The Roseville Galleria Flash Mob Hallelujah chorus

We've seen these flash mob videos on YouTube where people just show up somewhere and start singing or dancing or whatever. They are a lot of fun. So we heard about one that was happening in Roseville at the Galleria tonight, and Carol and I thought we'd go. They were going to be singing the Hallelujah chorus. It was supposed to start at 7:30. Carol's husband Cliff and her grandson Michael came along for the ride, as did John. We left here at 4 p.m., so we got there a little after 5. Not all that crowded. We sat down in the food court and had dinner. Seating was a bit crowded, but then again, it was more or less dinnertime. Then we decided to walk around the mall a bit, and finally around 10 to 7 we decided to make our way back to the food court. I had to go to the bathroom, after having about a quart of coke with my dinner. It was really crowded around the escalator and by the time we started pushing through the crowd we got separated, but they told John they'd meet us downstairs.

Well it was so crowded by the time I came out of the bathroom that it took about 15 minutes to go about 50 feet, and we couldn't see Carol, Cliff & Michael anywhere. We finally got to the lower floor, and were trying to look for them, when there was an announcement on the PA system that the fire marshall was saying they had to evacuate the mall. According to news reports, some people heard a loud crack-like sound and other people thought they felt the floor move.

We had given up finding them so we just left the mall and went back out to the car.


We waited about 10 minutes before they came out, and then sat in the car for about an hour with a slight pause for our ACTUAL PERFORMANCE.
The actual performance -- at least ours. Later we heard that some of the people had gone out into the courtyard and were singing. There was a helicopter overhead while we were waiting, making an announcement we couldn't quite understand. I could only understand the word courtyard and assumed people were being told to leave the courtyard. As I read the news reports, it seems that some of the singers went out to the courtyard and sang the Hallelujah chorus. We just did as we were told and left by the nearest exit. We had actually thought about the fact that it didn't seem like all that good an idea to have all those people up there on the second floor, but more because the crowd was so big and it was difficult to move around than because of thinking of any possible structural problems.




We spent a lot of time in the parking lot waiting for the traffic to clear up a bit, and we decided to have our own little performance. Two altos, a kazoo, and at one time a man from another car that came by and sang with us. We had brought a CD with us so you could actually hear the music over the car stereo.

So it was an event. Not the one we thought we were going to, but an event.

There was also another event tonight. There was a total lunar eclipse, the first one since sometime in the 1600s that took place on the winter solstice -- which also happens to be MY BIRTHDAY. So this was a really big celestial event celebrating me.