Answer:  Motherhood, being a woman, talking with a Midwestern accent when in the Midwest

Question:  What do Sarah Palin & I have in common?

I was talking with my sister yesterday and bemoaning the fact that I had choir practice that evening.  This is not because it was one more thing to do on a long list of to dos, or that it was a cold, wet night and a good one to stay in and watch my favorite “Must See” TV shows.  No, it was because deciding to join my church choir has been a glaring reality check for me and a very humbling experience.

Throughout most of my school years I sang with our church choir.  I loved it.  I loved the songs, the robes, the standing up in front of the congregation.  For a midwestern girl, it was about as close to Broadway I could get.  I even continued into adulthood for a while, garnering a small but very important (in my world) solo.  I love to sing and think of myself as relatively ok at it, although it varies from day to day or phrase to phrase at times.  That is, until I joined this choir.

I joined my church 20 years ago with the expectation that I would join the choir, which at the time was large, wonderful and full of professional singers.  Somehow I got sidetracked and never made it.  We just got a new choir director this year and he put out an appeal for singers to join the choir for a special Cantata to be performed at Christmas.  It was a 6 week commitment, a good way to dip the toe back in the pond, and with a big gulp, I accepted the challenge.  It was NOT what I anticipated!

The first night I showed up and unbeknownst to me, they had cancelled practice.  However, there was one woman there – who teaches singing no less – who volunteered to stay and take me through it.  Yikes.  No throngs of people to hide behind!  Not only is the music difficult, but it is in Latin!  If mercifully I managed to hit a note, my brain was still struggling to figure out the word associated with it.  Three weeks into this and I am only slightly better.  I realized that over those past 20 years, among other things, my voice has dropped and I instinctively sing things an octave lower than they should be sung.  You can’t quite do that in a choir situation.  So between me trying to hit a high note and trying to remember that it is pronounced “AHHH-bra – ham”, not “A-bra-ham”, it is a stressful experience.  Gone now are any illusions of my being a Broadway star in this lifetime.

So, I mentioned to my sister that really, to be kind to the choir, I should quit.  She said, “Ah, a mercy quitting.  You’re just like Sarah Palin.”

Enough said.  Come see me sing with the choir in early December!

Tags: choir, quitting, Sarah Palin, singing

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Just because. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.