Another "flashback:" American Idol Auditions

Since my life right now is dominated by stacks and stacks of thick books that I have to read, I decided to recycle a post from 2007 that originally appeared as a MySpace note. (remember MySpace?) The post recounts my experience auditioning for "American Idol," and it is sentimental for me because the setting is the old Cowboys' Stadium in Irving, which is now nothing more than a pile of rubble. Here it is, in all its former glory:



In fact, one of my fondest memories of that day is hearing the reverence in the voice of a stage-mom behind me as she scolded her son for being disrespectful in that hallowed home of America's team. (true story). This tale also bears repeating for the many well-meaning folks who have encouraged me to audition for the crazy reality-TV spectacle that is "American Idol." In addition to musical differences that I have with the style of the show, the audition process, which I've endured twice, is not really worth a third try. Anyway, without further ado, here is my "flashback" blog post:

In 2006 I made the time-consuming journey from Fort Worth, TX to San Antonio for the American Idol auditions. I did not make it onto network television, but I was happy to say that I had at least tried. However, when people asked if I would do it again, I insisted that I would only return if the auditions were held in my back yard.

This year [2007] the auditions were held at the Dallas Cowboys Texas Stadium in Irving, TX, which meant a short twenty minute drive from the apartment I share with my husband. Bound by my own promise I once again subjected myself to the ridiculous process that can only be described as "American Idle."

The day of the auditions I arrived at Texas Stadium at the officially recommended time of 5:00 in the morning. My experience from the previous year told me that I did not really need to be there until about 7:00; nevertheless, I showed up at 5 to be with a friend. Oh, would that I had followed my instinct!

Our position in line was toward the middle of the vast throng of Idol hopefuls that encircled the entire stadium. We did not move until about 7:00, at which point there were still newcomers taking their place at the end of the line. Then tragedy struck: the line we were in was split in two, allowing for entry at opposite ends of the stadium. This meant that we were now at the end of the line, and the late comers were getting to go in first.

We stood. We shuffled ahead at irregular and lengthy intervals. We waited. The sun rose above the unattractive skyline of Irving. Eight o'clock, the appointed time for the auditions to begin, came and went. The sun rose higher, and we waited. We were a motley assortment of humanity: rock stars and rappers; drag queens and divas; the poor and the privileged – all united in a grumbling, sweaty, stinky mass. Still the sun climbed higher into the sky.

The outrageous wait was due mostly to the need to search every bag for food and confiscate it. Most everyone had brought food, as the official American Idol rules indicated it would be all right to have it. However, the rules also stated that some stadiums would not allow food, forcing us to purchase five dollar nachos and three dollar bottles of water.

As the cause of our delay became clear people began to frantically remove all the food from their bags while still in line. But instead of walking a short distance to dispose of their food in trash cans, most left it on the ground. So as those of us in the back of line advanced, we found ourselves trudging through empty wrappers, boxes, and bags, as well as half-eaten food of every assortment. Some left entirely full containers of good food, now beginning to decay in the smoldering August sun.

The security guards were actually patting people down now and were splitting the line by gender. I joked (perhaps rather tastelessly) that they could tell us we were going to "the showers" to be gassed, and we would have willingly believed such a promise; the seething, perspiring throng that we were.

Around 10:00 we made it inside the stadium. There the waiting continued in the sweltering heat. Located at regular intervals across the football field were ten tables covered with tents at which were seated ten American Idol producers. Contestants were divided into groups of four and sent to sing their hearts out for fifteen to thirty seconds in front of one of the producers. My group waited in the August heat until 8:00 p.m. to finally take our 15 seconds of stage time in front of an American Idol producer.

The judge for my group of contestants was a beautiful British blonde. "British is good," I thought, for I had decided to sing a selection from The Beatles' classic, "Hey Jude." When my group advanced to the next in line to sing, I watched as our judge smilingly put a terrible singer through to the next round. It was with that same sweetness that, after we had each laid a bit of our hearts bare in song there on the green turf of the football field, she told my group that none of us would make it through. I breathed a heavy sigh – not of disappointment, but of relief. Then, sunburned, dehydrated, and half-delirious with heat, I trudged up the ramp out of the Cowboys end zone into the light of the westering sun to search for my car and go home.

