Three Layer Cake

Kristina Karaoke

 

 

 

    I guess it all started when I told my father I wanted to play violin in first grade.  The school sent around a little permission slip to parents asking if their children were interested in learning a stringed instrument.  Lessons would be given following the Suzuki method.  I had dreamed of playing the violin, and finally, I had my chance.  My father went out and got a little violin for me and I began the following week with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  I screeched around on the violin that night until I figured out the song on my own, that was the Suzuki method.  First year, no reading music, just screeching and scratching around til you figured it out.  A song was played for you, you remembered it, and played it back.  Needless to say, this was the beginning of a beautiful relationship (between me and my memory). By the next summer, when it was time to read music, I wasn't too enthusiastic.  I fudged my way through, relying on my memory.  I guess that was the real stumbling block to my progress.  As my classmates soared through complex songs, I was still stuck in Twinkle Twinkleville, more or less.  For the next seven years, I bounced from violin teacher to violin teacher.  They all quit.  They all said it wasn't anything personal...

 

    Since I couldn't use my memory with the violin to any great success, I used it for song lyrics.  I religiously listened to Casey Kasem's America's Top 40 every Sunday, and every New Year's.  By the time I got to my last year in high school (barely out of the eighties), I had, through no fault of my own, learned every song that hit the Top 40 in the 1980s.  Not the Top 10, the Top 40.  My sophomore year, every day in English, my friend Kerby and I started on song one of Tracy Chapman Tracy Chapman and sang almost in a whisper until we were told to shut up by the teacher, and/or I got thrown out of class, usually simultaneously.  (Kerby was my air-guitarist from middle school through high school)

 

     My senior year, I convinced my government teacher to let our class, which had won a competition and a trip to Washington DC to represent the State of Tennessee, to sing We Are the World to Al Gore when he came to present us with our award.  (My best friend leaned across the aisle and asked,"Kristina, did you just ask her if we could sing We Are the World to Al Gore?"  I answered, "Yes."  He asked, "Did she just say Yes?"  I answered, "Yes."  You see, I had been proposing that my class, any and every one, sing We Are the World for four years, even when there was no occasion to entertain such discussions.)  After battling with the decision of Cyndi Lauper's or Steve Perry's part, I raised my hand and announced that I'd be doing the Steve Perry part.  Al Gore stood us up.  He doesn't know what he missed, or maybe that's why he missed it.  (Do you think someone told him that we were going to sing We Are the World?)  To celebrate our graduation, I organized a spoof of our school's pop band, the Pop Ensemble, and called it the Flop Ensemble.  I used my treasured Rock Guitar Fake Book to put together a brief collection of songs to sing on the front stairs of school.  Night Shift was our strongest piece.

 

 

In the car on the way to Atlanta once, a four hour drive from Nashville, my friends tried to find a radio station or a music tape that played something to which I didn't know the words.  Didn't work.  Instead of winning some worthy prize, silence was imposed on the way back as some sort of punishment for knowing the A sides AND the B sides to every tape they had brought in the car.  When I got to University, I had the pleasure of learning that I had even wrangled perfect pitch out of those violin lessons.  And from my dedicated Bee Gees, Jon Secada, Journey, Madonna, Public Enemy, NWA, Earth Wind and Fire, Indigo Girls, and everything else song sessions, I was nicknamed Kristina Karaoke.  But you shouldn't imagine that I was like an air-guitarist.  I was just singing in my own little world, for the most part. 

 

 

    Through graduate school, I specialized in Italian pop-music (almost the worst there is out there) Loredana Berte', 883, Raf, Lucio Dalla.  Once I started my first job, I moved back to U.S. music.  Not too long ago, I was listening to my MP3 player on the train, and mouthing the words to songs like We Are the World (a perennial favorite), especially passionate on the Steve Perry part, and when I got up to leave, a woman said, "AAAW, what a shame.  We're losing our singer."  I wasn't sure how to take that...as an offense, or an invitation to tell her that if she liked, I could actually sing We Are the World and the other songs to her quite audibly (Islands in the Stream by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Pardon, Like a Stone by Audioslave, Endless Love by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross, Don't Stop Believin' by Journey, California Love by 2Pac).

 

     Still, my singing was never with the intention of garnering attention.  My biggest fan to date has probably been my dog Crash! who, while he doesn't join in on the harmony, does allow me to change the lyrics to include his name without getting offended, like with the Oscar the Grouch song, I Love Trash.  Since I've been married, I've changed my approach to singing.  Instead of singing to myself, now I go to the other side of the house and sing at the top of my lungs all of the songs I know which have parts that can be shrill and startling.  Ray of Light by Madonna, Easy Lover by Philip Bailey and Phil Collins,  Beast of Burden and Miss You by Rolling Stones, Sister Christian by Night Ranger, Turn me On by Keith Lyttle, Cry Me a River by Justin Timberlake (the Remix)... Even though I do it to get on my husband's nerves when he won't let me watch something on TV I want or something like that, not ONCE has he ever come and told me to shut up.  Not even when I come into the room with him and act out the Time Gous by con Loli dance and sing like she does.  Not even when I come running into the room and scream THIS IS THE BEST PART, LISTEN LISTEN, THIS IS WHAT I'M SINGING AT MY AMERICAN IDOL TRY OUT, BUT I'LL NEED THE JUDGES TO SING THE BACK UP VOCALS.  (Somebody to Love, by Queen).  All he does is humor me.  He says, "OK, show me your act.  How are you going to dress?  Do you have a dance in mind?"

 

    So imagine my extreme happiness when I was told that at the work Christmas party, there will be Karaoke.  I asked my husband if he'd be one of my back up singers when I sing Somebody to Love.  He said he has to think about it.  I bet I can hook him if I let him sing Steve Perry's part in We Are the World.  Or maybe he'll want Huey Lewis.  I've started to spread the word at work that the mic will be mine.  I wonder if I'll still have a job afterwards...