Valentine weekend

- category: observations -

I have mixed feelings about the Permias Valentine Cafe last Saturday. This is probably old news, but I feel obligated to say something about it.

First of all, the setting was neat: minimal, but effective. Pink and white baloons spelled "Happy Valentine" on the stage background, red and white paper strips hung from the ceiling, and a believable cafe-like atmosphere (thanks to the dimly lit halogen lamps). The food from Bandung Restaurant was excellent, however had I not had dinner two hours before, I would've starved since the portion was very limited.

The performances and games were actually fun, my biggest complain was only that we started very late, about 8:10 pm, way later than the scheduled 7:20 pm. There was also an empty table which could be distracting (at least for me as one of the performer).

That said, I was exhausted when I perform my song, a parody of KLA Project's "Menjemput Impian" on around 9 pm. My breathing was shallow, and my voice range wasn't really in my best condition. Although it overall went fine, thanks to my boyfriend Chris' cameo as "pujaan wanita se-Jepara" (which disturbingly, invited more enthusiastic claps from the male audience), the song never took off to its dramatic climax. Elka, the pianist was also quite nervous and made a few mistakes which she later described "I could have definitely done much better than that" ^_^
But having her as a pianist was a great joy, really. As my last public performance in Madison, I would be lying to say that I was a little dissapointed, but as the only performance of the night that received three sets of claps from the audience, I was adequately pleased.

However, my group performance of The Rembrants' "I'll Be There for You" and Cindy Lauper's "Time After Time" with Amanda, Eveline, Elka, and Alfin as guitarist was more dissapointing. I was in charge of providing the alto voice, but I think it was rough, often 1/4 note off-key, and tired. So yeah.....I prefer not to talk about it too much.

Still, the rest of the nights was entertaining, and the free photo sessions that followed was extremely fun. The only surprise for the night was when the audience unanimously chanted my name when one of the games to welcome new students require them to flirt with any one female audience to get a $1 packet of chocolate. However, apparently none of them followed the audience's humor and purposely avoided me. Honestly, I would actually love to see one of them try. It would be fun, and it will definitely show how bold they were. Plus, I actually planned to give anyone who dared to flirt with me anyway. Thus my impression was unfortunately, none of them had enough courage to heed the audience (I'd like to say none of them had balls, but it would be too harsh and assumingly closed-minded).

As a closing statement, I really had fun, and thanks everyone!!!