Lasses and Lads of Enchantment to open council meeting with anthem

Lasses and Lads of Enchantment will open the Los Alamos County Council’s regular session Tuesday evening with America The Beautiful, a ceremonial start tied to a salute to America’s 250th birthday. The performance will come before the council moves into its public business in Council Chambers at 1000 Central Avenue.

The meeting is scheduled for 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, June 30, 2026, and residents who want to follow the council’s work will find the agenda posted at least 72 hours in advance. Los Alamos County says regular sessions generally meet three Tuesdays each month, and any council action requires at least four affirmative votes from the seven at-large councilors.

That structure makes the opening more than a musical prelude. After the anthem, the council will proceed through the evening’s agenda under the same rules that govern every regular session, including public comment on items not listed on the agenda. The county’s open-meeting format gives residents a chance to speak before the seven-member body acts, while the four-vote threshold sets the bar for anything that becomes official county policy.

The chorus itself carries a local history that reaches back more than three decades. The Los Alamos Area Chapter of the Barbershop Harmony Society says the group came together in 1992 and was chartered in 1993. It began inviting women to sing in 2015, then adopted the name Lasses and Lads of Enchantment to reflect its mixed-gender membership. Maurice Sheppard directs the chorus.

Its barbershop lineage connects back to the 1957 international quartet champion Lads of Enchantment, the only New Mexico-based quartet to win the Barbershop Harmony Society’s International Quartet Competition. The chapter says that quartet was formed in Albuquerque, anchoring the chorus’s local identity in a broader New Mexico barbershop tradition.

The chorus has resumed regular activity after the disruptions of COVID-19 and has continued to stage annual shows and joint performances with the Santa Fe Harmonizers. For Tuesday’s council meeting, that civic and musical history will be folded into a public chamber where ceremony opens the door to county government.