Big Time (6 page)

“I think that's great for today, guys,” says Ms. Kogawa once we've run through the song a few times. “We'll have to do our best to find a guy or two to sing bass, but other than that, it sounded really good. I'm happy to say that I think everyone is going to fit into the group.”

It's been so much fun working out the details of the song, I've completely forgotten that this is actually an audition. I'm surprised to find that I'm excited to hear I've made the cut—for now, at least. Maybe my parents were right about throwing myself into music and improving through hard work. Maybe it won't be that bad after all, although I can only imagine what Meg will say when she hears.

“You were really good on piano,” I say to Bernice as we're putting on our coats. She looks at me as if she's surprised.

“What, you mean today?” she asks. “Thanks, but that's nothing. I've got a background in piano. I've been playing since I was four. This was just plunking out the melody line.”

“Gerri and Tyler, do you mind sticking around for a minute?” Ms. Kogawa asks. We hold back as everyone else leaves. When they've cleared out, she comes around to sit on the front of her desk. “You guys did a really good job today. It isn't always easy to keep up when everyone else has some theory and is able to read music. That said, I do think you could both benefit from a bit of extra training. Are you able to come by here for, say, a half hour or so on Tuesdays after school for the next few weeks?”

“Works for me,” says Tyler.

“Yeah,” I say. “I can do that.”

“Good,” she says. “It'll be fun to see where we end up over the next little while.”

Chapter Eight

As I suspected, Meg thinks the whole thing is insane.

“What do you think you're going to gain from singing with a choral club?” she asks.

It's after school on Tuesday, and I've just explained to her that I can't go to the mall with her because I have to get some extra help from Ms. Kogawa.

“I don't know.” I shrug. “I just want to learn more about music.”

“I don't see the point,” she says, following me down the hallway. “You don't need musical training these days to hit it big. Music producers don't even expect you to have a good voice. They just shove everything through Auto-Tune and out pops a hit single. It's more important to develop a good image than to waste your time with lessons and stuff”

“I'm not trying to get a hit single, Meg,” I say. “I'm joining choral club because I like to sing, and this is a good way to practice and maybe learn a few things”

She looks at me as if I've just sprouted a third eyeball from my forehead.

“That's the craziest thing I've ever heard,” she says. “If you really want to sing, you should just sing on your own. You've got a wicked voice. I bet you wouldn't even need Auto-Tune. I'm telling you, Gerri, you need to think about your image. I say this as your friend: choral club is not going to help your image.”

“Meg, I don't care about my image. This has nothing to do with trying to be famous.”

“Well, last time I checked, people don't try out for
Big Time
if they aren't interested in being famous.”

We arrive outside the doorway to Ms. Kogawa's classroom at the same time as Tyler.

“What do you think Kogawa is going to make us do?” he asks me.

“Who knows? This is all new to me.”

“I should have picked school paper,” he says before opening the door and walking into the classroom.

“Is
h
e in choral club?” asks Meg.

“Yeah,” I say. “He's doing it for the extracurricular.”

“I wonder if there are any spots open,” she says, peering through the doorway at him.

“I don't think they use Auto-Tune in choral club,” I tell her. “I have to go. I'll text you later.”

Ms. Kogawa passes me some papers as I come into the room. It's more sheet music, but a lot simpler than the music we used in practice.

“The goal over the next few weeks,” she says, “is for the two of you to become comfortable with basic sight-reading. I don't expect you to get up to the same level as everyone else in the group, and that's fine because a lot of this will be memorization, but you'll find that a bit of hard work on this end will lead to a better understanding of things down the road.”

For a few minutes we run scales and do some vocal exercises. Then we start to work on the music she's given us. We stand next to her at the piano as she plays variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “The Farmer in the Dell.” It's dead boring, but I slowly begin to make the connection between the notes on the musical scale and the words I'm singing.

After a little while we stop for the day. Ms. Kogawa writes a website address on the board and hands us more sheet music.

“Copy this address down,” she says. “This is an online tuning fork. Use it to find middle C and then practice doing these songs at least ten times before rehearsal on Sunday.”

I glance at the songs. I've never heard of them, which will make it more interesting when it comes to singing them blind from sheet music.

“Tyler,” says Ms. Kogawa, “I've been having a hard time finding a bass to join us in the club. I was wondering if you have any friends who might be up for it. What about Patrick from the track team? He's got a deep speaking voice. Maybe he'd be interested in trying out singing.”

Tyler starts to laugh. “Sorry, Ms. Kogawa, but there's no way Patrick is going to join choral club. Let's just say it's not his scene.”

“Well, think about it anyway,” she says. “You too, Gerri. If anyone comes to mind that might be interested, let me know. They don't even have to go to our school. They just have to be high school aged. We can push through without a bass, but we'd sound a lot fuller if we could find one.”

I walk out of the school with Tyler. “Man,” he says. “The guys have been giving me a hard enough time about joining chorus without me trying to recruit them.”

“It's fun though, isn't it?” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “I like it all right. I'm not telling them that though. They all think I'm only doing it because I need the extracurricular.”

“So why
are
you doing it?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Because I love to sing, I guess.”

Sudden death is the point in every season of
Big Time
when all the semifinalists have to compete against one another in front of the judges. I usually love sudden death—it's one of the most exciting and stressful parts of the show—but this year all I can think is how happy I am that I don't have to go through it. Dealing with the judges is hard enough, but the other competitors can be even worse.

