Music and Memory, part 12: First Chinese Presbyterian

Rodak has asked me to post my own pictures of New York on this blog. which I almost never do, since my photos are virtually all of my friends and family.  But as I was going on my rounds during last weekend's trip back, I got lost in Chinatown -- yes, this can happen, even if you've lived in the city your entire life -- and found myself walking past a place which was familiar to me, the First Chinese Presbyterian Church:

Which is hard by the Manhattan Bridge overpass:

What, you may wonder, was my connection with this place?  Well, the First Chinese Presbyterian Church was the site of my first orchestral gig, singing the soprano solos in the Vivaldi Gloria with a pick-up orchestra of conservatory students and a chorus of elderly Chinese ladies.  The alto soloist was a good friend of mine, who's gone on to an important career, though not an especially lucrative or renowned one.  We were conducted by a marvelously gifted South American lesbian, who had won a scholarship to the Tchaikovsky Institute in Moscow as a teen, but had switched her ticket at the last minute and gone AWOL from the conservatory, landing up in New York instead.  Upon disembarking at JFK, she fell in with the Moonies, and lived at their compound for a while, selling flowers on the street, but by the time I worked with her that was all in the distant past.  I have no idea what she's doing now.

I am not making any of this up, and I thought I would take a commemorative photo as I passed by.