The biggest youth conference I ever had was a stake conference where we performed From Cumorah's Hill. They did that in place of a trek, so I never got to experience pushing a handcart or anything. (I probably would have died.)
We started one morning by meeting at North Canyon Park and we got colored bandannas to put us in groups; each bandanna had our conference theme, "I Never Stand Alone," the last song of our program. I can't remember whether the color was assigned to us or if we picked them; I got a white bandanna. A fairly young couple oversaw our group. I might have been wearing a Joe Cool t-shirt that day. We were talking about people being on teams and playing sports, which of course I didn't do. The wife of the couple asked me if I did chess club--I was a little offended that she thought I was nerdy just by looking at me. I was nerdy, of course, but I didn't like chess. I felt extremely uncomfortable in that group. We had an activity where we played a charades-type game, and I think they were all sports clues, and we had to have a partner. I had to be partners with the husband of the couple. One of the ones we had to act out was wrestling. Later, they played some musical clips and all the groups had to come up with a dance to go with it. I really did not want to participate. Part of the music clip had the sound of an engine revving, and we got in a line and pretended we were on a bus. I was at the end, so I was the driver. We practiced it a few times, and then before we were supposed to perform for everyone, I noticed that my mom, sister, and niece were sitting on a hill watching. I wanted to play with my niece, so I used it as an opportunity to try to get out of doing the dance. But then the leaders came up and insisted that I do it, so I reluctantly did so. They told me later that they couldn't have done it without me because I was the bus driver. We all watched the other groups, and one of them incorporated the words "Given this land, if they lived righteously" in their dance. After lunch we had an object lesson where we had to put blindfolds on and someone would guide us over to the park's amphitheater, including telling us when to step down. I kept hearing the guide in front of me telling his person to step down, so I kept stepping down prematurely. Once we were settled in the amphitheater, we were taught by a Bountiful High seminary teacher. He told us a story of a friend he had who got a temptress girlfriend after his mission and ended up getting disfellowshipped, so in order to prevent him from getting excommunicated, he would go to his friend's house when he knew the girlfriend was there and wouldn't leave until she left. He said one night he spent the entire night on his friend's couch eating Cheerios.
I know we had two performances, but I can't remember how many days the conference lasted or if we had dress rehearsals, although I know we had little practice runs. I remember getting in my costume (I was Alma) and taking off my glasses. The people in charge noticed I was squinting and told me I could wear my glasses; Sister Castleberry said she was legally blind, so she knew what it was like. They put makeup on me for the performance. I remember talking with David Christensen about something bad that someone in our stake had done, but I couldn't tell him. He was mad that I told him he had done something bad but then didn't tell him what it was.
We practiced our entrance onto the stage. They played a bagpipe version of some hymn (which I found not fitting), and we all sang "Army of Helaman" as we walked up to the stage.
After the night of our first performance, when I played Alma, we were standing outside with my family, with my makeup still on. Jennifer Nilsson was saying that she hadn't remembered some of the lyrics, joking that she had mouthed "watermelon," which Ya-ping found funny. Someone used the expression "a piece of cake," and Ya-ping said, "a piece of cheesecake!" We took other kids in the neighborhood home. We talked about Chalei Simmons wanting to be a librarian; I said that was a good job for her because she was so quiet. I was excited to go home and watch The Addams Family. After we got home, Susanne was saying that she didn't like Peter Moosman when he was a kid but she liked him now.
I think it was after our first performance that Susanne said that the Brunners' son Brandon had been really excited to see the performance and learned all the songs, and then he slept through it.
I wasn't really going to wash my makeup off--not because I wanted to wear makeup, but because I wanted to see how much would come off just by going about day-to-day activities normally. My family may have made me wash it off, but I can't really remember.
One morning we ate bagels in the green room at the regional center. I remarked about the cornmeal on the bottom of the bagels, just like pizza; Matt Miller said they probably used it to keep them from burning. I didn't know what it was, so I joked that they looked like those things you pull out of your eyes, and Matt said something like, "There are enough tired people here rubbing their eyes for them to use that."
At one point, we engraved our testimonies on gold-colored fold, which they fastened into gold plates and had Moroni "bury" on the stage. My mom later said that she had alluded to "disrespectful youth" in hers because Paul Castleberry had been behaving horribly, and she had threatened to tell his mom.
I wasn't performing during the second night's showing; I was just in the choir. We all got on the stage after singing, and then the lights over the instrumentalists' music didn't turn on, so we just sat in the silent dark while we waited. There were a few outbursts of laughter, I think in an attempt to ease the awkwardness. Some sarcastic guys were behind me, and one said, "That was professional." They were being irreverent the entire performance, so at one point I nudged them to get them to be better. Then later one of them was trying to show his friend what I had done, so he tried to make noise, but I knew that I couldn't nudge him then. I remember watching Alex Harding helping Matt Chidester, who had Down syndrome, beat the drums at the right places. I thought it was nice that he wanted to help Matt do it, but I thought he should have just done the drum himself. Matt liked to belt out the lyric "Stand alone!" in the last song, "I Never Stand Alone."
After that performance, the consensus seemed to be that that was the better performance, but my mom and I thought the first one was better. Matt Miller thought the second was better, but I pointed out how we had the awkward silence at the beginning, and he conceded that that did affect the momentum.
I think it was after the second performance that I saw my friends Macey Garrett and Tiffany Frandsen, and they had called us the "Three Amigos" in ninth grade, and I was sad they missed me as Alma.
Our last evening, we had dinner at our old stake center. They were also showcasing the float our stake (or was it our ward?) made for the 24th of July Parade. Bernie Ure showed up in his Moroni costume; I thought it was because we had all been dressed up as Book of Mormon characters for our show, but I think it was because that was the costume he wore for the parade. Then we went up in the chapel for closing ceremonies. They told us that some sisters employed by the Church to see stake performances had been at our show, and they said that they had seen From Cumorah's Hill performed many times, but they had never seen it with a live orchestra, and they had never seen such a well-behaved group. We closed our meeting by singing "I Never Stand Alone," and the sister in charge gave us a note to start on, but I was pretty sure it was the wrong note. Afterwards I heard someone say, "It's hard to sing a cappella," and I was thinking that it wasn't that we had no accompaniment, it was that it was the wrong key.
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