This thing likes to
sing. This thing can't sing like anything. She sings high while the
others sing low, but she is not too bad, you know.
That is not a
genuine Dr. Seuss quote. Like I said, I like to sing, but my voice
is what I would call completely mediocre.
Sometimes, I sing really well and people compliment me and I just
know I nailed it. Other times, no one says anything because they are
well behaved humans who haven't calmly clamped a hand over my mouth
to stop the sounds from coming out while whispering in my ear that,
'some
things aren't worth dying for.'
I know what you're
thinking. No one can have that large of a spectrum between awesome
and Seagull from Little Mermaid. But
I am telling you, I have no control over whether or not it's going to
be a good day, or otherwise. I am also not particularly improved by
practise. I can practice a thing, and still botch it on performance
day. I also tend to cry... a lot.
Now with what I've listed so far, I again know what you're thinking.
I should sing in a group. Again, this is a terrible idea. If I am
singing next to a person who sings, I'll just hear them singing and I
won't have any clue what I'm doing with my voice. I used to try to
sing in a choir, and the choir director would stop everyone, point in
my direction and say, “Someone over there is off.” She wouldn't
take me aside and say I was the mouldy peach in the patch, but I
couldn't swear an affidavit that I wasn't the one who was off. I
have ears that require
silence to hear things. I'm not good at picking out overlapping
voices.
Lately,
I've been doing a challenge with myself to see if I can sing all the
songs in church without a hymnbook. I've found I like it partly
because then I don't have to
hold a wrist-hurty-heavy hymnbook.
So, now I tell whoever is
trying to share a hymnbook with me to hold it comfortably and when
they do, I can still see the words! What I want to do is yell at
them that they were supposed to hold it so I couldn't see it, not
hold it comfortably.
How did they not understand that? Weird. I made it perfectly clear.
The
most success I've ever had with singing is when I'm singing something
by myself and if there is an accompanist, she's on a piano far, far,
away. I'm singing something I know, I have the music in front of me
and I know. I mean, I
really know, that even if I blow it BIG TIME, it doesn't matter.
Someone has asked me to sing something on the fly. I have had
zero practice time, and something about the situation is good. I
don't know what. Maybe it's that my nerves haven't tied themselves
into knots with the awful
knowledge that I was going to
sing in front of a couple hundred people in a week or two. Maybe
it's that church music has a heart of its own, no matter
who is performing it. Maybe it's that my lungs are smaller than the
average singer and I can take the kind of pauses I need to get the
best out of my voice.
Or
maybe, I have it all wrong and dying waterfowl sound better.
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