Chorus Member

 

All through my life, I've been in theatre. In High school, my favorite shows were musicals.

My first EVER musical- Bye Bye Birdie in 7th grade. That was the best show of my life to this day. I was a chorus member and I was completely fine with that (that's how good the show was!). I learned how to stage faint, I was allowed to run around shrieking on stage and when asked to fawn over Conrad Birdie I wasn't just acting. Our Conrad Birdie was a babe. I'm sure we were yelled at, I'm sure we had to do scenes over and over again. But I have successfully blocked that out of my memory. Now anytime someone plays a song from it, or decides to perform a number from it, I have this selfish reaction like, "What? That show's mine!"

As I entered High School all I wanted was to just get into Seussical my freshman year. The dance for the audition was being choreographed by my (now ex) boyfriend's mother. I thought this would be an advantage for me.

It wasn't.

I had practiced every step. I did the ponies, the  ball-changes, the weird downward fist pump walk she had us do, and I was confident that I would win her over.

About 2 minutes before I was supposed to enter the room, I was going over the dance in my head and marking the motions half heartedly when my heart started going a mile a minute. This was not typical anxiety. My heart literally started into almost a murmur. Now, as you could imagine, I'm freaking out. I'm grabbing peoples hands, slapping them over my chest and asking them if they felt how fast it was  going. I was trying deep breaths, pacing up and down the hallway outside the choir room where we were dancing.

My group was called. As I  fell into line I silently panicked that this heart thing wouldn't go away by the time it was my turn to dance. Soon enough, heart still racing, my turn came.

I was preoccupied with my heart racing and then preoccupied with looking like my heart wasn't and that left little to no brainpower for the stylizing the dance. I plopped around the front of the room, a wiry smile plastered across my face.

It was disastrous. As you can imagine, I did not make it into the spring musical that year.

The next year I auditioned for Anything Goes and got in as "Model." I thought this meant I would have a line. What it actually meant was that I was a chorus person that had a special stage cross during a particular scene. Big woop. Nonetheless, I tried my best to make a come back with my dancing abilities. I was rewarded by being put in the front of the stage (almost center! I told myself sometimes) during a big production number, "Blow, Gabriel, Blow."

The funny part about this song is that recently, our director had seen some people doing the Soulja Boy Superman dance around school. In every dance number, we leaned on our right foot,  crossed in the middle and leaned on our left foot. 1920's musical...with some Soulja boy.

We thought this was hysterical.

It's interesting that I don't remember the shows where I had a bigger part as well as I do being in the chorus. There were no lines to memorize, and until there was a  big production number we giggled in the wings, fixing each other's wigs. We re-did our lipstick a hundred times over and practiced our dances in the tiny back hallways together.

Whenever I hear these songs I remember all the auditions, all the laughs, the rush of being under the lights, the smiling so big it hurt. I would give anything to do it all again.

I am a proud chorus member.

Car trips

Growing up my family went on a lot of road trips to visit family in either Tennessee or Chicago. On the way we always had a box of CDs in the car that seemed to be almost designated for the road trip. Sometimes I would be allowed to pick them out before we left, or choose them while we were in the car.

I distinctly remember sitting in the captain seats of the car looking out the window as the fields and telephone lines  that you would normally find in Ohio whipped past our car. Porcelain by Moby was playing. Despite all the motion and chaos, the calm streaming sounds of Moby made my view out the car window seem like poetry worth contemplating. This wasn't uncommon. As I grew older, I started packing less and less to take in the car and spent more and more time staring out the window. Moby is one of the few artists that has the capability to successfully make everything more serene, more contemplative and almost mind boggling. I mean that when I listen to Moby it occurs to me that we live on an earth that rotates the sun that is in only one galaxy and we are just a floating orb in a vast space that never ends. Yeah. He does that to me.

But that's only one aspect of car rides in my family. We also leave at the wee hours of the morning when my mom is ready to start truckin' down I-80, and Ian, my brother, and I are ready to sleep 7 hours of the 10 that it takes to get home. So when we all grumble and stumble into the car (except for Mom, who's exceptionally chipper) we are all coherent against our own wills. I have all of these fuzzy memories of a dark car, my head squashed up against my seat belt in a desperate effort to seek comfort, freezing feet...and Counting Crows.

Now, there are so many words in a Counting Crows song. It's like he took 3 poems and squashed them into a kinda-melodic, almost Dave Matthews-like "ramble" verse form. But if you're only half there, like I was in the car in those wee hours, those lyrics can make for some pretty interesting dreams.

There is yet another aspect of our car rides- the four of us get really excited and hyper for about 45 minutes- the perfect amount of  time for a typical LP. From my childhood I remember these times being filled with Ben Folds (who you will soon learn is my favorite artist of all time) or Propellerheads. But what I remember the most is the White Stripes. The dynamic duo: Jack White on the guitar, absolutely wailing, and Meg on the drums...just hittin' it.

Dad and I have this joke about Meg White's simplistic, driven drumming style: "Hey, uh, Meg?"
"Yeah?"
"Hit, uh... that."
"Okay"
And the song begins.

I tried desperately to pick another song besides Seven Nation Army...but I just couldn't do it. The song is just too good- especially for what our family needed in those hyperactive 45 minutes. All of us singing, Ian and I bobbing our heads next to each other, Dad slapping the steering wheel  to the beat (obviously trying to emulate Meg's style), Mom is gettin' a little too funky with the dance moves in the passenger seat. I pretend to not like car trips  but what can I say? Family bonding is the best.