Do Re Mi

I was such a big girl. Had it all figured out. No more confusion for me!

Right.

I do miss one thing from Middle School. Choir. I was good at it. Very good. Of course the teacher was amazing as well. She single handedly revived the school's boy's choir and got us awards.

Yeah, boys choir.

It was fun.. lots of work.. but I honestly had fun. I was good at it, but I couldn't solo for crap because of confidence issues. We had to work on a song in our own time for a big test. I think it was a midterm.. I forget. Well, on the day, staring at the camera and the teacher, I froze. My mouth opened and a little squeak came out. I promptly walked out of the room we were recording in and went back to my place. I could see the disappointment on her face. She knew I was good. I knew I was good. I just couldn't.. I panicked.

That one regret aside, I had fun. I was horribly shy about every performance, but I still enjoyed every moment somewhere deeeep inside. It was actually a blessing in disguise that I was in boys choir. The girl's was JAM PACKED. We barely had enough kids for a choir for the boys, but the girls had many more kids than one teacher is normally aloud. We got lots of individual attention. I could go on and on. Some of my more favorite performances. Just how AWESOME of a teacher we had(and a well known one at that), but I guess it is time to get to the point. I had to stand next to these other guys day after day. All of us slowly growing. Perfect chance to constantly compare myself to the others. They all changed so.. fast. It was irritating!

Yeah, I was jealous. For some odd reason I was jealous.

I felt like I was stuck in slow mo. Then there came the time that we(or rather, everyone else) was growing up enough to warrant splitting us into tenors and baritones. After lots of voice cracking (to the great frustration of our teacher) she got a voice range on us. Now, she had done this before when we first started to get an idea of what we were capable of, but it had to be done again. One by one we sung a simple song and got put on one side or the other. Then it came to me.

Tenor.

It was a strange feeling of disappointment. Like I didn't live up to some expectation of every boy. My voice was girly! Then I had a strange revelation. This was a good thing. I was on hormones. I didn't WANT my voice to get deeper. I should have been proud to be a tenor. The duality continued to kick my butt for a while though. I didn't want a deep voice, but all the guys around me got bigger.. got deeper voices. It was intimidating. At first it was only three on the baritone side. Then four. Then the tenor side was almost gone. At least we had much more people the next year.. so both sides had enough.

I do have one interesting story I got out of this. Eventually we participated in a performance where we had to sing with the girls at the same time. Same song. We prepared and prepared. This is how it would be if we went on to high school. Our teacher wanted us used to performing with the girls. I was having.. trouble. With only a few more practice sessions left, I was instructed to do something I'd never have expected. My teacher took me aside and told me I wasn't hitting the lower notes in the tenor range. I'd have to sing the girl parts(which were the same as the tenors except for a few parts where tenors went low). So yeah.. that was fun. I liked that. I couldn't make it as a baritone.. much less a tenor. Even THAT was too low for me. I was dragged aside.. probably because she didn't want to embarrass me in front of the guys. It WAS my last year in middle school though.. so maybe she caught on. By then it was.. how shall I say.. painfully obvious?

Either way.. fun stuff.