Coordination

Last week, Angelina had a performance at the Hong Kong Book Fair. After she had told a story, a group of six-year-olds performed a play - Jack and the Beanstalk. The children were cute and spoke excellent English. Unfortunately, one of them forgot a line and the performance became chaotic. Some classmates tried to be helpful and reminded each other what they should say. After a while, they realized none of them really knew where they were and could not go on. They made a bold decision, said ‘thank you very much’ together suddenly, and ended the show.

Once, I was a member of the hand bell team of my primary school. Hand bells sound nice, but each person is only responsible for two bells. Excellent players may be able to control four to five bells if they can change quickly. Thus, each member is like a single finger of a pianist. No matter how musical you are, you have little control over the whole song and rely heavily on your teammates. This is good training of team work.

I remember little about what we really did and the songs we practiced. Nevertheless, we once performed the bridal march at the wedding ceremony of our teacher. A wrong note appeared in the fifth bar. A couple of bars later, everyone played on their own and lost the melody. To her credit, the conductor tried her best to stop the disaster. Instead of keeping the beat with her baton, she repeatedly pointed at each of us like crazy, as if we were giant keys on the piano. We tried to cooperate, but we were so small! How could we know whether we were supposed to strike the bell in our right or left hand? In the end, she closed her fists tightly to end the song. All of us struck both bells together. The ultimate crash chord.

Our conductor was very angry and did not speak to us. On the other hand, the bride was kind enough to offer us cake. We were ashamed and sorry. Now that I have become an adult, I believe the audience really did not mind. At least we were funny.