The Spotlight Revisited

"My flesh is mortal
But my soul is eternal

And I choose who I share both with. "
          -Me.

Somewhere in the night, I sang.
To an audience, no less.
It was amazing. I was completely awash with nervousness, but I sang and played my ukulele to a fairly full house at a local haunt.

A very long time ago, I begged the question, "Did you come here to see the show or to sing for us all?"

I answered that in a very different way at long last.  Now don't get me wrong, my life is pretty much an open book as it is. But this was a new adventure, one I have been avoiding for far too long. And now, I am aching to do it again.

The young man who works for me in my office laughed when I told him about playing my uke and singing. He asked me "You can sing?"
I answered, "We can all sing."
Again, he laughed. "No, I mean you can sing good? Like, you know... I have friends that sing REALLY good. I can't."
I replied, "Who cares? Just sing. Nobody even looks up in most cases. We put too much importance on meeting some mysterious standard. Just sing."
He smiled and said simply, "That's cool"

Bet your ass it's cool!
I was too nervous to have ANY sort of stage presence, but I did it. The guy working the board screwed with me a little, since he was fidgeting and messing for a while, and I missed the fact that I was supposed to be playing while he did.  But eventually, I just played. Gina sang "Coin Operated Boy" into a quiet mic, and the bar was pretty noisy, but she sang just fine. Even when the guest drummer totally botched the timing of the song up, and I missed a chord change here and there. She continued with "White Rabbit", then yielded the mic to me. I did my version of "A Pirate Looks at 40", "The Man Who Sold the World", then asked if I could do one more... I finished with "Hurt".  I was told to make love to the microphone, as I was too quiet.

So I tried.

I'm getting more comfortable singing into one, and I'll keep at it as long as I can.

Would you like to sing with me? There's plenty of stage and there's time.

Well?