Keunhoo Park ’26
Contributor
The Family Concert Mishap

When we think about concerts, we generally picture a grand chamber with acoustics good enough to make your 7 o’clock alarms look like sirens and lighting that even puts your bathroom’s weak LEDs to shame. People come to sit in their seats and await the best performance they have ever seen in their life, or at least that’s what is expected. And that’s what the parents and friends of the Family Weekend concert were expecting.

You’ve been surprised at how smoothly everything was going. Before the performance, people crowded the building entrances as they waited for the doors to open. All the performers were sitting backstage, casually chatting or sipping water bottles as they waited for the concert to start. The tech crew had to fix a wobbly light stand, but everything else seemed to be going well. When the doors finally opened, people started filling the auditorium immediately.

The chaos began when the orchestra was setting up to play their piece — one of the cellos bumped into the previously mentioned light stand. It began swaying around like the mini air dancers you see outside gas station convenience stores. The music began to reach its climax, and at the same moment, the stand fell and struck the stage, creating a sound similar to that of twenty thousand rubber ducks going off at the same time as the warehouse storing them collapses. However, that was NOT the end. The loud noise confused the dancers backstage, and they began to move onto the stage. The first dancer quickly realized that something was wrong and tried to push the other dancers back behind the curtains, but it was too late.

The dancers started to perform along with the music from the orchestra. The melody of the song surprisingly synced with the dance moves, and it was almost as if the collaboration had been planned. The dancers were careful to maneuver over, around, and onto the crowd of musicians and instruments. The performance was amazing. It was stunning. It was absolutely, certainly, without-a-doubtedly, the most immaculate show to have ever existed. At the end, both musicians and dancers walked out together. Although they all kept a straight face, they all thought that it was a mess. However, the audience loved it. It had such an impact on the audience and performers alike that no one ever even realized that one of the orchestrians had skipped the show to finish their Advanced Physical Algebraic Geometry II lab report.

So, what lesson does this story teach us? Even if your face gets stepped on, don’t let your dreams get stepped on too.