This years show is only 2 weeks away, and Bert Brossoit wants your ticket money. Murray Phillips wants your ads and the money for them.

Bob Ebers is working to get us some good publicity, and consequently, we will be looking forward to a boost in ticket sales. Keep talking to people about the show. We need to money, the audience and the excitement!

This is the time to tell people we are again the Small Chorus Champs of the Mountain Division, and that our guest quartet Vocal Spectrum, is going into International ranked as #2. We also have added Ardesco, a talented a cappella group from McGill. Those of us who were at the West Island Chorus show saw them there.

See Bert tonight to reassess the value of the tickets you still have.

We have budgeted to make a profit on this year’s show – something we haven’t done for the past four years

It can be done, and there is no time like the present, so just do it! See Murray or Steve! Talk up our show with your friends and acquaintances. Tickets are $25.00 each.

New members = 2 Members in process = 0 Current = 33

We had no guests last week. That was a shame because it was such a fun rehearsal! Talk to somebody about barbershop this week! Our target for members this year is for a 7 member NET INCREASE by the end of 2006.

Remember: If you recruit 5 members this year, your International, District and Chapter dues for 2007 are 100% fully paid!

This is my guess at the show list. It is subject to revision on Monday evening. Bring a pencil.

Tonight
Beautiful Dreamer
Exactly Like You
Que reste-t-il ?
Orange Colored Sky
What Child is This / Child of the Poor
Give My Regards to Broadway
Chances Are
Hush-a-Bye Mountain
Before the Parade Passes By
The Impossible Dream

Finale – Reprise of Exactly Like You.

A "Celebration of Ed Waesche’s Life" will be held at his alma mater, Princeton University, on Friday, June 30, 1 pm – 3 pm. Location: Princeton University Chapel, 110 West College, Princeton, NJ. For additional information, contact Jack Pinto at BIHDIR@aol.com , phone (609) 581-5850.

J. Edward Waesche III, noted arranger, music judge and former Society president, died May 2, 2006 of cancer at the age of 74. He was inducted into the Society’s Hall of Fame in 2005 at the international convention held in Salt Lake City in recognition of his exceptional contributions to the barbershop experience.

Barbershop quartets often are characterized as four dandies, perhaps bedecked with straw hats, striped vests and handlebar mustaches. These caricatures of the barbershop tradition are not only a quaint symbol of small-town Americana, but have some historical foundation. Barbershop music was indeed borne out of informal gatherings of amateur singers in such unpretentious settings as the local barber shop.

The African-American origin theory is not new. Several of our early Society members and recent historians have made the assertion, or at least suggested an African-American influence upon barbershop harmony. But it was a non-Barbershopper, Lynn Abbott, who in the Fall 1992 issue of American Music published, "'Play That Barber Shop Chord': A Case for the African-American Origin of Barbershop Harmony," presented the most thoroughly documented exploration into the roots of barbershop to appear up to that time. In that writing, Abbott draws from rare turn-of-the-twentieth-century articles, passages from books long out of print, and reminiscences of early quartet singing by African-American musicians, including Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, to argue that barbershop music is indeed a product of the African-American musical tradition.

If you have a June 30 renewal date, you can go to the Members Only section and renew online. You can also send your payment by snail mail to:

The Society’s Canadian Exchange Rate for the second quarter is $1.0994.