Whomptons Got Talent!

For Good Cheer 2020, the Ethical Society hosted a talent show, in which members were encouraged to send in short videos of their many talents which would be shared out with the wider community. I immediately started thinking of all the talents the Whomptons might showcase and badgered the family until we got them done. We all know that Krystal's talent is overcommitting, and that's exactly what we did. While Raina is not featured explicitly in many videos, her handiwork is in almost all of them, either as the videographer or the Adobe Premiere expert. We asked her to put together a video of her visual artwork and she repeatedly said no. Alas.

Here are the entries we submitted in order of their creation.

1. Samantha broke her "number of books read in a single year" record and it was worthy of celebration. 200+ books is a lot of books, y'all. Eric read a record number of books in 2020 too. Honest to goodness, he's voluntarily choosing to curl up with a book in the bed. We're rubbing off on him!

2. We have a silly habit of breaking out into song in response to most any opportunity and, even more silly, it's with a set of spontaneously adapted lyrics to a song's melody. Imagine a much less skillful Weird Al and you've got the Whomptons. We debated sharing some of those songs and then decided no one would get it. Instead we went for a song that we sing frequently during the winter months: "Suzy Snowflake." 

3. Samantha and I frequently sang songs together as kids and definitely as adults in the car. Two years ago, she had two surgeries on her throat and one of the procedures damaged her vocal cords rather significantly. Initially it was challenging for her to talk at her normal volume and she was unable to project her voice with any authority; she finally regained her ability to sing (with a more limited vocal range) within the past year. I wanted to have a video with she and I singing together, if she was willing, and we tried multiple songs until we found one that fit within her range and was within our collective skill set. Our first pick was Reba McEntire's "Fancy" but we decided that a song about prostituting one's daughter probably wasn't appropriate for an Ethical Society holiday special, ha! "Lean on Me" was easily shortened and it had the fewest number of sustained notes which Samantha needed for breath support. In the end, we submitted an outtake because it amused us to no end. 

4. Eric has incredible singing talent and he casually mentioned that he *might* put together a video. He asked the Whompton women to take a walk and give him 30 minutes in the house by himself; by the end, he had recorded this rendition of Queen's "Somebody to Love." Eric has missed doing music -- it's one of the things that COVID and Kate Lovelady's retirement have shuttered -- so it was really exciting for him to pull out a Freddie Mercury cover. 

True story: his workplace had a talent competition at the same time, Eric submitted his video, and came in 2nd place!

5. Lola has been a basketball sabbatical for the past 9 months and she wasn't certain whether she still could make her shots. On a nice weather day, she and Eric claimed an outside court and tried it out. Turns out that she retained more skills than she had thought. This video is a single take, with the instructions to keep making shots until she missed one. It took her a while.  :)