Date: June 4, 2001 It's Showtime! Break a leg, everyone!

Fiction, after all, has to make sense. Mark Twain

Mark your calendar and clear the decks for a rehearsal on Friday evening. This will give us the opportunity to get everything working well and sounding great. Last Monday was awesome. The sound was great and wonderfully in tune. Now all we have to do is make sure the fun we are having shows through to the audience.

From the TransCanada (Hwy 40) take exit 52 (boul. St. Jean - St. John's Road) South to Hymus Blvd. (the third traffic light after you exit the TCan) and turn left (east). Go past two traffic lights and when you come to Hastings, turn right. Follow Hastings to Westcliffe Avenue and turn right. The Church is at 176 Westcliffe.

Plan to be at the theatre at 12:00 noon on Saturday, and do not plan to leave until after the show is over and everything is cleaned up! We will rehearse, eat, dress and perform together, so don't plan to go anywhere once we start getting ready. Full costume is required.

Last year people left to go to the Afterglow before they had finished helping with the clean up. Volunteers will be needed to help load and move risers, clean the backstage area, etc. Do your part. The show isn't over till the clean up is done.

Here is the order for the songs in the show:

Dig out your Photos from the Past. Do you have some photographs among your souvenirs that will bring back some of our 50 years of singing? Please let Jerry Silverberg borrow them. We will have a couple of large display boards in the lobby of our show with photos of days gone by.

They don't have to be 50 years old! Last year or last week, if it is interesting, bring them in!

Have you sold your Show tickets? The show is our largest fundraiser, by far. We need to sell ALL of the 1000 seats. A ticket to our show is an easy sell. We have a great chorus and two great quartets headlining the show. Ask your friends to come. They will enjoy the show.

Even if you have taken tickets, you must sell them. Please do that. We ALL need to do our part.

A few interesting psychological phenomena can come to your rescue when learning songs (or anything else). They are the "primacy" and "latency" effects, and the notion of "spaced practice" versus "massed practice." things at the end of the list, but not in the middle. You remember the things at the beginning because your brain has had more time to repeat these elements to itself.

Researchers have found that when you have a list of things to remember, such as the lines in a song, you will most often remember things at the beginning of the list and

Even when you are not consciously thinking about something, an unconscious part of your brain is going over it, trying to sort it where it can be retrieved later. This is called the primacy effect because it has to do with things that come first in the list. The latency effect refers to things at the end of the list. You remember these because they are still fresh in your mind. You can test these effects by having someone draw up a list of 10 items such as song titles. Have the person read the list to you and see how many elements you can remember in the right order. They will likely be the items at the beginning and at the end of the list.

Now you know why the lead section quickly learned their first and fourth verses of "Sixteen Tons," but not the second and third.

Ultimately, practice makes the primacy and latency effects of no consequence as you repeat your parts until you have learned them thoroughly. You can accelerate the efficiency of practice by avoiding massed practice and engaging in spaced practice instead. "Massed practice" refers to practising a song over and over in a short period of time, like a student cramming for an exam. This is less efficient than "spaced practice" which consists of practising songs in bursts separated by longer periods of rest. When you do this, your brain continues to practice the song, whether you are aware of it or not. Your brain is very efficient at storing the information in such a way that it will be easy to retrieve. However, it can't do this as efficiently when it is busy helping your eyes, ears and mouth practice.

Thus, if you sing a song a few times in the morning, a few times in the afternoon and a few more times in the evening, you will remember it better than if you were to perform all those repetitions in one uninterrupted practice session.

Psychology can sometimes be useful and we would all do well to apply its useful teachings.

Practice is something we do at home, every day, between rehearsals!

Rehearsal is where we reinforce what we have been practising every day!