thediastema's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Soprano voices of the past. When we were twelve, I landed in a class with Moira, and barely took notice. When we were thirteen, I developed a crush on a boy, who developed a crush on her, and she could have cared less. When we were fourteen, I envied her this, and her perfect grades, and that year, I first heard her sing, and I envied her voice, too. When we were fifteen, separated from the guy by high school, I admired her. When we were sixteen, we began eating lunch with the same group of people. When we were seventeen, we landed in A Cappella together and I had a seat on the staff of the school lit mag, which she edited. By eighteen, we were good buddies, suppressing laughter at the most inappropriate moments of sacrament meeting performances and circulating Disneyland together on the choir's annual trip to California. Through her, I became friends with the Artist Formerly Known as my Accompanist. After high school, we didn't maintain much contact. She came to shows, and to my voice recital, and once we got lunch with the Artist. This was about it. Her father ordered Macbeth tickets through me, and I told him to say hello. The other day, I had a message from her on the machine... Sunday night, the Artist was playing for Moira's last recital before she embarks on her mission to Spain. If Moira's voice stunned me when I first heard it as a pimply fourteen-year-old, it absolutely floored me now; she's got over a decade of classical training under her belt. If you feel rumbling, it's Minnie Riperton doing a double-take in her grave -- that's the sort of octaves Moira's tacked onto her range. We're both a good distance from the dowdy girls we were in secondary school -- she had abandoned her corduroys and hippie hair for a wavy pageboy and a string of pearls, and I now dress less like a confused first lady and perhaps more like what Dimples calls a "naughty Catholic schoolgirl." Moira's studying English, and I've abandoned higher education altogether. Neither of us is engaged yet, unlike everybody else in our graduating class (and the one after, for that matter). This comes as little surprise. A thing occurred to me tonight as I watched her from the third row: had I never met Moira, I'd have never become envious, never attempted to bring up my grades, never begun voice training myself. I'd have never made it into A Cappella, never become friends with Scott, and pursuant to that, I'd have never wound up working at PTC. It's the sort of sequence of events you can't even detect until you're several links into it. She's got my contact info. She, the Artist, and I have pacted to get lunch together before they're off to Europe. ~~ An e-mail arrived from Dimples today, inviting me to her end-of-the-schoolyear get-together. I'm not in school, of course, but as she pointed out this is going to be a last hurrah of sorts, "before summer tosses us in different directions." (Don't you love that?) As I told JCGB already, I gave an affirmative RSVP before Better Judgment could stop me, so now I've no choice. I'll just have to dig in my heels and hope it's better than last time. ~ETK 03:40 - 28 April, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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