Concert flashback: the Lost show

I've posted this video before. It's of Adam and me at one of our most frequented coffeehouses, White Rock Coffee in Dallas, playing my song, "Wonderland." It's also the only remaining record of one of my favorite shows ever: the "Lost" show.



It was May, 2010, and the TV show, Lost was in its final season.  We were the most faithful of fans, re-watching every season each year leading up to the new season, and then religiously attending the free screenings of the show at the Dallas Angelika movie theater every week. And now, it all came down to a two-hour finale.

So, the weekend before the finale, we created a concert made up almost entirely of songs featured on Lost. We reminisced about that heart-warming beach montage as we played Joe Purdy's "Wash Away;" we remembered the first time we met Desmond Hume as we joyfully sang Mama Cass's "Make Your Own Kind of Music;" we memorialized Charlie Pace in our "Charlie Pace medley," which included Oasis's "Wonderwall," the Beach Boys's "Good Vibrations," and, of course, Drive Shaft's "You all, everybody;" and we remembered the moment on the show when Hurley's MP3 player stopped working and we knew things were getting serious as we played Damien Rice's "Delicate." If you look very closely, in the video, you can see a tiny Dharma symbol on my right shoulder (my hair keeps getting in the way), and the picture on Adam's shirt is of the band, Geronimo Jackson. (We were really big nerds, um, fans).

 It was a glorious concert -- an evening filled with hope and joy and the idealism of people who believe that their favorite TV show will not leave them disappointed. We knew that in just a couple of days, all our questions from the previous years would be answered, and we would walk away satisfied. This concert was our tribute.

Alas, that did not happen. Adam and I were both bitterly disappointed with Lost's ending, which I won't give away here. And that concert stands in my memory as truly a time of a kind of innocence. Sounds silly, I know. The saddest part is, there weren't even any real Lost fans in attendance. It was only after the show was over that someone showed up and started geeking out over Adam's Geronimo Jackson shirt.

But we sure had a lot of fun making our own kind of music.

Bookstore Show!

I love Half Price Books. Even if I didn't need to spend all my extra money on books because I'm a grad student, I would still spend a good chunk of my income on creating the perfect old book and vinyl collection. Since I love Half Price Books so much, I'm especially excited about our upcoming show in February:

This concert will be an informal, unplugged event at the Half Price Books in Humble, TX. So, if you are in the Houston area, we would love for you to stop by any time between 7 and 9 pm on Friday, Feb. 24th, and allow us to enhance your book-purchasing experience with a little bit of original music. Maybe I can manage to leave the gig without spending all the tips/CD money on more books!

Voice lessons learned

Today I had my first formal voice lesson since college -- make that, since my junior year in college. That was eight years ago -- yikes! Last semester I had the exciting opportunity to perform in the graduate student ensemble of Robert Xavier Rodriguez, singing a series of Scottish and Irish folk songs set by Beethoven. This semester, among other things, I'm singing this:



I get to sing it in English, but language aside, this is still quite difficult, and in a style I haven't performed in consistently for the aforementioned 8 years since college voice lessons.

So, I'm excited to be beginning lessons again, and I'm always happy to see how I will apply what I learn to the kind of singing that I do on a more regular basis. As a teenager, I took a lot of pride in having never had lessons, but now I understand that there are things that I can't see or hear about the way I sing that take another person to point out and help with. I also understand now that a voice teacher can't really change your voice; he/she can only give you the toolbox. Also, you would never expect a professional athlete not to work with a trainer, so why shouldn't singers have trainers, too?

At any rate, with everything going on with school (including learning this music), there's just not as much time to play the normal gigs, but I wanted to let everyone know that I'm still performing music, just in a different way.

Happy Friday -- with cats!

Earlier this week, you saw a picture of Desmond, "helping" me study. Here he is again:

"I'm too sexy for this blog..."

Confession time: for those of you who don't know me that well, I am pretty much a crazy cat mom. I love my cats -- the way other people love their children. When some women see babies, their voices raise a couple of octaves and they turn into cooing, squealing creatures themselves. This happens to me when I see kittens. It also happens frequently when one of my cats does something cute. Molly is especially good at this, since she is the fuzziest, prettiest thing in the world. (Could you hear my voice getting higher and higher just then?)  I am not a visual artist, but the other day, I tried to draw Molly, so taken was I with her peaceful, sleeping face in the sunlight:

Here's what she really looks like, though neither my amateur sketches nor my amateur photography can do her justice:

I am Elizabeth Molly, your Queen. Bow to me as I usher in England's Golden Age. 

