Hallelujah, Core, Us

My religious views to the contrary, I love choral music and Christmas carols. In high school I was in the Acappella Choir, singing religious music with gusto, because the harmonies thrilled me. (I was in a few musicals, too, in high school and college, playing the gamut from Pore Jud to Sir Joseph Porter KCB to Conrad Birdie.) Get a caroling group together, and I'm there (used to be, more accurately), baritoning or bassing my way from porch to porch, harmonizing my ass off. Testing my wife's tolerance (of me, not of the songs), I'll belt it out in the car, too, any time a good carol comes on.

One time, at the old County Hospital in San Francisco (long since torn down and replaced), where I cut my teeth and the skin of others, the night OR crew included several who'd been in choirs, and we managed pretty much all parts as we sang The Hallelujah Chorus while I attended to the latest trauma case. In that ancient OR of the amphitheater variety, with its tile walls and high ceiling, it sounded like a church! I wondered if the poor guy on whom we were operating might have heard through his anesthetic fog and thought he was being welcomed to heaven. Probably would have surprised him, since he'd been shot by the cops while committing some heinous crime or other.

In any case, as good as we thought we sounded, it probably was nothing like the above girl group, giving it a whole new twist.

(And from the other side of the universe, there's this.)

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