Whew! This weekend sure has gone by in a whirl. You could say mine started Friday morning when I headed up to Manhattan to participate at NATS at Kansas State University. NATS stands for National Association of Teachers of Singing. It is a voice competition for college students in the West Central region, including Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska. So, as I was saying, I piled into the car with four other girls participating in the competition Friday morning and made the 2-hour drive to Manhattan. It was a great opportunity to get to know each other better. Three other students from Bethel also participated–so overall we had 2 guys and 6 girls. Each of us sang in one preliminary round on Friday. One has the option of participating in either the classical division or the music theatre division–or both–and each division is also divided into classes, i.e. freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. I competed in the classical junior women’s division. I didn’t go into it with great expectations, as I had been sick the week before and hadn’t been able to practice. I also knew the upperclassman divisions were very competitive, and it would be even harder to break into semifinals than it had been the year before when I was a sophomore–and I didn’t even break then. So I just went in, gave the best performance I could, and walked out, trying to act like I knew what I was doing.I guess I must have fooled the judges somehow, because the next morning on Saturday I found out I had, indeed, broken into semifinals! Four others from Bethel–Kelly, Kelsey, Julia, and Josh– did as well–5 out of 8 of us! Not too shabby, if I may say so! Our teacher, Soyoun Chun, was very proud.
Unfortunately, not all of us made the cut to finals–but Kelly, Kelsey, and Julia did! Kelly ended up getting third in her division, and Kelsey and Julia each got fifth in their divisions. Overall a very successful weekend for Bethel!
When we got back, it was time to celebrate at the annual Bethel Halloween Dance! Too busy to give a lot of thought to my costume, I threw together a Little Mermaid outfit at the last minute. It is always fun to go and see what creative costumes people come up with. There is always a costume contest with four divisions: individual, couple, group, and crowd favorite. Some of the most interesting costumes I saw were a group dressed as the characters of Clue, the iPod commercial person, and several students dressed as certain Bethel professors.
With so many things going on this weekend, it is hard to sit down and catch up on homework for the week! But NATS and the dance were definitely a nice respite from the norm.
