Bringing the Sing
In about 41 minutes, at 5:54 pm, we will go out on our porch and join neighbors in belting out Lean On Me by Bill Withers.
This is the second week of MPR’s Bring the Sing Home initiative (we didn’t hear about last week’s in time). At 5:54 pm CDT the song will be aired live at MPR News, Classical MPR, and The Current, as well as the streaming counterparts of all of those.
We have sent out texts to the block’s SMS network and expect at least two other households to join us.
Perhaps I’ll add photographic or video evidence of the event here — if we end up producing a spectacle worth preserving for posterity.
Our next-door neighbor’s family was singing along in their house; two across-the-street neighbors were out on the porch as we were.
I wondered how MPR was going to sync up three radio broadcasts and three internet audio streams. Turns out: they didn’t. Probably couldn’t. Delays and lag on the internet are inherently not predictable. The next-door neighbor’s audio was skewed from what we were listening to by at least several seconds.
No photos or video of the singing itself, but here is our local bunny who came out to keep us company during the sing. (Click for a larger version.)
A week after this post, on May 1, we did another Sing with MPR: this time the shared song was Here Comes the Sun. We could see three other households participating. One of us had a boombox tuned to MPR News. We weren’t very loud, or particularly good from where I sat. For example a couple walked by on the sidewalk (maybe 15 feet from us) but didn’t seem curious or stop to see what we were all doing.