Before you ask: based on Homer, not James Joyce. Alas?
We were given two options to sing: one for boys, one for girls. The girls’ one was a soprano part. You know, for girls.
You went into a room, and sang a bit, and then went out, and they gave you a score from 1 to 3, which would decide whether you’d be offered a main role or be in the chorus.
‘I saw your score,’ a friend told me after. ‘You got a 1.’
At age 15 I was horrifically shy and would’ve found the scrutiny of being anything other than a cheery team player in the chorus just awful. This did not mean I didn’t harbour dreams of suddenly being revealed to be a star in waiting.
As it turned out, I loved being chorus plus randomly-assigned tiny role (even if I did realise that one of my two lines could be made dirty, so I made it dirty, but not in rehearsal, just on stage when it was too late, and it got a laugh, but I don’t think the drama teacher appreciated that).
But the 1 made me sad. I really liked singing! To the Grease soundtrack, on tape, in my bedroom. In the back of the car as a kid, to the Beatles or some weird folk thing. In privacy, always, except when I worked at a Girl Scout camp one summer and we used to sing the kids to sleep, a memory that is almost too wholesome to feel plausible. A thing I had been officially deemed as Bad at, but was fun.
Last year, after a bit of prodding from the Doctor, I joined a choir.
It turns out women can not only be altos, they can be tenors! Funny how singing in your range makes it all a lot easier. And (thanks to my choir being awesome and sharing MP3s of each part for people who can’t read music) I can rehearse, and learn my score, and (mostly) hold my notes while someone else is singing other notes, and be part of a big roomful of people making a big good sound.
That first week in September, discovering that I could do it, sing with other voices; sing well enough not to stick out as a honking atonal please-leave-now disaster, and be a 2, a very respectable 2: that was really powerful. A big lift.
The me I am now looks at that 15-year-old audition and thinks: before that happens, go and have a quick chat to the music and drama teachers about how these notes aren’t notes you can hit, and how to make this work. But I would never have done that. Out of shyness, mostly, but also because it felt like I was failing at ‘girl’.
I’m starting to clock quite how much time I spent worrying about that. Grease might have been the fifites via the seventies, but the options didn’t seem that dissimilar: Sandy or Rizzo, and both of them somehow wrong.
A side note: last week I belatedly discovered I’d lost my printed scores and fled mid-practice, overwhelmed. Even things we like are sometimes more than we can do in the moment. I have a thinner skin since my Dad died. I’m a leaky-eyed human at the best of times, but lately there’s a new absence of resilience, especially in the presence of feelings, or other people.
But we’re currently learning Hopelessly Devoted to You, from my bedroom warbling days. I love being able to sing it as a tenor. So I’ve been practising at home, and I’ll get back in person when I’m up to it.