Celebrity

I'm not usually timid.

My first day on the Crystal Darkness Committee, during which I shared a table with the head of the Department of Mental Health, the head of the Bureau of Narcotics, and a former DA, I called out the Superintendent of OKC Schools for trying to use tactics fit for grade and middle school students to get high school students interested in the project. From the committee members from whom I did not win friendship, I won respect, and from the two I did not even win respect, I at least won the begrudging acknowledgement that I did in fact know what I was talking about.

In PRSS training I told a cultural competency instructor that her facts were wrong.

I've got a little chip on my hip, a hereditary sass passed down from my Nanny that once earned me the nickname "General Sassy." (And I have the commercially embroidered ballcap to prove it.)

But joining a new Church? *shiver* I can honestly say I really hadn't interacted with many people outside of superficial pleasantries until this past weekend. I'm always afraid I'll slip up in this most important of aspects of my life. What if I genuflect on the wrong knee? Can you genuflect on the wrong knee? What if I do this wrong, or that wrong? What if my skirt is a 1/32nd of an inch too short? What if my veil doesn't cover enough? WHAT IF I DON'T STICK MY TONGUE OUT FAR ENOUGH AND THE HOST FALLS OFF?????????

Yeah, I probably grew a grey hair in anticipation of my first few Sundays.

But the morning after my first choir practice? That was completely different.

I don't really think I was being treated all that differently. Sure, a number of people I hadn't formally met came up to tell me how well I had done...when I really only sang a few of the propers...but other than that, I think it was entirely due to a shift in my own mind. On the one hand, I was in the choir. A real choir. Not a children's choir. I suddenly felt accepted, as if I belonged. As if I was welcome truly, and not just tolerated because everyone was far too nice to say anything to me.

More importantly, I felt useful. Allow me to transport you, via the magic of pan flute, to my childhood.

It's the summer after we've moved to the city. I've started attending a performing arts camp that a few of my friends from school went to. It was the first time I'd really done any singing outside of into a hairbrush or shampoo bottle.

I very quickly figured out that mine was NOT the voice of a princess.

I did try valiantly, but when your competition is a slender, curly-haired blonde with a spinto soprano like a nightingale...Yeah. Eventually I got to the point where I preferred the comedic side roles to the princesses, anyway, but I still could never find any kind of vocal role where I fit.

There was a brief moment in eighth grade where I was highly necessary, as the only girl in seventh or eighth grade who could hit a low E, when we did the Carol of the Bells for the Christmas program, but when high school arrived, it was more of the same.

Now? I came knocking on the door of a chapel with a choir recovering from a greatly reduced congregation, with a desire to build itself back up to polyphonic proportions, and only one alto. Many people's first or second questions upon meeting me, actually, were "Do you sing?" and "What's your range?" Every time I said alto it was like I had revealed myself capable of spinning straw into gold.

I feel like I have something to offer back now. In return for all that this little chapel and its people have given me. I feel like I have something figured out for the first time in ages; what I believe. It feels more liberating and freeing than anything I've tried before under the pretext of "liberation" has felt.

And most of all, and I nearly wept when I came to realize this, I feel like I used to feel as a little child when I was in Church; enveloped by cloaks of red and of light blue. In the arms of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and of the Blessed Mother.

And I'm so, so grateful to God that I have something useful to give back.