Saturday, May 31, 2008

Our Friends the Butchers

Our friends the Butchers finally have a blog! Yay for cute kid updates! They are far away in the icy north and we miss them very much. Today, though, several things happened that reminded us of the leader of clan Butcher, the good Doctor himself:

This morning on NPR I heard part of a radio interview with the author of a new book called Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory, which is cool enough in itself since Jono was part of an a capella group in college. But they also discussed a capella singing specifically at the Butchers' alma mater: the University of Virginia.

Now, until I met Jono I was completely ignorant of a capella groups except for perhaps Rockapella from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and a few run-ins with the Christian group GLAD. And honestly, up until then, I thought it was all pretty lame. Apparently though, the world of collegiate a capella is captivating and competitive and actually pretty amazing -- the author stated that one group made $300,000 in one year just touring college campuses. Wowsers!

I had no idea how many students actually audition for these things! How do you find out about stuff like that? Do people choose a college just because they have a famous a capella group? The NPR interview played some clips of one famous group called the Hullabaloos, and I have to say that their imitation of the synthesizers (at the end of the segment) on "Come Sail Away" was pretty stinkin' cool.

Finally, to cap off my day of things that remind us of Jon Butcher, we heard not one but THREE Journey songs in the span of 30 minutes on three different radio stations -- two in the car and one in a restaurant. If we had heard a Petra song, too, we would've known something freaky was going on and he was mind-controlling the Atlanta radio stations or something.

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