Best. Concert. Ever.

(apologies for the highly inconsistent punctuation. silly Spanish keyboards)

Judging by the measurements of audience size and audience response, last nights concert in Puriscal was easily the best tour concert we have had in the last five RCS tours.

We performed with a local childrens choir in a 5 oclock concert following mass at the big church in the center of town. Costa Rica is a very Catholic country - 75% according to wikipedia, and like 95% christian overall - so at first we wondered if the, oh, 500-600 people at mass were there for services or for us.

They were there for us. After the childrens choir sang a set (which included a three part arrangement of My Heart Will Go On and a song with hand motions that inspired me and Jenny to start twirling our fingers a la Inkolovane), RCS did the singing-in-the-round thing where we spread out down the aisles between the pews and sang the Van Ness and Duo Seraphim. We then moved into normal standing positions for the rest of the concert, but we definitely hooked them from the start by surrounding them with RCS;s sound. Their enthusiasm grew and grew over the course of the concert, and after Amazing Grace, which was announced as our final piece, we received a universal standing ovation. So we launched into our planned encore of the first half of Mata Del Anima Sola, featuring rockstar soloist Bianca Calderon. The audience started clapping along, which was of course nearly disastrous (consecutive notes of equal value etc etc and whatnot) but Katie held it together. We then got another standing ovation, so we sang Utopia. Which prompted ANOTHER standing ovation, so we polished it all off with a round of R-A-D, and then called it a night. Three encores! We also sold all the cds we had with us at the performance (unfortunately, we didn{t have enough for everyone who wanted) and some old ladies were collecting RCSers signatures on their programs and, basically, they adored us.

And by the time we finished having a lovely dinner with the childrens choir and playing many ridiculous rounds of musical chairs and lime tossing and something involving balloons that will most certainly be joining the human pyramid racing in next years lineup of new retreat games, we adored them as well.

-Liz-