Pre-"Lilies On The River"

I was scheduled to perform on Sunday, 11 September, 4:30pm at the "Lilies On The River" event, organised by Viriya Community Services. All thanks to YL's last minute call that allowed me less than a week to prepare. But considering it was a 15min slot, it shouldn't have sounded so difficult.

But it was.

On Friday night, I rushed over to her centre after work for a rehearsal. This would be the first time I met May, a sweet young girl from RGS. She's only in sec 3 and she's doing her diploma for piano. wow... I only got mine in Poly lorz. Kids nowadays.. waaaah...

However, I observed that May was very classically trained, and she herself said that she usually only practised classical music. Back when I was learning how to play the piano, I was expected to pick up non-examinable pieces be it New Age, Pop, etc. But for her to be able to pick up the pieces so quickly, I was glad enough. And considering that I was super unable to memorise any lyrics yet, she was definitely doing much better than I.

Anyway, met her mum when she came to pick May up. We explained that the keyboard that we had used for our rehearsal that night would not sound good enough to put on stage. Her mum immediately whipped out her handphone and started making calls. You see, it's not that YL's centre (it's called Dreams @ Kolam Ayer) doesn't have a piano, but there is no budget to shift it there. It's not cheap to do so, so I understand why.

I stayed around to mess around with the piano abit more, and later that night, before going off, learnt from YL that May's mum managed to rent a Clavinova for $100 for 2 days. Luckily YL's colleague managed to find another keyboard that same night so they could help the mum save that money. (We can tell the family's rich, but still... not good to use people's money like that.)

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Saturday: I went down to Dreams for a final rehearsal with May. I had managed to remember the lyrics a bit better with that repetitive singing from the night before. We managed to rehearse on the keyboard YL's colleague borrowed. Definitely much better. She still stumbled at certain portions, and I struggled to remember the lyrics better. We continued to work on our chemistry and cues.

After 2 hours, we still made mistakes. Uh-oh.
And we all had to go already. DOUBLE uh-oh.

We said our goodbyes and wished each other all the best.