One of my favorite things to do is to discover hidden nooks and unexpected treasures. No matter how well I think I know a place (my home city, for example), surprises often lurk just out of casual sight, and reveal themselves as soon as I peer down an alley or pop into a store I’ve walked past a dozen times.
At UUCPA, of course, I know lots of these, and I’d rather people didn’t have to be here for years before learning about some of the gems of the congregation. Here are a few you might not know about:
The Networking email list. Now and then someone wants to list an item for sale, or find a new dentist because theirs is retiring, and they ask if there’s a way to do that through UUCPA. Yes, there is–and the more people there are who sign up for its digests, the more useful it is.
The Harmonic Circle on the 1st, 3rd, and 5th Sunday of every month, in which people gather to sing folksongs, popular songs, whatever takes their fancy (they have lead sheets for hundreds of songs).
The monthly Writing Group. Sometimes a group falls off the calendar–hey, they’re mostly volunteer-run, and the folks who volunteer at UUCPA are busy people. I hadn’t seen this one for a while, and inquired as to whether it was still meeting. To my delight, it is–in fact, the next meeting is tomorrow, June 2. Just email the list owner, Janet, to get the Zoom link and you’re in the group!
The choir. Okay, there’s nothing hidden about a group that sings in most services, but it can be veiled in assumptions. If you have assumed that to join the choir, you have to sing every Sunday, that you shouldn’t join unless you can make it to every rehearsal, that you have to be experienced in reading music, that it sounds so good that the director must be a taskmaster: cast those assumptions aside! Bruce is a sweetheart who makes rehearsals a lot of fun. Some of our best singers over the years have learned their parts mostly by ear (but there are also choir people who can help you improve your music-reading skills if you want–and if you don’t know how to read music at all and you want to join the choir, talk to me). And it’s fine if you can’t make every Thursday or every Sunday.
That’s a start–I’ll write some more in an upcoming column. And beginning next Sunday, with the Sacred Text Reading Group’s table on the patio, I’m encouraging people who love their small groups and other such activities to take a Sunday to tell people about why they love them and how to join in.
What are your favorite little-known treasures of UUCPA?
Blessings,
Amy
Photo by Stefan Steinbauer on Unsplash