In the
afternoon, Leona will go with me as I judge an English singing contest being
conducted by her older Feng-Yuan cousin’s publishing company. They needed someone
in an emergency as the regular judge stiffed them. They will pay me 800NT
($26us) an hour and I’ll be there from 1-3:30pm. Her cousin will pick us up and
drop us off back home.
I had an interesting experience yesterday at
Shuang-Wen Junior High School. I was one of eight judges (three of them
Caucasian) of an English song choral singing contest. The winner will represent
their school in a city-wide contest. We were seated at a table in the front of
the large auditorium where at least sixteen classes with more than five hundred
students carried in little blue folding chairs on the gym floor and balcony to
watch their classmates sing and wait their turn to sing themselves. We had to
judge the groups based on pronunciation (50%) tune (30%) “liveliness (sic.) and
creativity of the content” (10%) and team spirit (10%). The best team sang “Were
All in This Together” and got a 90% from me; they were my best team, too. The
funniest teams sang “Beauty and the Beast,” the Beast a young man with
duct-tape x-ed across his nipples (taboo) and a group dressed in black
incinerator bags to look like monks and nuns who sang “I Will Follow Him,”
reverently and then rocked out! At the end of the performance, each judge had
to use the microphone to address the audience with our reaction and advice. I
gave my two-minute review of their pronunciation (watch the high vowel sounds
and word linkage”) in Mandarin. I guess they understood me!
Leona’s male cousin from Feng-Yuan picked
us up and drove us back. The publishing company he works for was one of the
sponsors of the contest.
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