Saturday Night with the Tabernacle Choir

On Saturday, I felt like I was in two places at once:  St. Louis, and Salt Lake City, where I grew up. That's because I was in the Scottrade Center for a performance of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. At the reception before the concert, I was completely immersed in nostalgia -- though my family is fairly evenly divided between secular humanists and Methodists (with a few exceptions), growing up in Salt Lake, it was hard not to be affected by the predominant culture. The Tabernacle Choir made regular appearances on TV, not to mention the Tabernacle on Temple Square, so we took it for granted; that's why I was amazed to hear that it not been to St. Louis in 51 years. It was sweet to see all these geniunely excited fans (some of whom had been listening to their weekly radio broadcasts since the Choir's last stop in St. Louis) raptly listening to the concert. Dana King, a designer who often pops up in the pages of St. Louis AT HOME, was there as well, and has this rather charming blog post over at STLtoday. I, too, would count myself as a non-groupie, but the performance was not only superlative musically, but broke my old sterotypical views I had of the choir -- their new repertoire includes numbers like a very rhythmic, passionate Nigerian hymn, which was one of my favorite numbers of the night. --Stefene Russell