Chapter News
2006 was a most gratifying and enjoyable year in our continuing journey:
- We competed at the July, 2006 Barbershop Harmony Society International Convention in Indianapolis and placed 18 th in the competition, performing our “Music Man” set, “Till There Was You” and “76 Trombones.”
- We competed in the Illinois District Fall, 2006 Competition in October and placed second in the District, qualifying once again for the July, 2007 International Competition in Denver.
- In addition, we hosted the Fall, 2006 District Convention and Competition, with our Partners of West Towns auxiliary organization excellently managing registration, logistics and the Harmony Marketplace store.
- We performed our most successful and varied Christmas Show ever in December, virtually selling out the Tivoli Theater for all three performance.
- We finally issued the DVD of our 2005 Christmas Show, after going through the very trying and enormously time-consuming process of obtaining copyright permission and licenses to publish our performance of the songs on the DVD. We are probably the first Barbershop chapter to have issued such a recording since the Supreme Court decision on copyright and licensing in June, 2004.
- We added substantially to our membership, including a number of younger members attracted by our outreach to schools and the community.
- We continued on our path to becoming one of the top singing and performing organizations anywhere and one of the top Barbershop choruses in the world. We accomplished this through the excellence of our director and his guidance, through a careful choice of music, through high level outside coaching, and through careful progressive training of our singers.
- The Partners of West Towns, our auxiliary organization of dedicated women and men who are a part of our growing family, grew to be an integral part of our organization and essential to our operation. They assisted us in every facet of our competitions and our shows and or our fund-raising activities. They also manage refreshments and other aspects of our weekly rehearsals.
We work very hard to keep ourselves a high-level singing organization and to make sure that we are financially able to support our ongoing mission, which is both to be a great show chorus and to be a great competition chorus.
In doing those things, we always ground ourselves in the idea of The West Towns Family, which to us is a very real thing. This singing family is an extension of our own families and an integral part of the community in which we live. This past year has been more than gratifying in all of those respects.
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