Well,  between traveling and work, there has been little opportunity to give the last day of the tour the attention it deserves.  It was an early start - 7:30 am on the coach - and we headed of the Apostolic Church for the early service.  This was a large church in a prosperous neighborhood.  The choir was down to only 18 singers for the service - jokes were made about it being only an ensemble - but they produced a fabulous sound.  The service was intense, with a visiting preacher from Dallas, Texas giving a fiery and impassioned sermon.  The feeling was very much like camp revival meetings, except they did this every Sunday! 

From there we headed immediately to Trinity Church.  This church was beautifully decorated with stained glass windows depicting scenes both biblical and political (this is Barak Obama's church although he did not appear to be attending).  We missed out on the Sepulcher Choir who, dressed in traditional African robes, usually sing at the services, but instead had a 70 voice male chorale as a substitute.  The service was much more intellectual and there was a strong message of activism and social justice in both the sermon and the service guide.

It was about 1:00 pm when we left Trinity, and we headed back to the Hotel for a quick lunch and rehearsal before our final gig of the tour - a tribute concert to the author James Baldwin at North Western University.  After a gulped lunch and a quick sing, we reboarded the bus and headed off.  The concert was in a venue called the Alice Millar Chapel -  a humble sounding name for a gorgeous, 3 story building with 9 floor to ceiling stained glass windows.  We entered, soundchecked, and then sat down to enjoy the first choir - the NorthWestern Community Ensemble.  After their set (unfortunately spoilt a bit by an overenthusiastic band), Rosie gee'd us up, reminding us this was the last sing on tour, and we took the stage for six songs.  After two weeks of singing and spending time in various Baptist churches, the silence into which we sang seemed strange and uncomfortable - reserving the shouts of encouragement, the clapping, and the voices to the end of each song felt unnatural!  Our set was very well received, and we left the stage and returned to the pews.  The final choir was the Soul Children of Chicago (http://www.soulchildrenchicago.com/).  Their CD is playing as I write this blog entry.  This choir has been going for 25 years, based in South Chicago.  It's musical director, Walt Whitman, is an amazing man with boundless energy, who asked the audience to pretend they were in a Baptist Service for 20 minutes - a request that was enthusiastically fulfilled by the Angels and most of the African Americans in the chapel.  As an aside here, I'll point out the the Chicago Soul Children were selected to sing at the opening ceremony of the 1998 Soccer World Cup.  They were unbelievably good as singers, the arrangements were tight and funky, the movements were spectacular, and the enthusiasm and  verve was infectious and uplifting.  Their version of Total Praise brought tears to more than one set of eyes.  It was at that point that Walt turned round and asked the BOA to join them on stage - so we went.  We sang Go Tell It On The Mountain, and then Oh Happy Day as an encore, picking up the parts from the singers around us, or improvising once we got a feel for the key.  There was also some impromptu movement training going on at the same time.  This was one of the singing highlights of the tour for me, and the fact that it came at such an unexpected time and place made it all the more special.  We had a chance to chat with the kids afterwards, and swapped CDs, names, email addresses and information about Australia.  These guys travel all over the world, and hopefully will make it to Perth one day.

A brief reception followed the concert, after which we all boarded the bus and headed to the North side of the river to Cafe De Luxe for dinner with Patrick and his partner Steven, Scott (a Cafe bass singer and APRA employee who happened to be in Chicago), Janet (whom 2005 tourists met in Memphis at the health food cafe and store) and her publicist Millicent.  Janet has just completed  a solo a;bum, and is heading to Australia and New Zealand  in March/April next year, so we are going to try to get her over to Perth.  The food was fantastic, the company great, and we parted company with our other guests at about 10:30 pm.  We headed back to the hotel, ready to go our separate ways on Monday. 

That's kind of it for the reporting - I went off to Denver (work) for a day, before making the 36 hour trip home.  At dinner on Sunday night, Millicent asked me about what we'd done and where we'd been, and then asked me what I was carrying back to Perth.  It was a great question, and I'll do another blog entry to try and answer it later.

Good luck and best wishes to all the wonderful people we've met over the last two weeks.  and to all the Angels I travelled with, wherever you happen to be in the world at the moment, and to all who have read and posted comments. 

To sum up the tour, I guess the best answer is that if it was on again next week, I'd be going.

Mike