New York Shitty Day Ender: Messiah Sing In

This item comes courtesy of John Merz, the new Reverend at Greenpoint’s very own Church of the Ascension on Kent Street! He writes:

Miss Heather,

I am the new Priest over at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension on Kent Street. www.ascensionbrooklyn.org
I am a friend of Jay Lombard over at Unleash Brooklyn as well as Lily over at Dandelion Wine and a bunch of other folks. You were kind enough to put a previous event on a post, our October Animal Blessing and Remembrance. It went great. We had 240 people, about 160 animals, a jazz group that played great music, including Wayfaring Stranger during the remembrance of beloved animals that have died. John Tapper at the Garden , Lily and others provided a big feast for the church garden after. It was a real community affair and a success in part due to your publicity (a website I have touted on our email lists to parishioners). So thank you!

I have been in this post for a few months and basically my job is to open Ascension up to the community in all kinds of ways, for arts stuff, religious, interfaith exploration or just anything interesting (bingo nights are something Lily and I are going to hopefully launch this winter). To survive the church needs to be a real part of the community and this is slowly happening. It helps that as Episcopalians we are about the most liberal brand of religious folks out there. In fact our religious detractors think of us as humanists with incense–not a bad charge by my estimation. In any case this is all a long way of introducing myself and wondering if this week you can publicize the event we are having this next Saturday?

It is a Messiah Sing In this Saturday December 18 at 4pm at the Church of the Ascension 127 Kent between Manhattan and Franklin. It is being done in collaboration with Thomas Toscano from operaogginy and info and scores can be found on the ascension website at ascensionbrooklyn.org Basically, if you like to sing then you come down, get a score and join the chorale. This is NOT a religious event, just a chorale nerd throwdown. There will be refreshments afterward. We hope that this will lead to the creation of a greenpoint-williamsburg chorale that would perform all kinds of works from the standard rep to the most modern experimental works out there.

You may know of Thomas. he is the dude who performed those one night opera’s and did that big thing at the Warsaw, the Polish Opera. He is a serious talent as well as delightfully nuts…

I cannot honestly say this is my kind of thing. Cut me some slack, fellow Greenpointers: I actually hung lights this year— albeit to Metallica. Enter Sandman to be precise. My all-time favorite Christmas tune is For Whom The Bell Tolls— but that’s another story. For those of you who are into Handel here’s where you need to go and when!

Messiah Sing-In
December 18, 2010 starting at 4:00 p.m.
Church of the Messiah
127 Kent Street
Brooklyn, New York 11222

Miss Heather