Students raise funds, spirits at Winter Thaw

Jan 26, 2020

It wasn’t the first time that the Friends of Old Rochester Music held a winter performance opportunity for students, but it was the first time it happened at the Knights of Columbus hall. 

The Knights had offered to let the music nonprofit (which helps to supplement the school budgets for music), use their hall for its Winter Thaw event, which had previously been at the Inn on Shipyard Park. 

“It’s nice to have the whole space. And the cash bar is helping them,” said Tracy Fiore, who serves as President for Friends of Old Rochester Music. The rest of the profits from admission and raffle tickets went back to the music nonprofit. 

For Fiore, the event helps to liven up a quiet time of year, and gives students a venue to perform.

Old Rochester Regional Junior High School choral music teacher, Angie Vaughn, said that despite the change in venue, the numbers remained more or less consistent, which the group was “really happy about,” since it sometimes sells tickets in advance and had not this year. 

In addition to giving students a venue, the event also gave them a chance to have fun, with performers sometimes laughing too hard to sing well. 

Performers ranged from a Junior High School band called the Purple Tacos, to Old Rochester Regional High School duos, to instrumentalists, to Fiore, who did a rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream.” 

Dante Cusolito may have taken the cake for the most unusual instrument. He performed on a gourd banjo, an instrument that he described as a precursor to a modern banjo and had made himself.

Cusolito explained that it is really difficult to make a wooden instrument round, and that he took advantage of the gourd’s natural roundness for his creation. He stretched goat skin over the cavity, and made the neck of the instrument from a piece of wood he bought at Lowe’s and sanded down to smoothness.