Continuing to Beat the Music Theme Like A Drum

One last music rant, and then I will go on to other things, I promise.

I not only rebelled against my peers, I rebelled against whatever my sister was listening to.  She fell for The Beatles before I did.  I thought the lyrics of She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah and I Wanna Hold Your Hans were inane and repetitive.  I would run around the house singing over and over again "She Loves you Yeah Yeah YEAH!" just to annoy her.  But I wasn't a complete musical imbecile.  By a couple of years I came around like everybody else.

I tried to be in the band at school.  They administered a musical ability test in 6th grade, a test that I failed.  But I still wanted to be in the band, so they relented and let me in anyways.  I used the trombone my Dad had in school that he bought used.  It must have been seventy or more years old.  Hard as I tried, I couldn't get the hang of it.  So after a few weeks my parents rented a trumpet.  While the other band members were playing more sophisticated songs, I couldn't get past Mary Had A Little Lamb.  I would play a note, then several seconds later I would finally position myself to play the next note.  Try as I might, my brain/motor movement coordination was never going to work fast enough to play anything in any rhythmic reasonableness.

In Junior High I joined the school choir, and did better because I didn't have to worry about the whole delay from brain to hands thing.  My bizarre sense of humor was beginning to give a kind of bizarre popularity, and although I didn't get any solos in the choir, I did get to be an emcee of the talent show.  I decided to do the Battle Hymn of the R3epublic.  My voice was pretty good at it1  Unfortunately, you also had to learn the lyrics, something I failed to completely do.  so I turned it into a comedy bit.  I started singing the song in impressive, full-throated glory, got to the part where I couldn't remember the lyrics, looked out at the audience as if I'd seen them for the first time, and then squeaked in a frightened voice, "Christ!  Look at all the people!", and then ran off.  The kids thought it was hysterical, but the Principal Louise Stottlymere (who, like Jiminy Cricket, lived to be 103) was not amused, and I was banished from the stage for the rest of Junior High.

I left the choir until I was a Junior in high school, when I rejoined because I had discovered plays as a Freshman, and always wanted to be in a musical. And my Junior year they were going to do It's a Bird, It's A Plane, It's Superman.  Well, lifelong Superman fan as I was, there was no way I was going to sit on the sideline for that bad boy. But they only let people from the music department be in the musicals. There was no way I could play an instrument so I rejoined the choir.  In tryouts for Superman, I sang the only song I could remember the words from, Somewhere Over the Rainbow.  Only I didn't know anything about pitch and key, and sang it in a range higher than Judy Garlands.  The big band teachers running the auditions were stunned.  They took me to the band directors home and had me do scales.  They told I had one of the rarest voices there was, and that I could be a countertenor, make a lot of money singing opera or whatnot.  I never took that up, being as how I couldn't figure out how singing higher than a soprano would work in impressing the ladies.  I got the part of the mad scientist and had a blast, thankfully singing the songs I had in a somewhat lower range.  I had always hoped that one of the theater groups I performed with would take this great musical on, but, sigh, so far there have been no takers.

In college I joined the University of Men's Glee Club, a group that had recently won the International award for best men's glee club in the world.  My high tenor voice paid off, because you were supposed to be able to sight read, but they were so desperate for high tenors that they waived that requirement.  We toured the country twice, sang on television at the National Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony.  There are many stories of this time that I will share at a later date.  I'll just mention that it included the musical highlight of my life, where I got to sing a small solo when we preformed at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

Since then, I have been in a number of community theatre musicals, sometimes with not much to sing, and sometimes with a lot.  I mostly play comedic roles, and when I do have a song, it was in a lower range that was hard for me to project volume.  I was very envious of Hairspray done here a year ago, because all the main singers were miked.  god, I could have used that when trying to croak out baritone or bass.  I did have one musical lead with six songs, Shenandoah.  That was a lot of work.  I worked as hard to come up to standards in that play as I had in anything I had ever done.  The worst part is that most of the practices were in tax season, and I could only kick in to high gear the last two weeks or so.  I stayed at the Academy by myself rehearsing the songs for hours and hours.  It wasn't my most perfect performance, but I poured as much passion and commitment into it as I ever had in anything I had done.

So there you go.  I can't play an instrument, but I can sing if I work hard at it.  And now my son is getting ready to try out for the band.  Benjamin is not a great athlete, but he does have more eye/hand coordination than I do.  I have high hopes that he'll take after my Dad and his mother, and be good enough that he can experience the joys of music, and the camaraderie that comes from being in those groups.