Day 10: Saying yes

I win the ham sandwich. I did something today that I couldn't have done for a ham sandwich and $1000 ten years ago. I sang in church.

OK, I've sung in the church I've been a member of for 30 years many many times. (And before I go any further I should probably address the readers in the back of the room who are whispering and pointing because they can't believe I'm allowed inside a church. Joke's on you. There are churches where people like me are welcome and they're called Unitarian Universalist. I've been a UU most of my adult life, even though I mostly only have faith in cynicism. So there. End of digression.) I have fallen away from that church and will probably give up my membership soon, but sometimes Coraline and I go to a small emerging UU church just a few blocks from us. I'm not a member though and I've never been asked to participate in a service like I did a lot in my old church -- playing music, leading worship, that kind of thing.

A couple of days ago though their board president, who has been a close friend for years, texted and asked if I'd help their choir director out. Seems their music director was supposed to help him do a hymn-sing service and the music director wasn't going to follow through. They wanted me to come in and lead the singing while the choir director played the piano so he could teach the congregation more songs. I said, "Sure, I know all of those songs. I'll do it."

I have a policy of saying yes to things that scare me or make me anxious. That policy has led me to do some pretty crazy things, but it's also helped me work through a performance phobia that paralyzed me for decades when I was younger. One of the vestiges of that phobia is that I struggle to sing by myself in public. I don't break out in a sweat and run for the bathroom any more, but I still struggle with it. I'm good at singing in a choir and I'm damn good at singing harmony, but by myself is hard. Really hard. I should have put that on my list of things that scare me.

So I said yes, even though I suffered a bout of laryngitis a couple of weeks ago, and my voice hasn't entirely bounced back yet. It's at about 65% if I'm being generous. But long story short, I did it. I didn't sound great, but I did it. I sang and I don't think anybody walked out because I did. No, that's not honest. I did it, and fortunately I was working with an extremely talented professional musician, and the congregation loved it. So I'm not going to lie and try to tell you I wasn't a little proud this morning.

It reminded me of another time when I took a much bigger risk. I was a fairly new guitar player, and I'd been going to this monthly folk music sing-along where we all sat in a circle with our guitars, if we played, and went around the circle choosing a song to lead for everybody to sing. One of the guys who went most of the time, Don, asked me to play a gig with him. He said his regular band had another job and he didn't want to play alone. And he would buy me dinner and pay me. My gut clenched. I said yes.

Before we left that night we played through a few songs together, and he gave me a 2-inch stack of lead sheets (pages with words and chords printed on them). I looked through them when I got home and realized I didn't know more than half of them, and some of them only had lyrics on them. I couldn't really practice them, because he gave me a lot of songs, and I would be singing harmony, which can't be practiced without someone singing melody. Fuck it. I had already said yes.

I drove to a small town about 40 minutes away to a coffee shop/bar. We had less than an hour before we were supposed to play. He bought me a ham sandwich on white bread. That was dinner. Fine. I was too nervous to eat much anyway. We warmed up on a few of the songs, but again, I didn't know most of them. And then we went out to play.

The sound guy hadn't shown up. I'm not a sound guy, but apparently I knew more about it than Don. We eventually got the sound system up and running. And then we played a 2 1/2 hour show.

When I had the chords, I played along using the music. When I didn't though, I had to watch my page of lyrics and watch him to see what he was playing. Granted many folk songs follow standard chord progressions, but since I didn't know the melodies, I didn't know when to change. In order to sing the melody, I'd just play along with him for the first verse and part of the chorus. Then when I thought I knew the melody well enough, I'd jump in on the harmony.

We sounded pretty good, I think, under the circumstances. At one point early in the night, I realized Don was a liar though. One of the audience members -- he played there every  month so they knew him -- asked how long we had been playing together. He acted like he had to think about it, and then as if he were guessing said, "Oh, I guess it's been about two years, hasn't it, Reticula?) Uuuummmm, sure? It was his gig so I went along with it. I kind of wished they'd known the real situation, because then they'd see how truly amazing it was that I was playing and singing along with him at all.

Long story long, we played a good long show for a friendly audience and when it was over, Don said he'd send me the money because he hadn't been paid yet. He never sent the money, the lying sack of dog shit, and I never saw him again. He also unfriended me on Facebook. Fuck you, Don.

I've played a lot of other gigs in the years since, because I love playing music more than almost anything else.

So this morning was a bit of a breakthrough, but it wasn't my first rodeo. Being a single parent means I don't get the opportunity to say yes to as many things as I used to. Like that time I found myself naked and clinging to a sandstone cliff in a state park in Illinois while a professional photographer I'd met less than 48 hours before took photos .... but I digress. That's a different story.

Do you ever say yes to things that scare you? When was the last time you took a risk like that and forced yourself to move past your fear? What would you like to say yes to but you don't because you're scared?