The premature wee-dee, or was it???

February 24, 2008 by Ro.

Singing live, onstage, in front of an audience — certainly can inspire terror. Or on a good day, a bit of nervousness. But for sure, whenever we sing at a performance, there is a certain amount of “out of body” experience. To the audience, we probably appear perfectly normal, smiley and happy, self-assured, well-rehearsed, and in control. But, inside our own heads it’s a different story.

Today, for example, we do a show, and we are very well-received. The audience is happy and smiling and singing along. They request our cards. They seek us out afterwards to compliment our singing, our repertoire, our costumes (well, we ARE cute, Audrey and Ro in our “bumblebee” outfits: yellow and black sparkly tops straight off Macy’s clearance rack. We are, in a word, adorable.). And yet, to us, there are glitches and moments of panic only we are aware of (and sometimes blissfully unaware).

Take, for instance, the premature wee-dee. There is a part in “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” where Steve and Ro duet on the “wee-dee” part. The actual words are, and I am not making this up: “Wee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee eee um mum away.” Hey, Gershwin it’s not, but it’s still a big hit. Anyway, this duet wee-dee part comes after two verses. Well, the performance is going great, Audrey is singing like a little angel for what Ro counted as two verses, and then Ro launches into her duet wee-dee part with Steve. EXCEPT HE ISN’T SINGING.

So here’s the whole gist of this blog entry: what goes through your mind onstage when things clearly aren’t going the way they were rehearsed. Now, mind you, things aren’t going badly: the audience has no idea it is supposed to be a duet, but Ro is thinking, “Holy jeez. I am singing alone. Did I come in too early? Didn’t I count two “sha’s”? OMG did I prematurely wee-dee? Will the song finish 30 seconds early because of my mistake? Why has Steve been rendered mute?”

All these thoughts fire through Ro’s neurons at lightning speed as she is singing the now-solo wee-dee part.

And the song continues, and finishes, and it is a big success. But it remains unclear whether Ro prematurely wee-dee’d or whether she just took Steve by surprise.

Either way, it explains why we all sweat so much during a show.

There are always unforeseen factors at work during a show. Things that cannot be imagined during rehearsal. WHAT IF the place you’re singing has a large birdcage with a lovely but very vocal bird inside that persists in squawking and tweeting incessantly during your songs? WHAT IF a cell phone rings — twice— in the middle of a ballad? WHAT IF enthusiastic audience members are so transported by your music that they sing along — a lovely thing, except that they don’t know the arrangements and the key modulations and the tempo changes and become quite distracting? WHAT IF your bumblebee outfit is so low-cut that you can’t take a bow without exposing your very nonnies?

And all these thought occur while you are in the middle of singing and supposedly concentrating on lyrics and breathing and stage presence.

I suppose that explains why we show folk make the big bucks.

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