Throwback Thursday: Technical Difficulties

((Blogger's Note: An update on housing will be coming today or tomorrow. In the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy an older post I never got around to finishing at the time about some embarrassing moments at a talent show.)

There are two things you need to know to understand what made the stake talent show so memorable.

The first is the fact that we were in the stake talent show at all. 

This was back in Spring of 2015, and my roommates and I (and our next door neighbor who was practically our roommate), being musically inclined, decided to put together a song for the upcoming ward talent show. The song that my roommates selected, however, ended up being from the Land Before Time movie. It was actually my very favorite song as a kid, which made me feel as self conscious as a teenager to be performing it in public. But they were going to have me sing. Despite the fact that performing makes me shake like an aspen tree in a wind storm, I secretly ALWAYS want people to ask me to sing a solo. (I guess putting this here makes it slightly less secret, but only slightly since I'm directly related to 80% of the people reading this.) In fact, one of the truly pathetic things about me is that to me one of the perks of being a music therapist is that I can sing to people all the time whether they want me to or not. Anyway, being asked to sing always makes me feel very flattered, so despite feeling self conscious about the song choice I readily agreed.

But which song am I talking about, do you ask? Diana Ross, take it away.

We had a pretty nice arrangement; piano, cello, and flute, and it did sound rather pretty. We called ourselves "Avocet 2 and 3/4", as a nod to the fact that we were sort of all roommates. (Another name considered but quickly discarded was "Older men in loincloths", an in-joke from a comment someone made while watching Tarzan.)

Apparently our ward agreed, because much to my shock and surprise our talent was one of two that were asked to perform in the stake talent show a couple of weeks later.

The second thing you need to understand is that the guy I had a crush on at the time was in my stake.

He was an old friend that I had recently discovered lived about a block away from me, but I almost never saw him. As a matter of fact, part of me was starting to wonder if he was avoiding me. So I was well aware of the fact that he might be in the audience when we performed in the stake talent show.

The stake talent show was a lot of fun. Some of the talents were skilled musicians or dancers. And then there was a couple that sang "That's All I Ask of You" from the Phantom of the Opera while doing the corniest dance moves you could imagine, (complete with a girl randomly running behind them waving an American flag), only to reveal at the end that behind the curtain were the real singers and our performers had just been lip syncing. My description isn't doing it justice, it was hilarious.

Then it was our turn. Stepping onto the stage, I felt terrified and embarrassed about the song choice. One of my roommates, recalling my lousy introduction during the ward talent show, stepped up to the microphone and invited the audience to tune into their childhood nostalgia before listening to the song. Then we began.

Now, we had three mikes. One for the piano, one shared between the cello and flute, and one for me. So I was standing a bit in front of the others, meaning that they didn't find out what happened until afterward.

As I sang, I gradually became aware of the fact that the microphone was getting farther and farther away from me. At the start of the song the microphone was about the same height as my face. But as the song continued, the insufficiently tightened hinge on the mike stand continued to lower little by little until the microphone was pointing at my belly button. At first I just tried to lean forward and sing louder, panicking a little (and the sound guy in the back of the room was desperately trying to adjust as needed), but when it started to dip below my waist I yanked the microphone back up to face height. The sudden increase in volume was painfully loud, and I got more than a few sniggers. Still, I did my best to maintain my composure until the end of the song.

Most of the people who spoke to us afterward were kind and polite, of course. But I was soon distracted by seeing a familiar form across the crowded parking lot on our way out of the building-- they guy I liked. My roommates, who knew of the situation, encouraged me to go talk to him--and I didn't need much encouragement since he was someone I already knew well--and had been trying to talk to for a while. He was not going to get out of talking to me tonight. After all, he had to have seen my performance, so he knew I was there.

As I walked over, though, I heard one of my roommates shout, "Jen! Jen! Jen!" I spun around, ready to deal with some sort of crisis--only to discover that one of my roommates, slow on the uptake, wanted to tell me to go talk to that guy. Some facepalms ensued, but I assured her it was fine, I could still-- and then I turned around to discover that he had vanished into the crowd. 

Needless to say, my roommate was pretty embarrassed by the whole thing. In retrospect, I'm not too upset about it--I found out later he was already dating a girl, and the two of them are actually engaged right now. (*cough cough facebook stalking cough*). So it was probably just as well, no matter how much Katrina wailed about single-handedly ruining my love life on the way back home.

Besides. It was kind of nice not to be the only one embarrassing myself that night.