Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation (15 page)

We were all
Idol
contestants, no Randy Jackson.

But we were determined. Motivated. Obstinate even. Willing to feel our way in the
dark. To suck terribly in the pursuit of excellence.

And let me tell you, we fucking sucked.

Because we were so rough around the edges, early on we decided we needed a gimmick,
a special look. Our singing was still quavering and unsure, so we figured if we had
a flashy presentation, people might not notice dropped lyrics and wobbly key migrations.
We also figured this would set us apart from everyone else and make us seem more professional.

Sure.

We kicked this around for a while—how to come up with a look that was casual yet polished,
accessible yet refined.
⁸
We struggled with every thematic idea, every visual trick, our brainstorming hampered
severely by the fact that we were college kids whose daily uniform involved a college
sweatshirt and jeans that smelled of Bic pens and taco salad. We couldn’t afford uniforms,
eveningwear seemed pretentious, and just showing up in whatever we were wearing that
day would make us look like an assemblage of slovenly singing street urchins. We got
tired, then bored, then quietly annoyed.

We finally settled on an idea that was simple, affordable, and easy to execute: a
set of variations on the mock turtleneck.
⁹
Why? Because this was the nineties, the United States was completely devoid of any
style whatsoever, and the mock turtle was the height of sartorial edge. Functional
yet fun. Business at the collarbone, party at the neck. We had settled on the mullet
of clothing items.

But how to make this special? Indeed, how
do
you make a group of college women in mock turtlenecks look like anything but a team
of foodservice workers or a large modern jazz collective?

The answer was in one of our first songs, a maudlin and forgettable piece by the group
Yaz called “Mr. Blue.”
¹⁰
The name said it all. We would all wear different tops, of different colors, and
we could introduce ourselves to the audience according to the color of our shirts.
As in—and I am not exaggerating here—“Hi! My name is Aisha, and I’m Mr. Green.”

I am Mr. Shattered Pride.

This weirdly non sequitur and socially self-destructive performance bit continued
the entire first year of our group’s existence, and into the second. We were earnest,
we were determined, and we were undeterred. There was a wholesomeness to our ham-fisted
approach, a sweetness that balanced out the off-putting peculiarity of it all. We
were adorable, the way a yipping puppy is adorable right before it scoots its filthy
bottom on your heirloom rug.

But we kept at it. And we practiced, and squawked, and blew on those infernal pitch
pipes, and we eventually got better. And then, we actually got good.

The big badge of acceptance at Dartmouth was being invited to “Spring Sing,” an a
cappella concert that was held—yes, each spring—and involved some rotating segment
of all the on-campus groups. Not all of the groups were invited, mind you. This was
not a democracy, and every year the group that got to plan the Spring Sing and invite
the other groups let us know it.

We’d been around for three years at this point, and had been snubbed by the group
that organized the Spring Sing every year. It hurt, because we had actually gotten
very popular, selling out shows and even recording an album. We had finally lost those
infernal mock turtlenecks. But somehow, not being invited to the Spring Sing reminded
us that we were still outsiders. We were the Nickelback of our school, loved by the
masses but rejected by the establishment. We acted like we didn’t care, but we did.
We cared a lot.

Each year, when the Spring Sing lineup was announced, we would be eager and bouncy
and puppyishly confident that
this
was going to be the time we got an invitation, then bitterly stung when we realized
we weren’t on the list. But, like most wounds do, each time we got stung it hurt a
little bit less. And eventually, like a wryly funny but socially awkward wallflower
in some high school swarming with viciously exclusive cliques, we resigned ourselves
to never getting invited to the big dance. And that was okay. We continued singing
and performing and writing sketches that made people laugh and making our “art,” sometimes
good, sometimes bad, but always ours. We got better outfits. We forgot about pleasing
others, and started pleasing ourselves.

And then, one day, we finally got invited to Spring Sing.

I am Mr. Shrieking Delight.

I won’t lie. This was one of the greatest days of my young life. I had been acting
like I didn’t care if we ever performed at this thing, but I was freaking thrilled.
We were going to sing in front of a theater full of our peers, some of whom I really
wanted to lord this over. This was rewarding. This was validating. This was utterly
satisfying. It would have been a dream come true, but there was something oddly anticlimactic
about it. After all these years of wanting this prize, yearning for it, and crying
over it, now that we had it, it felt a bit . . . meh. We had put the Spring Sing dream
to bed long ago. If we had never been invited to that concert, it wouldn’t have changed
how we saw ourselves. We were making the music we wanted to make, and every time we
stepped on to a stage
¹¹
in front of an audience, our heads raced and our hearts fluttered. We loved what
we did, and after a long slog through insecurity and self-doubt, we finally didn’t
care what anyone else thought. We knew who we were.

Getting the chance to show our classmates how super hot we already knew we were was
just icing.
¹²

The show was a triumph. We weren’t perfect by any means, but we were enthusiastic,
and mostly in tune, and we broke out some sexy new choreography,
¹³
and we blew those other pinstriped crooners out of the water. And in the name of
all that is good and holy, we were not wearing those insufferable fucking turtlenecks.
We killed it. We had arrived.

Years later, the group we founded still performs, with a new crop of inductees joining
with each freshman class. They have recorded multiple albums and given concerts all
over the world. If you had told that ragtag group of girls that first freshman year
that what we were doing would create a musical legacy that would last more than two
decades, we would have laughed until we cried all over our polyblend mock turtlenecks.

We didn’t know we were renegades. We weren’t trying to be rebels. We just wanted to
sing. But you never know what you can create if you put your heart into it unreservedly,
and never let anyone else make you feel as if you don’t belong. Because a rebel is
just a guy who doesn’t have the good sense to go the same way the crowd is going,
and the composure to act like that was his idea all along.

