In June, I was in love with life in the Valley again. I was out of the house, driving with someplace to go, an actual rehearsal with live people, singing together and face-to-face with a seven-piece band, all celebrated professionals who could swap places, join Jon Batiste any night the week and play for Steven Colbert’s national audience.
The Young@Heart Chorus was about to be reborn, unleashed from lockdown and back in action — live action.
Sometimes I took the back route from Greenfield to Northampton, going through Whately and Hatfield just to reacquaint myself with the surrounding countryside.
Then, we were released from a year-and-a-half of COVID isolation — finally, a call for live rehearsals. We would be meeting at the Northampton Center for the Arts. I was pinching myself that I actually would be seeing all the people whose faces I could recognize but had never met in person with the exception of our founder and director, Bob Cilman.
That was the hope as we left our world of Zoom boxes behind and started rehearsing for the first live stage performance at the Academy of Music booked for Oct. 16. Still, we were cautious, distanced and arrived masked until it was time to sing. Singing is famously the biggest transmitter of potentially affected COVID aerosols.
A few singers after soloing replaced their masks immediately. Some did not remove them at all. Age itself makes us COVID-vulnerable and susceptible. With the average age of 85 and six members in their 90s, you can be sure we’re not all in good health.
The focus isn’t on how old we are, it’s on the music we are learning, the lyrics we need to memorize and the next performance. In itself it’s a hopeful deterrent against the worst aspects of aging — loneliness, lack of purpose, isolation, memory loss and sadness. It’s a tremendous credit to the tech coaches Bob, Julia and John La Prade that ultimately we were all able to tune into Zoom rehearsals on different devices with varying degrees of internet reliability.
Our first “outing” was a live rehearsal, a long-awaited meet-and-greet barbecue at Look Park. I could hardly contain my excitement that I was finally going to meet, greet, hug and schmooze with the people whose faces were now well known to me. I had the distinct feeling I would retain lyrics better when we were all together in the flesh, with the palpable collective energy that is the magic of choral singing.
Suspicious for shrinkage in my own gray matter, I wrestled with new songs. My Irish repertoire is no credit to my memory. Those songs were lodged in my DNA before the 1916 Rising. Now I am wondering if I can count on multiplying neurons for nailing and retaining the lyrics of The Pogues, The Clash, The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Pogues, The Doors and more.
Additionally, our very young 29-year-old Dutch filmmaker, Julia Van IJken, was here during our Zoom furlough, after navigating an international incident that called for a two-week quarrantine in Aruba. Amazing was the sight of Julia in the very space in which we were rehearsing. She got 40 hugs every morning.
But it was not to last, these in-person outpourings. After only five live rehearsals, we were back in our Zoom boxes and Julia was soon back in Holland.
She manages to make us look as if — like Dorian Gray — we have a picture of ourselves aging in the attic. She is an able filmmaker and can digitally hop from London to Holland and to Pulaski Park , where we had a Zoom escape recently to film a sequence for “I Will Survive,” by Anita Shumway. We danced on the grass, attracted a few dancing locals and scared away the squirrels.
We will be moving masked from one location to another, synced up with the prerecorded songs and tweaks by the camera that we hope will show our best sides. Everything helps at 76. Maybe if I’m lucky enough to still be in the chorus at 92, I’ll have stopped worrying about wrinkles. Film is a great opportunity for Young@Heart to keep evolving.
At the short-lived live rehearsals, I plonked myself in the front row, all the better to see and hear the band and pick up on the chorus cues from Bob, a live wire of leadership and energy with cool dance moves and hand signals, just in case we forgot when and where to sing.
Then dawned delta, and the cancellation of our live return to the stage Oct. 16 at the Academy of Music. Young@ Heart is nothing if not flexible, having traveled the world and performed on stages from Japan to New Zealand, Australia and Europe. The new recruits — there are five of us — hope we live long enough to ditch our masks and get to go at least as far as Belchertown.
No kidding. Even that much travel is an exciting prospect.
For now we are back to the livestream world for our Oct. 30 show, “On Hold.” Fresh songs, new opportunities, renewed resolve and the creation of an actual original musical documentary. Young@ Heart is no stranger to documentary film, having won multiple awards for the 2008 Young@Heart.
I used to be the youngest. Where at 76, but in Young@Heart, could one feel chronologically young? A young heart is a must and age an entirely different matter.
Rosemary Caine lives in Greenfield and is a harpist , songwriter and founder of Wilde Irish Women.