HGC Foundation

Hello All!

I write to you this fine evening for the final time as the Tour Manager of the Glee Club's 150th Anniversary Tour across the country.  The Glee Club's time since I last sent along an update (from Effingham) has been rewarding, relaxing, and emotional for all involved.

We had a remarkably uneventful ride back to Chicago after the wonderful pool-party Quentin Sedlacek and his family provided for us - made all the more remarkable when you consider that the Glee Club had been drinking since 9am.  There were some threatening clouds on the horizon as we approached downtown Chicago, but the storms hit well after we had arrived and safely made it with our hosts.

From that evening on we had free time until our rehearsal and concert the following evening at Saint James Cathedral just off the Magnificent Mile.  It turned out that our major contact there was a Yalie, though I can't say this surprised me.  He was helpful enough and worked hard on publicity, but when he left work early last August when I was coming to visit him and left me out in a rain storm... I knew something was up.

In either case, the space was beautiful and the audience was very receptive.  To be fair, however, I would do best to say that the audience at that concert didn't matter as much to those of us on stage that night.  The group was caught up in the fact that it was our last concert together and many of us lost our composure throughout the set. 

Yet as soon as the concert was over and our requirement to sing complete, it was if no one could stop themselves from singing.  The dressing room burst into song as we cycled through nearly everything else we knew how to sing and exited the Cathedral smiling and humming onto Chicago's streets.

The final day of tour meant it was time for the end-of-tour banquet and time for the return to an older HGC tradition that I wanted to revive:

cooking our own food.  To highlight the return to tradition, it turned out that the house that we found for this event is two doors east of the Eisendrath house - where the 1978 Tour spent a night under some tents with Yale girls!

Cooking for 50 guys was not an easy feat, even with tasks split up quite well among hosts, but the event ended up being wonderful on the whole. 

Chilled avocado soup, watermelon-tomato salad, salt crusted monkfish with steamed vegetables, and eight of my mother's pies (poorly made by her son) managed to fill the group until the speeches and toasts began. 

It was a gorgeous night outside, but it was made much better by the presence of such great friends.

Tonite finds the Glee Club separated in body for the first time in over five weeks.  Despite our physical distance from one another, I have never felt part of a more tight-knit group of men in my life and I trust they all feel the same way: proud of what we have accomplished, sorry that the great journey is over, relieved that the great journey is over, and excited about the future we can still create.

But above all else, however, I think we are evermore filled with the glee and good humour that has characterized the Glee Club experience for 150 years.  As I ride Amtrak through night-darkened Indiana on my way home to Rochester, I now understand what so many alumni of HGC have felt from 1921 when leaving the end of a Glee Club tour.  This wonderful Anniversary year has taught me not to feel sad about what I am leaving behind, but to cherish what it was to me, what it was to those before, and what it will be to those who follow.  It is indeed a very special family we all are part of.

In Glee and Good Humour,

Kelby James Russell '09

President, Harvard Glee Club