When I was a young person, I lived in a rural area outside of Buffalo, NY. Throughout my junior and senior high years, I was selected to participate in the Erie County Chorus made up of students from schools all over the county.
I had a big, powerful soprano voice that could fill up a concert hall without a microphone. In the late 50s and early 60s that was essential if one wanted to sing a solo. Individual miking was just unheard of in that era.
One year the concert included a number with a soprano solo. The solo required a strong enough voice, not only to fill the room, but also to sing against the entire choir. I tried out for the part. I really loved the song and believed that I knew better than most teen girls how to interpret it. The theme was serious and moving.
After the try-outs, I went outside the school where the practices were occurring, to wait for the bus back to my home school. As I sat there, one of the music teachers who had judged the try-outs came out of the building, and paused on his way to the parking lot.
What he said went something like this: "I want you to know that you are not going to get the solo....but you should have. You were the only person who tried out who had a powerful enough voice to sing against the entire choir. The director has made a purely political decision. He wanted someone from his own school. The girl he has chosen won't be able to do it alone. He will end up putting others on the part with her."
I don't remember saying anything to him in response. I think I smiled and nodded, and he shrugged and walked away. I had the strangest feeling at that moment...as though I actually felt my life going in one direction rather than another. I didn't feel bitter, but sort of melancholy. Later, I did feel sad, because he was right....3 girls, all from the director's school, ended up trying to sing the solo part together in order to hold their own against the choir. They were, in my view, 3 silly air-headed girls, who had no idea what the words in the solo really meant, and no ability to draw on their very souls to interpret it
Still, I never felt angry. I believed that God had intervened to push me away from a career in music and toward something else. I will never know whether singing in that setting would have caused me to be "discovered" or mentored by someone who understood the music business, and it doesn't matter.
Throughout my life, music remained a form of expression of my most intense personal beliefs. In 2000, I developed a severe laryngitis at the same time I experienced a deep emotional wound. My singing voice has been totally unreliable since. The ENT doctor didn't know if the laryngitis was to blame or whether the inherited neurological tremor I have developed was impacting my vocal chords. He was adamant that it was physiological and not psychogenic, but I feel as though the connection that existed between my voice and my very soul was broken by the terrible hurt I felt...do wounds inflicted by our "friends" ever heal?
Once my voice soared out into the air and rose to heights propelled by an indescribable joy in my spirit. Now sometimes I feel as though a bird with broken wings is flopping around in the core of myself.
When I get to heaven, I expect the wound to be healed, and I will stand on a street corner and sing for eternity.
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