Of Me I Sing

A theme of my musings would seem to be self-pitying if one were given to whining. I am not given to whining, so there’s no selfpity involved, just the plain simple fact that I am often overlooked, being a cipher in other people’s eyes.  I’m an observer but never observed.

Annoying, yes.  But at some point one must accept the fact that no one notices me or appreciates my many talents, among them my ability to sing.

Why do they no longer have music classes in schools?  All of us in kindergarten had to purchase a flutophone and learn to play the scales and a few simple tunes.  Onward from that was practicing staying on the beat, with the teacher handing out all sorts of rhythm instruments, the tambourine, the triangle, the marimba. See note above on being overlooked because I was always given those damn wooden blocks.  Not even a drum to beat.  What gives!

In upper elementary school we sang.  How I loved to sing.  My mother used to sing in the kitchen while she was doing the dishes.  That’s how I learned the songs from World War II, especially “We’ll Meet Again.”  A sad one, that.  And I can’t forget about that red red robin, bob-bob-bobbin’ along.  One of the neighboring kids, Richie Fry, asked my mother if she were a professional singer.  Was she pleased?  I would have been.

Unfortunately, no one’s ever asked me that question.  In fact, when members of our class were being chosen for the county chorus, I was one of the few left out.  I couldn’t understand why because I had a beautiful voice.  How humiliating the year-end school assembly, when all the county chorus members moved down the risers to sing their pieces.  I was left standing conspicuously alone, mortified by the disgrace of not being chosen.  (Another girl, also rejected, moved down with the chorus, which, if I had been clever enough, I would have done also.  But—-)

In high school I joined the chorus.  I had to “audition.”  I was so nervous, but I knew it was something I would enjoy if I could get past Mr. Bremer.  He probably let anyone in, but I was overjoyed to be sitting in the auditorium with sheets of music on my lap, discussing the hickey on Joyce’s neck or how someone five feet tall would have sex with a basketball player.

Oh, we sang too.  There was always the Christmas concert where we would walk down the aisle with “candles” singing, “Come all ye Faithful,” and then have to watch the entire pageant of Jesus’s birth, except for the labor, be pantomimed on stage.  We always knew who was the most popular girl in high school that year, as the speech teacher chose her to portray Mary.

College came, and I knew that my singing was at an end.  I was at the mammoth University of Michigan, where I was sure auditions would be more rigorous that my perhaps seven-note range would take me.

Flash forward so many years I refuse to count them and place yourself with me at the Augusta Heritage Center, Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia.  This wonderful program is dedicated to keeping Appalachian arts alive, with fiddling and clogging and dancing and so much more. Like singing.  At first my husband and I went there with Road Scholar, as it was not called at the time, so we were confined to their programming.  Fortunately, I was able to slip their constraints by simply not attending and discovered music, singing in the chapel—not of love, a real round chapel.

Thereupon I fell into one of the happiest weeks of my life, not that first year, or the second, but the third year when I signed up for singing alone and spent the entire day from eight-thirty in the morning until after nine at night singing my heart out.

Did I make sure I stood next to someone who held steady to the alto part so I wouldn’t stray to tenor or soprano? Yes.  But the variety of music choices thrilled my soul, with baroque, country, Irish, gospel—African.  And here is where I pushed myself forward because I was tired of standing on the risers alone.

At the end of Augusta Festival week, there’s a party in the park with many performances.  Our African music contingent was scheduled to show off our many talents.  The instructor had picked only two women to sing forefront while the rest of us were doing backup.  Well, screw that, I thought.  Why am I always in the background?  So when the time came, the women stepped forward and so did I.  Was the instructor horror struck?  I wasn’t paying attention.  I was just adding my authentic version of an African chant and what was she going to do, drag me off the stage.

For some reason, she didn’t acknowledge me afterwards.  But members of my husband’s group—he was still with the old people—came up and told me what a wonderful job I had done.  How very true.

Unfortunately, life intervened; and I never got a chance to go back to Elkins, but I highly recommend the program to those who are still able to attend.  Some day maybe, I shall return, unless they remember me.