Choir attire

We're a pretty musical family. My kids especially like to sing, and one has been bugging us for years to allow her to join a local group. And this year, now that she can drive herself to rehearsals, we've allowed her to join. She's very happy doing this and the choir is really good, and we knew there would be some level of parent involvement, but we were completely unprepared for the cultlike aspects of being a part of this.

I should have known it would be like that when I saw that they referred to the girls as "choristers." I understand that this is an actual word, but it isn't one I'd encountered in the first 55 332/365 years of my life. The first thing that started were the e-mails. They come, several times a week, with details of concerts and everything about he concerts. Then came the uniforms. Then the calendar, then a series of calendar updates, modifications and clarifications. And then the meetings (I am currently sitting in what could be called either a double meeting or one long meeting, which started at 10:30 and runs through 12:15 on Saturday morning(!)). You learn that being the parent of a chorister is a state of mind, requiring an orientation that choir is, if not the only thing, certainly the vital center of the kid's life.

Now we're in the midst of fundraising hell. Obviously, an organization needs money, so we're going from one fundraiser to the next. My favorite so far is the cookies. Somebody knows about this bakery in another city that makes cookies. They are vanilla cookies with a big gob of chocolate icing on them. The  number of announcements and amount of meeting time spent on these cookies is astounding. A few weeks ago I went to (somewhat shorter) back-to-back meetings, first for the whole group, then for my kid's particular group, and then another 3 days later. There were announcements about the cookies at all 3 meetings, and it was actually scary how scripted the announcements sounded. I know that, aside from being indescribably delicious (the woman sitting next to me did not agree), the cookies "make wonderful hostess gifts" and that they "freeze wonderfully." These exact phrases also appear in multiple follow-up e-mails. I can just see the glassy eyed choristers, traipsing from neighbor to neighbor, endlessly muttering "Make. Wonderful. Hostess. Gifts. Freeze. Wonderfully."

An afternote- the cookies arrived today. They look like vanilla cookies with a lot of chocolate icing on them, come in cellophane packages with printed labels on them like supermarket cookies, and would make (based on my non-WASP limited comprehension of the phrase), completely uninspiring hostess gifts. I have no doubt that they freeze wonderfully.