Area choir to sing with Foreigner

When Foreigner sings “I Want to Know What Love Is” before thousands of fans Friday at the Arena Theater, choir students from George Ranch High School will be right there on stage to accompany the band.

“It’s once in a lifetime,” choir director Chris Cuellar said.

George Ranch High School’s Chorale group won the opportunity to sing the 1984 hit song with Foreigner through an online competition hosted earlier this summer by KKRW-FM 93.7 The Arrow.

George Ranch High School also is receiving $500 for its choir program.

Cuellar heard about the competition from Phillip Sulak, communications coordinator for Lamar Consolidated Independent School District.

“We learned the song really quickly and recorded it on site,” Cuellar said. “We got it posted on The Arrow’s website at the last minute.”

The winning high school was to be determined by votes.

At the encouragement of George Ranch High School principal Leslie Haack, nearly every student and employee at the high school voted.

“It was really exciting that our school rallied together,” Cuellar said.

The Arrow called with the news about the school’s win Sept. 6.

“We got super, super excited,” Cuellar said. “The kids were yelling.”

It wasn’t a given that the high school students at George Ranch would be familiar with Foreigner, which released most of its hit songs in the 1970s and ‘80s.

“Even though these kids were born in the ‘90s, they like a lot of classic rock,” Cuellar said. “Once I told them the song we’d be singing (for the contest), a lot of them were familiar with it.”

It also was pretty cool, Cuellar said, that the contest called for a group with no more than 25 voices.

Chorale, the school’s top choir group, has 25 members.

Junior Samantha Oesch, 16, said she’s pumped about the con- cert. “We’re a brand-new school. It’s very exciting to have this accomplishment,” Oesch said.

While she didn’t listen to Foreigner before the contest, her father is a big fan. “He’s very excited. He has two of their vinyls.”

Senior Jacob Sotelo, 18, said his mother had a similar reaction to the news about the choir’s upcoming performance.

“She was a Foreigner/ Journey kind of person,” he said, adding that he’s pretty happy about the concert opportunity, too.

“Who could say they’ve performed with Foreigner?” Flori Meeks is a freelance writer and can be reached at flori@swbell.net.