Adventures in New York City: A Florida Girl Braces the Cold!
- Taylor Despars
- Mar 21, 2023
- 3 min read
The week of Spring Break brought me to New York City to perform with my choir, The Jacksonville University Singers, at St. Patrick's Cathedral! I was lucky enough to have my fiancé in the choir as well so we went together. We began the week a day before everyone else arrived. Our first day was spent figuring out the subway system, walking around Manhattan, and seeing Stephen Colbert live! It was an amazing experience. His band, Louis Cato and the Late Show Band, was so lively and had everyone on their feet instantly. After the show, we got pizza (our first of many) and headed back to the hotel for a good night's rest before the rest of the choir got to NYC.
Day two brought us to a birthday lunch at Serendipity3 and touring NYC, now knowing how to navigate the subway. We saw Rockefeller Center, snuck a peek at our performance venue, at ended the day watching Lohengrin by Richard Wagner at the Metropolitan Opera House! Our good friend Alex was able to get me, Daniel, and my best friend Meli tickets right at orchestra level, and the performance was absolutely stunning. As we sat in our seats, we had no idea what to expect. When we read through our programs, though, we realized that the show was around 3 hours long with two intermissions! (Lohengrin is actually Wagner's longest opera!) After a long night at the theatre, we went back to the hotel and started to get ready for the next day.
The day we'd been waiting for was finally here... Performance day! The morning began with a group breakfast at Copper Mug Café, where our generous dean of the school of fine arts paid for our meal and a coffee. After that, we all got on our finest concert attire and headed on the subway towards the cathedral. The church was larger than life, and a lot of us were in awe! The stakes were set pretty high. The president of Jacksonville University, Tim Cost, was present, alongside many donors and prestigious benefactors of the school. It was a very important audience! Our performance was the best we'd ever sung and going back to the hotel we were so proud! The night wasn't over for most of us, though, because some of us were in another choir on campus: Infinitus!
After a night of rehearsing for the Infinitus concert, we woke up on Thursday morning ready for the day. We headed to Little Italy (we're both Italian, so we felt right at home) and ate some delicious Italian food while some hits from the 50's played in our ears. After that, we headed to the venue for the concert and got ready to sing! We combined the concert with C4, another choral collective that is based in NYC. They were the first choral collective, which is what Infinitus' structure is based on! The concert was beautifully sung and conducted by some of our students, and we headed back to the hotel to get ready to head back home.
It was such a wonderful trip and I got to see a lot of the beauty of Brooklyn and Manhattan while in NYC! It even snowed on Tuesday, allowing for Daniel's birthday to be a little extra magical. On Thursday before the performance, my friend Alex gave Meli and I a small tour of NYU, where she is currently getting her Masters Degree in Voice. A lot of really fun and heartwarming memories were made during this trip and I'm so grateful to have gone with two people that I love and a group of people that I care about and love singing with! There are lots of amazing opportunities still in store for me, so keep a look out for some more posts! Here's to my first post and many more after that.
Here's a link to the stream of the University Singers Performance and program notes for the Infinitus concert if you'd like to watch/read them!
Feeling a little cold,
Taylor.
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