I've never thought about how much of a reality show
Big Time
really is until now. It's not just a talent competition; it's a fight to the finish, based on the idea that only one person is good enough to claw their way to the top. This is never more obvious than during the sudden-death round.

Poppy is a naturally friendly and outgoing person, but she also has an awesome voice, which makes her a target. I'm shocked when cameras catch three singers plotting to sabotage her during group survival. Group survival is the first part of sudden death. Contestants are randomly teamed up and then matched against another group, and they have to “sing to survive.” Three of the singers on the team that's been chosen to compete against Poppy's actually talk about putting detergent in her water bottle.

“This is insane!” says my mother, who's watching it with me. “It's like
The Hunger Games
!”

Fortunately, someone has enough of a conscience to report the scheme to the producers, and when they're caught on camera, the three guilty kids are kicked off the show. Poppy isn't filled in until after her group performs and makes it to the next round. When she does hear what happened, she loses her composure for the first time and starts crying. When she tries to go into the bathroom, the camera follows her and won't leave her alone.

“Music competition indeed,” says my mother, disgusted. She gets up off the couch and leaves the family room. I consider following her, but I really want to see how Poppy does in the one-on-one round. Of course, she is able to pull herself together and does a great job, easily blowing away her competitor, a short guy with what Tim Canon refers to as a “lounge-singer voice.”

Now she's on to the finals. It's good news for Poppy, but for some reason I'm not all that happy for her.

When the show ends, I turn off the
TV
and go upstairs to my room to practice my sight-reading one more time before the second choral rehearsal tomorrow. I've been practicing every night since Tuesday. At first I just sang from the music that Ms. Kogawa gave Tyler and me, but after a couple of times I knew the melody by heart and it started to feel like cheating, so I printed a bunch of other songs off the Internet and started learning them as well.

I don't need to be very loud when I'm practicing— I just quietly sing along to the sheet music—but I keep my door closed anyway, because I don't really want anyone to watch or hear me. It's really different to be approaching music this way, slowly and carefully, instead of just jumping in the way I always have in the past. I like it though. I like knowing that I'm going to work with other people to build something from the ground up. Right now, I think I prefer that to standing by myself in front of a bunch of judges, waiting for them to decide if I'm any good or not.

Chapter Nine

I arrive at rehearsal a bit early the next day. Ms. Kogawa isn't there yet, and Macy and Davis are sitting on the floor outside the locked classroom. I drop my bag and sit down across from them.

“You want some halvah?” asks Davis, handing me a Tupperware container.

“What is it?” I ask, pulling out a piece.

“Hippie fudge,” he says.

“It's actually a Middle Eastern dessert,” says Macy.

“That hippies feed their kids instead of real fudge,” says Davis.

“We're vegan,” explains Macy.

“For the time being,” says Davis. “Oh man, I am going to eat all the hamburgers when I ungraduate and leave home.”

“Ungraduate?” I ask.

“We're unschooled,” says Macy. “Most people would call us homeschooled, but that's a different kind of thing. We don't have classes or structured study. We just kind of learn about what interests us.”

“And sometimes what interests our parents,” says Davis.

“That too,” says Macy.

“Wow,” I say, after I've had time to pick my jaw up off the floor. “That sounds awesome.”

“Most of the time it's pretty cool,” says Macy. “As long as we get to do stuff like this.”

“Music, you mean?”

“Music and sports and stuff that involves other people. Davis is in an amateur radio club with a bunch of middle-aged men.”

“Hey,” he says. “It's fun. Don't knock it till you've tried it!”

“Why are you in choral?” Macy asks me. “Have you been doing music for long?”

“Not exactly,” I tell them. “I mean, I've been singing my whole life, but I've never done any kind of musical training. I guess the real reason I'm doing it is because I auditioned for
Big Time
and didn't make it, so I thought I'd try to get some experience this way and maybe audition again next year.”

“What's
Big Time
?” asks Davis.

“Are you serious?” I ask. They both look at me with blank faces. “It's, like, the biggest show on
TV
. People sing and then judges critique them and then people at home call in and vote for their favorite and then somebody wins and gets a record deal and a car.”

“We don't have a
TV
,” explains Macy.

“No offense,” says Davis, “but that sounds awful.”

We turn and look as Ms. Kogawa and Bernice come around the corner and walk toward us.

“Wow,” says Bernice. “You guys are keeners.”

“How did your sight-reading practice go, Gerri?” asks Ms. Kogawa as she unlocks the door.

“I think it went pretty well,” I tell her.

Unfortunately, it hasn't gone quite as well as I'd hoped. Ms. Kogawa wants to use today's practice to get through four of the songs in our workbook, but after a couple of attempts at starting from scratch, it becomes obvious that neither Tyler nor I can keep up. We revert to our old method, this time with Macy at the piano, and begin to slowly work through the individual parts until we can finally do a full song all the way through.

It's a lot slower this way, but it works better, and eventually Tyler and I start to catch on. Still, I'm happy when Ms. Kogawa tells us to have a seat. We've been rehearsing for two hours and we've only gotten through half the songs we wanted to. I can't help feeling that it's at least partly because of me, and Bernice doesn't help matters.