Make Me a Match

So, let’s move on from the formative elementary years to those juicy middle school years. By sixth grade, I had picked up a small group of friends, so things were looking up in that regard. I had zero understanding of female grooming habits, no boobs, bad taste in clothes, a weird sense of humor, and a hopeless case of boy fever. Oh, and abnormal parents. That’s probably all you need to know to get a good taste of how things were going to go for the next few years.

I was a creative kid, and I was interested in the performing arts (which is weird, considering that, as an adult, I’m really introverted and hate being in crowds or, God forbid, talking in front of a group of people), so it seemed natural to try my hand at singing. I could belt out “Straight Up” by Paula Abdul in the shower like nobody’s business. “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston and “Girl You Know It’s True” by Milli Vanilli were also on Desiree’s top shower hits of early middle school. And anything by Bobby Brown. (I’m not ashamed to say those songs and artists are on my grownup Spotify playlist.)

My parents totally couldn’t sing. Mom would sing Placido Domingo songs outside while she gardened, her favorite pastime (gardening, not singing), but she didn’t care at all what anyone thought about that. I thought it was awful – but then again, I thought everything she did was awful. Dad never sang unless he had to (church, funerals, and “Happy Birthday”), and when he did – ouch. But you know, who cares? It’s not like either of them would ever sing in front of a crowd.

Luckily, I was convinced that I’d gotten the recessive, great-singing gene in the family. In sixth grade, I decided to put it to use – in our annual vocal/instrumental contest, called the Bland Competition (not because we were all boring, but because it was named after some person named Bland, I think. I don’t recall, and who really cares, but now that we’re thinking about it, Google tells me it’s a state-wide arts competition for a scholarship and – spoiler – I didn’t make it to the state level; more on why in a minute). Let me take a moment to share why I chose this particular moment in time to unleash my talent on the world, which I think might come as a surprise even to my closest friend at the time (still a friend after all these years) – let’s call her Rose. (She’ll be making a guest appearance in a future embarrassing story, which she totally deserves, since she tells this story about me at the Bland Competition all the damn time, even 30 years later.)

It wasn’t for the glory. It was for a boy.

Man, could he sing. He had a beautiful voice. I just thought he was so handsome – in my mind, he was totally like Patrick Swayze in “Dirty Dancing.” For those of you who know who he is because we grew up together in this ridiculously small town where everyone knew everyone, I’m sure you’re laughing right now to picture tweenage Desiree comparing this guy to Patrick Swayze, but there’s really no reasoning with hormones. Ask any pregnant woman. Anyway, he sang in contests and, if I remember right, he sang at the fair one year (that’s like the tiny town equivalent to Madison Square Garden). I had this recurring dream that he and I would fall in love while singing a duet together (sometimes in my dream we were singing in the school gym, sometimes at the fair, sometimes in the school auditorium – the place didn’t matter, just the movie closeup of our eyes locking on stage while we sang, like in any good movie of the 80s or 90s). In order to make that dream a reality, I’d need to prove myself worthy of duet-singing, and what better way to do that than to win this contest! I’d have been fine to just do well enough to get a decent score and get his attention. I won’t share the long backstory, but suffice it to say, I did not at that moment in time have his attention, despite my best efforts. (That was pretty standard for me at the time: putting forth my best effort to get the attention of a crush and getting totally rejected).

I was part of the choir, and that (singing in school classes) was the extent of my voice training. You’d think that my music teacher’s face the one time I sang alone for her that year when she was helping me decipher my range would have given me a hint that I was not as naturally gifted as I suspected, but I didn’t pick up her vibe. She helped me pick the song “Matchmaker” from Fiddler on the Roof – this is an incredibly awful song, in my opinion, and I had never seen the musical, but whatever. I was going for it.

I wish I could say I practiced diligently, but that wasn’t the case. I had my natural talent to fall back on. When I practiced in front of my parents in the living room, they clapped politely and told me how proud they were of me. As a parent myself now, I totally appreciate their predicament – what do you say when your child sucks at something? (One lesson I learned from this story that I took with me into the present is that I have no qualms telling my son when he’s not good at something, which I claim as a parenting win so far). At the time, I just basked in their praise, because they loved my song, clearly. They were BLOWN AWAY. Their faces gave it away.

Fast forward to the night of the contest. You’ll recall that I mentioned that I had the fashion sense of a blind person picking clothes from circus hand-me-downs (I was oblivious to this defect at the time), so my choice of outfit that I was sure was gonna knock ‘em dead, um, didn’t. A tea-length black-and-white polka dot dress with ruffles that emphasized my lack of bustline, accented with a giant black bow on my head. It probably wasn’t as ridiculous a bow as it is in my mind’s eye, but in my memory, it looked like this (but black):

Rose is always quick to remember the outfit if you talk to her, but luckily, I don’t have a photo to share with you here. Regardless, I felt like a princess at the beginning of the night, ready to dazzle the world – until I walked out on stage. That was probably the first time I had performed alone in front of an audience; it was definitely the first time I had competed on stage alone. The stage is a weirdly quiet, still place when you are about to deliver a solo performance – you can see the dust in the air floating in front of those hot, white lights; you hear the rustling and murmuring of the audience, a sea of black heads. You can’t pick out a friendly face. You can hear yourself breathe. You can feel your sweat beading and pooling. Your tights squeeze your stomach and you can’t decide where to look. It’s hard to swallow. You miss your cue, but finally start singing.

If you’re performing in any generic auditorium, you’ll find the acoustics are designed to amplify the sound from the mike and direct it precisely back to you. When you sing alone on stage, you hear your voice very clearly, just as the audience hears it. The sound of the notes that your voice makes goes right into your ear and into that part of your brain that judges whether a sound is pleasing or not, and if it’s not pleasing, your heart drops to your stomach and the realization hits you that, shit, you actually can’t carry a tune. You sound like Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem. You sound like Brittany Spears without autotune. Okay, those are anachronisms, but they give you a good sense of what I was hearing that night when my own voice found its way past my certainty of my singing ability and right into my little tweenage heart. My brain was trying to process the awfulness I was hearing, and it couldn’t also recall the lyrics at the same time. It improvised for a bit by having my mouth sing the same line over and over, but at a certain point, there was no finding its place in the lyrics, so it gave up. I faltered, stopped singing, and ran off stage in tears.

There was no romantic duet in my future. There was no winning the contest and no more singing solos. No more singing, period, the next school year. That was the first time my impression about my perceived ability at something came directly in conflict with my actual lack of ability; that is really crushing. I’m sure we’ve all faced that deflating moment at some point. In the long run, it was a good lesson to learn, but when you’re 11 or 12, the wound stays raw for a while. Embarrassment cuts deep when your whole life feels like an endless embarrassment (the definition of middle school, I think). I still channel that moment on stage sometimes when I have to speak in front of people, so in that way, maybe I came away with the wrong lesson implanted in my brain. That’s the problem with those kind of rip-the-veil-from-your-eyes moments; sometimes your brain chooses the wrong takeaway, and then you’re kind of stuck with it. No golden flashes of brilliance have come to me from writing this, alas. Maybe everything isn’t a teachable moment. Some moments just suck, and we move on.