Ever wonder how the choir member’s significant others got to be called “The Spice?” Well, read on for a brief history so you will have the context. No names have been changed to protect anyone’s innocence.
It all started a dozen years ago in August of 2012 when the choir flew to Italy to attend the Europa Contat Festival in Turin. Several of the men were accompanied by their significant other's. Many of those significant others had either never met or had just met in passing prior to the Italy trip.
Each day, we would all have breakfast and then the choir members would head to the festival grounds to participate with other groups from all over the world. This left the significant others on their own. The first day out, they travelled as a large pack. At the end of the day, they were to meet up with the guys at the festival grounds. Now, the “camp followers” weren’t sure from which direction the guys would be coming, so they found a wall that was in the shade and settled in to wait for them to walk by. It seemed to work, eventually.
As Judy Porter, a founding member of The Spice, tells it, “The next morning at breakfast as we were discussing logistics, Bill announced that at the end of the day we would all meet at the wall where our...what is the plural for spouse? ...is it like house? houses/spouses or is the plural of spouse like mouse? Mice/Spice? Of course, we were in full agreement that we were, indeed, spice! ... so it was decided we would meet at the Spice Girls wall. At this point, the fellas left for the festival, and the ladies carried on this conversation as we planned where we were all going to do for the day. We agreed that we were the spice of Nova Voce. We then named each other with a spice name that spoke to something about each of us. (I can't remember all of the names – There is a Paparazzi Spice, Sporty Spice, Vespa Spice, Cappuccino Spice, Survivor Spice, Intrepid Spice, and a Gelato Spice.)
Anyway, after two weeks of travelling, The Spice became fast friends and upon return would plan events for the group to get together. They had an Italian Night reunion. They would meet a few times a year while the guys were at practise and head to coffee shops or a small shopping district or the library, and, being true Nova Scotians, they supported each other in trying times.While some of the original Spice Girls have moved on, we have brought on new members of the team. Today, you can find some of us turning pages for our accompanist, selling tickets at the doors of a concert, handing you your concert program and insert, selling CD's, planning after-concert events, planning the fundraising Gala, taking pictures/videos, creating posters and seasonal booklets for the choir, keeping the choir's website and social media up to date and, of course, singing the praises of the wonderful choir that our significant other's sing in.
