Singing Adventures

Yesterday the King and Queen of Norway visited Duluth.  The Arrowhead Chorale was invited to sing at an outdoor ceremony in a local park, where the King and Queen came to rededicate a tall stone tower that commands a magnificent view of Lake Superior in the central area of town.  We prepared two folksong pieces in Norwegian and two American folk songs by Aaron Copland, and learned to sing the Norwegian national anthem in Norwegian.  (I am yet again so grateful for understanding the International Phonetic Alphabet . . . man that thing has served me well in life).

All of the chorale was very excited to sing for King Harold and Queen Sonja, because even though the king didn’t get to hear very much of our music, WE got to be on the VIP side of the barrier for the large crowd of people, we got to be right up at the tower during the ceremony, and the King and Queen walked right in front of us, only mere feet away,  and we had a truly unobstructed view.  We were there, up close and personal.

There is a lot of security and logistics involved in a royal visit to your community.  There were Norwegian guards next to the king, members of the United States military, and plenty of secret service agents milling around wearing ominous long black coats and sunglasses even though it was cloudy.  Countless city police were involved with directing the crowds and blocking off streets along the route of the motorcade.  Previous to coming up to the tower the King and Queen had lunch with lots of important Norwegian Americans and visited the Sons of Norway Lodge.

The atmosphere was exciting!  The crowd of people waved their Norwegian flags in jubilation.  The band played marching music.  The Native American Drummers played and sang.  The Lake Superior Children’s choir sang.  There were old people sitting in chairs wearing Norwegian sweaters, and children, and a few people dressed in stunning Norwegian traditional dress.  There were countless members of the press taking down notes with pencils and paper on their notepads, and photographers milling about with sometimes FIVE cameras strapped to them, all decked out with fancy big lenses.

King Harald and Queen Sonja were lovely.  They were down to earth, and they were kind, very kind.  On her way up the walk to to the tower a girl handed the queen a paper crown for her head, and she put it on her head and wore it!  That’s a true queen.  I LOVED that she did that, because all those little girls were so tremendously excited to see a real queen.

I know this, because The Banana was nearly beside herself with excitement because the Queen was coming and I was going to sing for the Queen.  We worked through several days of genuine tears because she was so terribly disappointed that she couldn’t come with me.  In her mind the Queen was going to be wearing a very poofy dress and a sparkly crown and would surely be sitting on a tall and elaborate throne. The Banana saw a picture of the King and Queen in the newspaper the morning before they came to Duluth and said, “Hmm.  The King doesn’t exactly have a lot of hair left anymore, but I think he’s still very handsome.”  I came home from my chorale rehearsal Sunday evening and Dr. Peds said, “I hope you know The Banana has been praying for the King and Queen of Norway, that they’ll travel safely and especially that they will be able to understand all the Norwegian you are singing.”

All of my kidlets heard me practicing that Norwegian and were VERY worried that they royalty would not be able to understand what in the world we were saying.  They giggled at some of those Norwegian vowel sounds, and they couldn’t believe we were going to sing a song about a boy who got in trouble for not watching his mother’s  chickens to the King.  They really thought we should have picked some music that was more beautiful.  They do have ideas, those kidlets.

In the past few hours, the kidlets and I have examined at the photo galleries on the newspaper’s website many times. They loved seeing the images of crowds of people, the pictures of the King and Queen, and everything that happened.

Before I left to catch the bus the choir needed to take to get to the tower (you could only get to the park by shuttle bus because of security) The Banana declared that she needed to take a picture of me dressed up to see the King.  She was more than happy to be running the big camera, and it eased some of the sorrow about not being able to go herself.  She took a pretty good picture!