Do you know what's sooo punk rock? Taking vocal lessons from a 50-year-old opera singer. I get free classes from the Community College where I work, so I was looking through the class schedule to see if I could find a guitar class. Though I didn't find one, something else caught my eye - private voice lessons.
My mom has been trying for years to get me to learn how to sing properly, even offering to pay for voice lessons as my Christmas present. I declined, telling her I wanted a keyboard that would plug into my computer instead, you know, so I could pursue my career as a techno artist.
However, after hearing myself over and over again as I've been recording the vocals for the Johnny Tightlips album, I decided any singing help would be beneficial. So I signed up for "Twelve individual one-half hour voice lessons" where I would "study proper vocal production, technique and development in several styles of literature."
I don't really know what I was thinking. I guess I thought I'd show up, tell the teacher that I wanted to learn how to have a really good voice so I could be a rock star and within "twelve individual one-half hour voice lessons" I would be able to accomplish everything I needed to. It didn't really turn out that way.
Since it was private lessons, the teacher was going to come to me. After exchanging a few phone calls with my teacher, we had decided on a time and place. She asked me to meet her outside of the auditorium (just upstairs from my office, how convenient!) before our first class so she could show me where the vocal studio was. She described herself to me thusly, "I'm about 5'1" and I'm a grandma, but I don't look like a grandma."
So there I stood, looking around for a grandma that didn't look like a grandma. I thought I would see a lady who had just walked out of an Old Navy commercial, with bleached-blonde hair, capris and flip-flops. Instead, I saw what I would've thought I'd see, had I taken the time to think about what a singer teacher is supposed to look like.
She had on black stretchy pants - not the cotton kind, the shiny polyester kind - and a black blouse that had sparkly things on it. She had long hair and a bosom that almost knocked me over.
Singing lessons didn't quite go as I'd planned. I knew I'd have to do weird breathing exercises - lying on the floor with a phonebook on my chest, singing with a pencil between my teeth and the like - but I didn't realize how geeky it was going to be until I was given my first piece of music.
With excitement that she was sure I would share she handed the theme song to the musical "Camelot."
"Here you go," she beamed, "Camelot!" The smile was frozen on her face as she waited for me to joyously respond.
"Oh," I said.
Slightly disappointed, she replied, "You've seen Camelot, right?"
"Nope."
"But you've heard it?" She started singing it for me. Nothing.
"Sorry."
"Well, you will just love it."
What had I gotten myself into? I took the piece home and had Traci play the accompaniment on the piano. It was awful. It's a Broadway musical. I HATE MUSICALS! I felt like I should be doing hand movements and gestures and dancing across the stage. I was ready to quit right there. But I figured since I had already shelled out the money for the class (my work only covers the tuition, if there is a special fee - which there was - you have to pay that yourself) I would just have to suck it up and learn how to sing "Camelot."
[NOTE: For a gay old time, literally and figuratively, rent "Camelot" from your local library. Watch the seen where they sing "Camelot" and then feel sorry for me.]
Though my teacher had a great singing voice, ("I can sing much lower than most women," she said. Frightening.) I quickly found that she was not what you would call "organized," "punctual" or even "reliable." Though I practiced and practiced that stupid song for weeks, I never really got the chance to sing it because she had a tendency to always miss our appointments.
It started harmlessly enough. On the morning of our second lesson she called me and told me she was having car trouble and she wouldn't be making it in. "S'all good," I said, "I'll catch you next week." Then the next week she had to reschedule because she had to go to a funeral. (The funeral wasn't the day of the lesson, but she had to get other things done that day.) For each lesson we had, my teacher usually cancelled two.
Halfway through July, I had only had four lessons and was thinking there was absolutely no way that we were going to get another seven lessons in by the end of the semester. I was standing next to the piano singing scales during lesson number five when I looked down and noticed a furry little ball on the floor. It was an enormous dead rat. Now I'm not a fan of dead varmints, but I really didn't want to miss another lesson. My conscience got the better of me, however, and I said, "Uh, I don't want to alarm you, but there's a pretty significantly-sized dead rat on the floor." My teacher jumped from the piano bench, ushered me out of the room and declared, "I'm canceling classes for the rest of the day!" What a shocker.
I believe the next two classes were cancelled due to inclement weather. "It's stormy outside and I don't want you to have to walk out in that weather," was the message on my voicemail. My lessons were upstairs. I didn't even have to leave the building.
The next week it was too hot in the room. I tried to not let on that I was burning up in that hot little un-airconditioned studio, but my sweat gave me away. "It's just too hot in here. I'm going to cancel the rest of the day's lessons."
Despite all of this, she ensured me we were right on schedule. Two weeks and two more cancellations came and went and the semester was officially over. Probably bothered by a guilty conscience, she called me for one last appointment. I was going to have to cut our 45 minute session short by 15 minutes because I had a work meeting I had to go to. When she showed up 15 minutes late, as she often did, I told her I would have to leave in 15 minutes. "Oh, that's perfect because we just have 15 minutes left to fill to complete our semester." Whah?!
That gave us just enough time to warm up and sing "Camelot" one last time - making it three times that I sung the song over the course of an entire semester.
"Since you're auditing the class, I don't give you a grade. But if I were to give you a grade, you would get an A!" she exclaimed. Oh, how comforting.
Now, you're probably thinking, "Man, you paid a lot of money, why did you let yourself get ripped off like that?" In the end, I guess I didn't get screwed as bad as I thought. I did a bit of research. Though she did say in her catalog listing that she offered 12 30-minute sessions, I found out that's not really what the deal was. I looked at some of the other private voice listing and they all mentioned 12 30-minute lessons. Her justification was that we always had 45-minute lessons, so if you are looking at it by minutes, eight 45-minute lessons is equal to 12 half-hour lessons. (Information that would have been nice up front.)
In the end I wasn't as bugged by the number of lessons as the irregularity of it all. It is really hard to learn anything when you don't follow a schedule. It's hard to retain anything if you are only meeting every third week.
So a semester later I still suck at singing and I'm $240 poorer. How's that for a raw deal? On a positive note, my mom loves "Camelot" and mentioned paying for more singing lessons after she heard me sing it.