Thanks for humoring me as I talk about my cats. It probably won't be the last time.

And Happy Friday.

Writing Prompts: follow up

Between facebook and blog participation, I have three writing prompts to work with after Monday's blog entry. This one is most likely to yield results, simply because I've written songs this way in the past:

I think it would be totally cool (fittingly nerdy) to do a medley or series of songs that serve as odes to your favorite books and/or book characters. Even if the songs come out a little silly.

I agree.  Book characters are fun to write about, because creative interpretation of them also seems to yield different insights to the characters than plain old analysis does. In addition to my song, "Ophelia," I've also written a cycle of four songs (meant for dramatic performance) from the point of view of Nina, from Chekov's The Seagull.  I learned a lot more about her character that way than I think I would have from a traditional paper.  So, perhaps this prompt will inspire some songs.

Another prompt:

...What would you say to your 10-year-old self growing up on Horseshoe Trail? [The name of the street where I grew up].

This one is very difficult for me. It's hard not to make something like this too sentimental or cheesy, like a bad country song -- something like: "remember the laughter and summertime friends/ and hang on to summer, 'cause summer always ends..." On the other hand, I might be prone to a certain level of bitterness in talking to my 10-year-old self: "When it's time to go to college, don't get a music degree; the industry will fail and never recover..." But that's not very helpful, and doesn't make a good song. So, I'm going to have to think hard about that one.

The final prompt is more of a brainstorming exercise:

Recently I was given a prompt to make two lists that characterize me--one of just physical traits, another of personality traits--then make those lists with traits that don't charictarize me, or traits of "not me". It was a telling and helpful exercise.

This I completely intend to carry out, because it involves making lists -- something I love to do.

As promised, if any of these writing prompts yield a song or songs, I'll post it here.

And if you come up with any creative results based on these writing prompts, I'd love to hear about it!

On Creativity and Boundaries

Do you remember back in  elementary school when your teacher would write writing prompts on the board for a class exercise? They would usually say something like, "Describe a time your family went on vacation," or "What would your house be like if you lived on the moon?" I always enjoyed these prompts, but back then, when I was bubbling over with the creative ramblings of an imaginative pre-pubescent, I also felt like writing prompts stifled my creativity. I wanted to write about kittens who could talk (heck, I still want to write about that), or about girls like me having wild adventures. (Two real stories that I uncovered from my young writing days include one about a squirrel named Dolly who leads a quiet life in her tree, going to the squirrel market and having tea with her squirrel friends, and one about a middle school girl who finds out that the guy she likes is an alien -- of course, most middle school boys are kind of like aliens at that stage.)

Anyway, the point should be clear: writing prompts were unwelcome constraints on my imaginative output.

Alas, that is no longer the case -- especially when it comes to writing songs. Over the last couple of years, I've had severe writer's block when it comes to subject matter.

Desmond, my cat, tries to help, but he doesn't understand that nothing rhymes with "orange."

In fact, some of my best writing in recent years has been from concrete inspiration -- mostly assignments -- kind of like writing prompts. For example, the song "Ophelia" from Girl on a String is about the play, Hamlet, and was written as part of a class requirement to respond in creative ways to the readings. In another class, on Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, I came up with a list of "rules" about Dylan's writing style from his folk period, and wrote a few songs trying to adhere strictly to those rules. Another time, I attended a Beth Moore Bible study on the Psalms of Ascent and was inspired to write songs based on those psalms. I only got as far as two of them, but it was still a useful exercise. The point is, in recent years, my creativity has come unlocked whenever I have been forced to fit into some kind of pre-determined mode.

So this is where you come in, reader. I need some writing prompts for songs. The well is mostly dry these days (probably because it's being sucked dry by my dissertation writing). So, I'd like you to provide those storm clouds of inspiration. Give me a writing prompt (or several) and if I end up using it, I'll post the song in a video here. Try to be somewhat specific. ("write a love song" won't help; "write a love song about the travails of a cat person and a dog person trying to make a relationship work" is more helpful -- though it might make a silly song.)

I can't wait to see what you all come up with, and thanks for the help!

--Christine