25 years.
That’s how long I’ve been wrapping my heart around audiences of people who have come to my Christmas shows. It’s a lot of work based on a lot of love. Our Christmas preparations here at the Connors home include the sounds of rehearsals as much as the music of crackling fires and the rustle of wrapping paper. That’s how its been for a generation of time, since my kids were young and singing in my Heavenly Choir. Now their kids are the ones joining me onstage with choir collars and flickering candles. I recorded Sleepy Little Town through a long hot Utah summer, with a little ceramic Christmas house lit in the corner of the sound booth. When I listen to it now I can pick out the voices of my own children in the Heavenly Choir. We celebrated the release of that album with our first Christmas concert with 700 of our favorite people at the First Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City.
This year we are celebrating our 25th ANNIVERSARY with a concert at the wonderful Libby Gardner Hall in President’s Circle on the University of Utah campus. The hall is gorgeous, designed for live performances, seats a large audience in comfortable auditorium seating, and allows us to create the kind of show we’ve been wanting to for a long while.
This performance will be a BY REQUEST show. The songs we will be singing are at this point unknown to us, even though the songs are all firmly planted in my heart, brain and fingers. YOU will design the show for us. Mark Robinette and Kelly DeHaan will jump on board with the songs they know. We are super excited to see what comes out. And with the songs will come stories you might not know. These shows are always as much about the stories and images and feelings as they are about the music. Don’t think we are not preparing…we kind of have a sense of what moist people will want to hear. But be ready for some new stuff, and some old stuff you may not have heard.
We will present a similar show in the place we usually call home, the FARMINGTON ARTS CENTER, sponsored by the Farmington Arts, Parks and Recreation Department. We love Farmington and will always call this place home. We usually do three shows in Farmington, but this year are only doing one, so if this is where you want to go, get your tickets early.
These shows are earlier than we typically do them: Thanksgiving weekend and the Monday after. So grab all those people you share Thanksgiving dinner with, at least the ones you enjoy, and come ring-in the season with a good old crowd of like-minded folk.
As usual, we will also offer all sorts of good stuff for sale to benefit our orphans in KENYA. We sure love the power of united goodness!
TICKETS to SALT LAKE SHOW NOV 26th at 7:30 PM at Libby Gardner Hall CLICK HERE.
TICKETS to FARMINGTON SHOW NOV 28th at 7:30 PM at Farmington Arts Center CLICK HERE.
