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Express Yourself
How Sweet the Sound
After years of silence, I’m finally conquering my fear of singing in public
We sat in a circle at the 92nd Street Y, recounting the traumas that had silenced us.
“My music teacher told me to move my lips but not make a sound,” the first woman said. The rest of us nodded in recognition. Half of the fourteen members of that class — optimistically called “Everybody Can Sing” — had been shamed at karaoke night. (I refused to ever, ever go out with my graduate students after our weekly creative writing workshops.) Alicia, who spoke with a mellifluous Spanish accent, told us the last song she had sung was a childish version of “La Cucaracha.”
The idea that in six ninety-minute sessions, all fourteen of us would stand in front of the room and sing a song that didn’t make the others cover their ears in pain didn’t seem believable. Hadn’t we been born with ugly, distorted voices, the way some people are born with unfortunate features, a lack of rhythm on the dance floor, or a mind that blanked when required to solve a quadratic equation?
If genetics plays any role in musical ability, I have been cursed from the instant my father’s tone-deaf sperm pierced my mother’s tin-eared egg. My parents’ and siblings’ voices were so tuneless, we never even sang “Happy Birthday” to one another. When my brother tried out for chorus, the music teacher told him, “You have a range of one note, and you sing even that one note off-key.” At breakfast, my mother would wistfully recount a dream in which she opened her mouth and an operatic solo came pouring forth; in real life, if she so much as hummed along with a performer on TV, we groaned and shushed her.
I had been cautioned by my third-grade music teacher that when the rest of the class raised their voices to warn of the low bridge ahead in “Erie Canal” or to pine for that rolling river called “Shenandoah,” I should only pretend to sing. Even then, I was too dense to get the message. I thought Mrs. Many wanted me to allow the other children a chance to be heard, the way our regular teacher ignored my ever-upraised hand in math class.
The truth didn’t dawn on me until the next summer, when the staff at Camp Jubilee held auditions for…
