Connections: Wheels on the Bus

It had been such a long time since I was on a chartered bus with a pack of friends, or travelers with common interests, that I was surprised when it turned out to be fun. The bus was taking some 40 of us back to the South Fork Saturday night after a concert at St. Peter’s Church in midtown Manhattan, where we joined the Greenwich Village Chamber Singers in a performance of the Brahms Requiem. (You may want to get tickets for the Brahms Requiem concert — with the Choral Society of the Hamptons, the G.V.C.S., and a 38-piece orchestra — on July 8 at the Parish Hall of Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church.)

There was a time in the distant past, when I was in college, when I joined  skiers on organized bus trips from Eighth Street in Greenwich Village to and from familiar Northeast ski slopes. What I remember most of those skiing days is the joy of executing a perfect turn called a stem christie on a beautiful spring day, but that is another story. The point is that in the bus we indulged in song. 

On the way home from the city Saturday night we found ourselves singing, too. True, we are choristers, but it had been a long day, we were tired, and you would think we  had already sung ourselves out. It was the bus driver’s fault. All was quiet till we reached the Manorville exit. Three of our number had left cars that morning in the King Kullen parking lot there, but the driver missed the turn. Shouting ensued before the driver realized what he had done and found a way to turn the 54-seater around. All was quiet again until the bus failed to make a right turn off Route 27 into Southampton Village, where others had left cars. The bus barreled along until the intersection of Hampton Road, where the driver made a turn into the village. It was then that the singing began. 

I’m not sure which wag came up with it, but if anyone was beginning to get a little grumpy, those feelings soon evaporated. “Show me the way to go home, I’m tired and I want to go to bed” rang out. Laughter was added to the lyrics. Then Christine Cadarette, who teaches voice and piano and is the Choral Society’s rehearsal accompanist, led us in other entirely appropriate songs —“Goodnight Irene,’ for one — easing the rest of the way for those headed to East Hampton.

As for me, I couldn’t help thinking back to those long-ago ski trips and remembering a word game we used to play that had something to do with music. The game went on for as long as the good storytellers among us could imagine and describe a series of outrageous adventures supposedly experienced by someone on a difficult quest to find a “tis bottle.” What is a tis bottle, you ask? It was one of a series of bottles tuned to ring out the tones of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” when struck; the tis bottle was the missing fourth note. Well, it was funny for music nerds, and it was funny at the time.