My wife and I love to sing in the church choir; especially around Christmas time. I usually stay home and take care of the kids so that she can go to choir practice, but this year I beat her to it. She hadn't gone in many months so around the beginning of October I started to go. Once we got a little closer to Christmas, my wife expressed her desire to sing with the choir, too. But she was kind enough to let me continue to go because I had stayed home for her so many times in the past. Fortunately, a teenage girl from our church volunteered to watch our kids for free so that both of us could go. That was when it started.
My wife started talking to the choir director and expressed "our" willingness to sing a duet sometime if the need ever arose. The following week the choir director announced that both Noelle and I had solo parts in the song "Oh Holy Night!" GULP!!!
I have a very valid reason for being nervous. When I was about 10 years old, I was one of the top singers in my class. Being young, my voice was much higher and only one girl could hit notes higher than I could and stay on-key. Then disaster struck in the form of an ill-timed wrestling match with my sister in the basement. One of my younger sisters and gone into my room and was carrying around one of the dumbbells from my weight set. I yelled at her to put it back but she only dropped it and ran off.
I shoved my older sister away from me to go put it away so that nobody got hurt, but, ironically, somebody did. My older sister, not seeing what had transpired with our younger sister and thinking I was still playing around, tackled me. The force of it threw me to the ground so quickly that I couldn't get my hands up to catch myself. The bar of the dumbbell hit me right in the throat! I couldn't breathe! My sister yelled for my parents as I was thrashing around on the ground trying to get some air. My parents came running but there was nothing they could do for me - especially since nobody understood what really happened.
Luckily, the collapse of my air passage was only temporary and, after about a minute and a half, I started to draw breath again - little gasps at first, gradually making my way up to full, heaving lungfuls. When I had stopped inhaling so heavily, my parents asked me what happened ... and that's when we noticed that we had a problem. When I tried to talk, no sound would come out. The upside of all this was that it got me out of school for a week. The downside was that the New Kids on the Block never called to ask me to be in the group (and, without that choreography training, I still can't dance!).
By the end of the week, my voice progressed from sounding like a soft sigh to the gravelly sound of an eighty year old man with throat cancer. Another two weeks and it gradually developed to the deep, deep voice that I have now. Apparently, puberty decided to strike me down a few years early since my voice was changing anyways.
It had its humorous moments like when I would answer the phone and people would start telling me about the church meeting my dad needed to go to. I would "mm-hmm" and "okay" at all the right times letting them run on. Then, when they were done, I would ask, "Would you like to talk to my dad now?" The sad thing was that I could no longer sing ... at all! I just couldn't hit the notes that I used to hit with ease. I would try to modulate between notes and oftentimes nothing but air would come out. It was so frustrating!
My dad teased me mercilessly, too. I would be singing along to the radio and he would burst into my room looking all panicked and ask, "Is everything okay in here?" I assured him it was and asked, "Why do you ask?" He would respond saying, "I just heard all this moaning and wailing coming from your room and I thought you had gotten hurt!" This did wonders for my self-esteem as you can imagine. So I just stopped singing around people. My version of singing a solo was to sing so low you couldn't hear me.
I turned the corner when I was nineteen and serving a mission in Denmark. I started singing more and more and developing more control. I sang in choirs while I was there and even helped out the bass section of a quartet that was singing for a funeral. I found that I was really good at amplifying a bass section, but I still didn't have the confidence to sing a solo. And now I was being asked to sing a one in front of approximately 400 people!
My wife sang with an award-winning choir in high school and many church choirs since, but she had never sung a solo before either. So she was nervous, too. (She would have much rather preferred the duet). The downside for her (or maybe it was an upside) was that a week and a half before we were to perform she started losing her voice. It never fully came back in time for here to sing her part so she really never got to see how it would turn out.
I, on the other hand, remained healthy as a horse. I kissed and made out with my wife often but I could never seem to catch what she had. (Curse this iron-hard immune system!) I realized the day before the performance that I hadn't memorized my solo and that it would be difficult to sing well while trying to read off the sheet music. So, being the on-the-ball person that I am, I procrastinated that until two hours before the performance.
Now if you give me a topic, a microphone and an audience of 400+ people and I don't have a problem giving a talk for 20-30 minutes. How hard is that, really? I've talked most of my life. I am fairly decent about putting one sentence together with another. I don't worry about people laughing at me if I screw up because I intentionally screw up and talk funny on purpose to make people laugh all the time. I'm used to it. Singing is a whole different ballgame. You have specific notes you have to hit and specific words you have to sing and if you screw up - everybody knows it!
I found that I had to give myself permission to succeed. I often catch myself listening to the other men in the bass choir and following their lead. If they go off-key, I go off-key. If they miss a word, I'm suddenly lost and scrambling to figure out where we are at. It is a highly reactive way of singing that just doesn't work for a solo. I had to get aggressive.
And aggressive I was! I sang with gusto and confidence. I believe I did well (a number of people said so afterwards), but I noticed my hands were shaking like leaves in a strong wind when I was done. It is a really good thing that I memorized my part that morning because I doubt I would have been able to read sheet music if they shook while I was singing my solo.
So the moral of all this is:
Don't get karate-chopped in the throat by a dumbbell because it really hurts.
- or -
You don't know what you can accomplish until you try. Be daring and give yourself permission to succeed in all areas. "Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain." ~Mark Twain
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