This Monday's Observations. I cannot sing along with Stevie Nicks. Generally, I have this problem of mimicking singers too closely when I'm singing along anyway, and for the most part -- high soprano notes obviously excepted -- I do alright. However, if there's an inherent rasp involved, say, like Stevie's, then I've finally learned my lesson.
Driving to work this morning, swaying on the steering wheel to "lovers forever/face-to-face/my city your mountain/stay with me, stay" I realized that I was all up on Don Henley's part and then "Edge of Seventeen" came on ...
(I know. You're wondering what's with all the Stevie Nicks. It's a phase. I can't say if or when it'll be over because listening to "Leather and Lace" just makes me want to sashay and swirl in reams of chiffon wearing a top hat and shaking a tambourine endlessly. Seriously? That's just a good beat. So good that I found myself just humming along and dancing to it in the middle of the aisle in the grocery store, doing the Axl Rose in slow motion.)
Anyway, back to "Edge of Seventeen." I have a cold. You'd think that would've been enough to keep me from singing out loud in the first place because with my head stopped up like it is, I can really hear how far away I came from hitting every.single.note in Jennifer Hudson's "All Dressed In Love." But I'm a contender and was in a radiant, on-the-up-and-up kinda mood this morning and so I busted right on out with "Just like a white-winged dove sings a song sounds like she's singin'!" like I wrote that piece.
I was doin' good, y'all. I skipped the "whoos" and peppered the verses with random words I remembered like "broken hearted," "all alone" and my favorite "hauntingly ... familiar!" But chi'ren? By the time I got to the part about the melody and the voice from the choir "nothing else mattered" indeed because my tail was choking. In a phlegm rattling, air-gasping wheeze I was flailing on the edge of the road - bump seventeen!
Oh, and you know trying to breathe takes precedence over a clutch and gears that don't change themselves. My car was lunging -- like that desperate Olympic runner who's dead last but determined to make it to the finish line -- and I chugged along and pulled dejectedly into the gas station parking lot thanking the Lord that like Toni Braxton I could "Breathe Again."