For the record, I take credit for starting the whole mock turtleneck trend.

You’re welcome, Apple.

( 17 )

The Time I Danced Tragically in Front of My Entire College

“There are some wounds that one can heal only by deepening them and making them worse.”
—
A
UGUSTE DE
V
ILLIERS DE L
’I
SLE-
A
DAM

“I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. Let’s just get out there and see what happens.”
—
A
ISHA
T
YLER

Just
because I could sing, doesn’t mean I could dance.

People often make this unfortunate extrapolation. If you can carry a tune, the assumption
is that you are a crunk beat away from getting your Usher on and doing a backflip
into the faces of the evil opposing dance team while a crowd full of hard-luck kids
with hearts of gold tauntingly intone “ooooooh.” I could not manage a backflip with
a gravity harness and a team of assistants, but this matters not; it is a skill set
people assign to me anyway. The fact that I am black does nothing to help disabuse
people of the notion that I can drop it down and back it up.

I cannot drop it down and back it up, unless you are talking about a shitty car with
a weak suspension into a parallel parking spot.
¹

In fact, being black has not helped me at all in this regard. I know that is typically
our domain, but I spent my childhood making tiny villages out of mud and sticks when
I should have been booty popping and krush groove locking. The boogie wonderland passed
me by; I missed out on this skill development completely. And much like learning a
language, I’m pretty sure the neural pathways that govern dancing form at a very tender
age. If you don’t start learning early, after a certain age you are reduced to the
dancing equivalent of only being able to speak barely functional English. I have mastered
a limited number of dances that I interchange with gusto, much like the facial features
on a Mr. Potato Head. They are rudimentary and visually lackluster, and they have
served me for years.
²
It is far too late for me to change now.

I will never be the lead in
Step Up 17: Old Lady Finally Gets Around to Krumpin’.
I have made my peace with this.

But in college, I had not yet come to terms with my lack of dancing skills or with
my utter lack of physical dexterity of any kind. In my head, I was a gazelle, lithe
and graceful, gliding across campus like a wayward angel fallen to earth, strewing
fragrant blossoms and opals in her path.

In reality, I was a massive, galumphing klutz. Towering, awkward, and completely oblivious
to anything happening around me. I was insanely accident-prone. I had the unique ability
to find the one sharp item in a room full of down pillows and dandelion fluff, then
impale myself on it violently and repeatedly, perhaps nicking a few bystanders in
the process. I was the human equivalent of Mechagodzilla, crushing all in my path
to dust in an orgy of carnage.

I would often write off my clumsiness to context or exhaustion, or the thoughtless
interference of others. But these were feeble and groundless protestations. One night,
walking alone mid-winter across the icy campus quad with an armful of books and a
large cup of coffee, on my way to a last-minute study session the night before midterms,
I managed the kind of feet-in-the-air, ass-over-teakettle earth-shattering tumble
that you might see in vintage animation classics like
Scooby Doo
or
Hong Kong Phooey
. You could literally hear the “whip-eedip-whip-whip-whip-whip-whee!” of my feet slip-sliding
on the ice, then soaring far above my head, as books, coffee, my backpack, and possibly
a tooth went airborne—then clattered with a thud to the solid, unforgiving ice. As
there was no one around for a quarter mile, I could not blame
this
fall on anything but my staggering inability to control the movements of my own body.

My ass throbbed like a bongo drum for three months after that. When it came to pratfalls,
I didn’t fuck around. Major irreparable personal damage was the name of my game.

So why I ever thought it was a good idea to enter a lip-syncing contest where I would
be expected to fake sing,
and
dance, to a popular song, on stage, in front of others, is a mystery. I mean, my
fellow students were drunken college kids, sleep deprived and starved for entertainment,
but they weren’t drooling imbeciles. Someone was sure to notice my total lack of dancing
ability and highlight it to others in the kind of “point-and-screech” physical stance
used by body snatchers to alert their fellow aliens that someone among them still
possesses their human faculties. Even going in, I knew there was no way for this to
end but terribly, humiliatingly, and with someone possibly losing an eye or a digit.
Or both.

I forged ahead anyway, mostly because my best friend assured me that we would have
really cool outfits. Still stinging from the shame of that abominable mock turtleneck,
I would have agreed to a public stoning if it meant I could change perceptions about
my fashion sense. A public stoning would have been less painful than this performance.
At least with a stoning there’s no choreography.

Of all the professions people fantasize about, pop star is the only one people assume
they could do right away if given the opportunity, without experience, training, divine
gift or dumb luck. People may armchair quarterback their favorite football team, but
no one thinks that if the coach reached out through the flat screen and tapped them
on the shoulder they could suddenly shake the D-line and make a mad scramble for second
down. And while we may complain about, criticize, or abhor politicians, very few have
the stomach to stand bare before the nation while people dig through every filthy
detail of their pasts, poring over offhanded comments and questionable investments,
parsing letters to ex-girlfriends and drunken photographic tweets. We all talk a good
game, but most of us know when we’re outclassed.

That is, in every discipline but pop performer. As evidenced by the litany of teary-eyed,
bleating tragedies that stream past the camera at the beginning of every season of
American Idol
, every bobblehead with half a vocal cord and a Hot Topic half-shirt thinks they have
what it takes to be the next Bruno Mars. Never mind that they’ve never had a voice
lesson or held an instrument in their lives.
³
Everyone thinks that all they need is the right lighting and a copy of Pro Tools
to be the second coming of Gaga.

I, apparently, was one of these bobbleheads. And this was my shot to show everyone
how selfless I had been to choose academia over my true calling: uplifting lives and
devastating hearts while jamming to a funky beat.
⁴