Having The Time Of Your Life

Getting up at 6.30am for a 7.30am meeting at Victoria Station is not my idea of a good time. Add to that the fact that it was an absolutely freezing morning, and we were going to be singing songs from the Mamma Mia soundtrack to grumpy morning commuters, and I had very good reasons for not wanting to get up at all. But drag myself out of bed I did, and thank goodness I did, because it was really, really fun!

The setup was really simple. Six of the Pink Singers, Tanya, Nathalina, Susan, Johnathon, Liang and I, with Mark and Warren in supportive attendance, would stand on the station concourse, serenading passengers with ABBA songs to a CD backing track coming out of one of those mini-component systems. We were all wearing specially designed Mama Mia T-shirts in navy with silver glittery lettering. In fact, for once we were given options as to the size of the T-shirts – I’m used to wearing T-shirts at least 2 sizes too big – but this was negated by the fact that the sizing, especially for the women was (for once!) too small. Seeing Susan squeeze into the medium T-shirt made me cringe in sympathy. The girls from the publicity company who were handing out the flyers obviously had the right idea. They all ordered male XXL shirts and wore two fleeces under them. They did look a lot like Michelin men, but at least they were warm! With our snug but chic T-shirts there wasn’t really much room for much else, and pretty soon the blood supply my extremities started shutting down.

So what else was there to do but dance to keep warm? I must say that I am one of the more reserved of the Pink Singers, but restraint is impossible in the company of people like Liang, Johnathon and Nathalina, all of whom seemed not only to know ABBA’s music off by heart, they also knew the slight variations to the music as found on the film soundtrack, could sing counter melodies and, get this, had a few dance moves to go along with it as well! The mood really was infectious, and pretty soon not only was I singing and dancing along with gusto, so too were several commuters. We had several people come up to us and take pictures with their cameras, including a woman who seemed to think we were so good she had to video us with her phone for a good three or four songs.

In the end it was a very entertaining couple of hours, we had a good time, and also helped to raise funds for the choir. Hooray!