-a-y back… until I could finally read the notes on the page. Now that I was hopelessly behind and eye-scanning as fast as I could in order to try to find out where he was in the music, I became aware once again that something was not quite right. Sensing someone looking at me, I turned…to see the music director staring right at me, eyes as frightfully big as saucers. That’s strange, I thought. Did something unexpected just happen in the service? Because he’s looking straight at me, and he would usually be looking at his music right now.

And that’s when it dawned on me, as the music director’s face took on that openly incredulous look of alarm one gets when one sees a completely foreign and possibly quite dangerous new animal in the zoo for the first time…he was waiting for me to turn his page! He must’ve previously nodded his head at me, but I’d completely missed it while stretching out behind him at a rather unstable 45-degree angle like a third-rate ballerina, trying to find where he was in the music so that I would be prepared to turn the page at the appropriate time. His look of shell-shocked desperation, then, was his last-ditch effort to get me to turn the page before he had to rip his own hands off the organ keyboards in order to turn it himself. And as I realized what I had just done, you guessed it…I froze in horror. I don’t recall for certain what went down next, but I do believe he turned his own page, and I began recalling those Biblical stories of childhood…you know, the ones where the earth opened up and swallowed people. And I frantically wondered why the earth couldn’t begin moving right now in Biblical ways of old so that it could swallow me up and I would be spared the embarrassment of having to stand here for the rest of this musical piece as a completely useless and gymnastically-failed page-turner. But of course, the earth never does open up and swallow you when you want it to, does it now, so I had to remain rooted to the spot until after the overly eventful Postlude had mercifully ended.

I don’t remember much after that, but I do remember that when my husband picked me up after his service had finished, I told him (in a voice that can only be described as a close cousin to a zombie) that he needed to go by the local Starbucks so that we could pick up a coffee. Like, right now. And once we got home, I may or may not have curled up into a fetal position and pondered uncharitably why songs needed to have second movements, anyway? Dang confusing, if you ask me. Surely one movement would be enough!

It should surprise no one at this point that two days later, a carefully-worded announcement of the music director’s imminent resignation went out.

Which brings me to my conclusion: if a church wants to attract and retain quality employees, they really should consider buying a quality espresso machine. Why? Because if this particular church had had such a machine, I would have had my coffee. This would then have meant that all of my (unintended) acts of churchly terrorism, such as disrupting the service, trying to ruin the Postlude, setting up unnecessary, dangerous stumbling blocks called music stands smack in the middle of the path of oncoming foot traffic, shutting off the lights and plunging church employees into total darkness while their unsuspecting selves are standing on steep stairs (well, you get the picture, and it surely ain’t pretty!), would have never happened after all. But most importantly, well-caffeinated congregants are going to cause their leaders far fewer problems than under-caffeinated ones, as my unfortunate experience illustrates. And lastly, what is a good leader worth? Surely many times more than the cost of an excellent espresso machine…

I hear tell that the church has hired a new interim choir director, so I have made a decision that until this church invests (and rightfully so) in a quality coffee-spitting machine, I will not show up again in the wee hours of a Sunday morning uncaffeinated. I am certain this news will fill the interim choir director with great relief…and in the meantime, Starbucks can count on a definite uptick in sales during this down economic time from a certain patron in Falls Church.