"Oh Say, Can You Sing?"

[W3WN]

Ok, so you fellow bar patrons who've been around awhile know that I'm quite proud of my daughter (aka Little Miss Field Day), and that she has (IMHO) a gorgeous singing voice.

So, earlier this evening, we were at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center downtown for Piratefest 2012, the annual event that the Pittsburgh Pirates put on... to keep people interested and con, er, convince fans to buy tickets for the upcoming season.

For the second year in a row, they've had a singing competition called "Oh Say, Can you Sing?". The contestants sing the National Anthem, and are judged by three players. The winner (there's one for each night of Piratefest) will sing the anthem at a Pirate home game next season.

Jessie entered, again. Last year, she finished in the middle of the pack. This year? Second. By 1 point. To a 40-something semi-professional singer. OTOH, Jessie got the only "10".

Judge for yourself. Please allow for the fact that the acoustics in the DLLCC stink, and that I was recording this on a little Canon digital camera... with a crappy little mike...
http://youtu.be/v-6_d5erZRY
The MC, by the way, is one of the stadium announcers. Joe runs almost all of the games and promotions between innings. Nice guy, we've known him for years. The other gentleman on the stage is one of the broadcast announcers & an ex-player, Bob Walk.

[N2CHX]

She sounds really, really good. I'm going to have to show this to my J, she'd get a kick out of it. J has hair almost exactly like Jesse's (and she hated it for the longest time) and she also sings. She's in Select Chorus at school and wants to pursue singing further. She is also an alto like Jesse. Gonna PM you a pic, I think you'd get a smile out of it too.

Anyway, congrats to Jesse! Very well done.

[KC2UGV]

She is a fantastic singer! I'm actually quite impressed she only lost by 1 point...

[W3WN]

I honestly don't think the winner was a better singer. I do think she got a few extra sympathy points (she was blind).

The boss is convinced that the fix was in, based on observing some of the staff talking to the players beforehand. Now, I'm not going to go quite that far... the winner was a semi-pro singer who's been doing this for decades, Jess is not quite 16 1/2 (that changes in a week). So, for her to place second, and come within a point of an upset, that's pretty good in & of itself.

Needless to say, she was walking on Cloud 9 the rest of the night. Especially when people came up to her to say that they'd been listening and couldn't believe she lost. And that was right BEFORE we ran into her favorite retired player, Jack Wilson, who showed up unannounced... but that's another story.

[W3WN]

OK, here's another one for you... from tonight's Winter Concert at the High School.

Let me warn you in advance that the audio is very poor. Two problems -- we were sitting too far back and too far down the row (I lost the argument -- still, she wanted to sit 6 rows FURTHER back, go figure) and they didn't turn up the mike gain enough... why I don't know, but the music was overpowering on most of the songs.

Still... well, judge for yourself, you know my opinion is biased...

http://youtu.be/zJhzBT9nLXg