Winter Showcase 2015 by Lily Chen
Posted on September 27, 2015.
Damn we’ve done so many of these I can’t tell them apart. Winter Showcase was fun and huge because everyone was hiding from the weather outside. We filled the entire penthouse and ran out of chairs, even though we set somewhere around 100. And then we were nearing the Logan Penthouse fire hazard, and I felt pretty proud of that. To kick off the show, I made a corny joke about the weather, I think, and then somebody told me to get off the microphone.
This Showcase was particularly fun, too, because we did a collaborative event with Robert J. Zimmerman?, which is the name of the band, punctuation misleading. They were awesome and knew what they were doing and we didn’t know what amps were. I think we were supposed to help them set up, but we were geeky classical musicians and not very helpful at all. So to thank them for their work and our lack of intelligence, I gave them a bottle of cheap ass champagne. (Am I allowed to write this? Ha who gives a --)
As usual, there were older guests (lovingly referred to by the board as ‘the old people’) (seriously, you are our only legitimate audience, thank you for your continued support, up there it doesn’t say ass, we are very professional) and they seemed to be shocked by Robert J. Zimmerman? which was kind of comedic and also scary, since I’m pretty sure they wanted to make a run for it, and then how would we break the fire hazard?
We were very excited to have the new “Firebird Quartet” join us, performing the first movement of Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19, K465. I think originally we were planning to haze the freshman quartet, but then they ended up being sweet and cute and talented. Boo, inconvenient.
We also welcomed the "Trout Quintet” to the stage, performing the first and second movements of Schubert’s String Quintet in A Major, D667, or in other words…the Schubert’s 'Trout Quintet’. OH I just remembered the theme of this show was UChicago Crushes - we had our amazing emcee, Kevin Schwarzwald (we love you Kevin! Have a great time in China! 加油!) look up UChicago Crushes written for our performers and read them to the audience. So nevermind. We definitely hazed those poor first years.
(Lessons learned from Winter Showcase: our performers are very sexy, ooooohlala.)
Finally, we had “Merkel & Hillary 2.0” perform the first movement of Brahms’ Cello Sonata No. 1 in E Minor, which was beautiful. They totally stole the show, until I came on, of course. I think I somehow screwed up “Have a good night everybody!” English is my first language.
Okay I’m going to shut up now, jokes on you for reading this garbage all the way through