I met a nice teacher,  Ms. Shawala. She leads my vocal music class. The first day back for in-person learning, she told me that this year we were going to have two concerts. The first was the winter concert and the other was the spring concert.  We started to practice the four songs for the winter concert but it was hard because we had to use face masks. Sometimes, we would go outside to the big field to practice so we could take off our face masks and breathe a little more. Soon, however, the weather was getting too cold and we could not go outside and we had to practice inside of the class and had to put our face masks back on.

The winter concert was getting closer and closer. Ms. Shawala told us that we can’t take off our face masks when we are singing in the concert. She tried to find a way we could sing with the face mask and breathe a little better by buying some face mask brackets. We were practicing with the face mask bracket that she found on Amazon but they were so uncomfortable. We could breathe a little more, but it was still difficult to breathe because some parts of the songs are very difficult to sing.

The last two days before the winter concert we went to the stage to practice all the songs. We had to practice how we were going to enter and exit the stage and how we were going to sit down in the concert.  One of my classmates fell back off the stage and was scared  that she would get hurt. The thing is, she was feeling nervous about the concert because she had one of the solos. We all were feeling nervous.

On the day of the concert, I tried my best to sing with a face mask and the brackets underneath.

When the ensemble were singing, I went outside for a breather. I got back to the audience and I saw Ms Shawala. She was happy for us  because she said there was no winter concert last year. This year we had a concert. She was not too happy because we had to use a face mask but she was satisfied that we did a nice concert and was thankful for all the hard work we did together.

Ms Shawala said to me that I did something that I never could do before: sing in front of people. You think a mask could stop that?