Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory (10 page)

At seven-fifteen, one car was still missing. Divisi was due onstage momentarily. Backstage in the Armory’s dirty locker room the rest of Divisi applied their paint-thick lipstick.

“My throat’s dry,” one girl said.

“Try biting the back of your tongue,” Sarah Klein said. “It’s an old choir trick.” A cell phone goes off to the tune of Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back.”

“Someone’s bringing sexy back,” one of the girls says. Sarah seethes, pulling her own cell phone from her bag and dialing. She is passive-aggressive by nature. She doesn’t so much confront the girl as sigh with intention. Sarah: “Are you close? [
sigh
]”

The final car showed up two minutes before showtime. And while the rift was imperceptible to the audience, the ladies of Divisi weren’t really themselves that night. They’d staked their reputation on their sound, but they were limp. For the first time since the group’s founding, Sarah Klein sees a deep divide. And the mishap at the armory, she says, was proof that the group was not on the same page. “That never would have happened when Lisa was in charge,” she says. It wasn’t just that one car was late. It was the fact that the rest of Divisi didn’t seem to care.
Sigh.

Keeley McCowan was less polite. Keeley, who is in her fifth year, works the early shift at one of Eugene’s finer restaurants. She’d been awake since four that morning. Worse, she was dieting. If she could show up—not just show up but
perform
—why couldn’t these new girls?

If Divisi was going to compete in the ICCAs again (and they were, that had already been decided by Keeley and Sarah last spring before most of these girls were even in the group), they’d need to be a cohesive squad. And so Keeley and Sarah were particularly excited when, in October, Divisi was invited to perform at the University of Anchorage’s annual A Cappella Festivella. While members of a sorority might bond at charity events or toga parties, a cappella groups have the luxury of getting acquainted on elaborate trips. And this one would be a five-day, four-night affair—all expenses paid. In Alaska, the girls conducted a beatboxing workshop. They sang five songs at the festival—the only five songs they knew. “We were so new,” says Rachelle Wofford, an intense sophomore. “We didn’t even have choreography.” But the music wasn’t really the point. Keeley and Sarah hoped the group would find some common ground.

There was the bonfire down at the beach. There were late nights at the hotel. Invariably the conversations turned personal. And that’s when Michaela Cordova pulled back—when her old fears and doubts surfaced. It was a particularly difficult, tense moment. Michaela (by her own admission) never got along well with women. But this was different. “We were being so silly,” she says. “We were sitting around with high ponytails on top of our heads, just acting ridiculous. It was so liberating to be goofy with this group of girls I’d just met.” But on her last night in Alaska she quietly left the hotel room. “I was respectful,” she says. “It’s just hard for me to talk about my feelings. I don’t want to say my life’s been harder than everyone else’s. But I had to remove myself. ” Which she did. Quietly the other girls wondered what had spooked Michaela.

There were highlights. Sometime that week, Divisi’s new catch-phrase was born. At the hotel, messing around on the Internet, the girls stumbled across a YouTube video in which a transvestite goes shopping for shoes. The whole thing plays out over a techno beat, with the tranny uttering (again and again, in various inflections) the word
shoes
. The women of Divisi adopted the phrase and made it their own. And defying logic,
Shoes
became their battle cry.

Alaska had been a step in the right direction (well, maybe not for Michaela), but despite
shoes
, the girls remained fractured, cliquey even, during the fall of 2006. As a countermeasure, Sarah introduced Thursday-night bonding sessions, but even Keeley admits you can’t force these things. “Just because you’re wearing the tie and the red lipstick doesn’t make you Divisi,” she says. She pauses. “I almost hope we lose at the ICCAs so the new girls will learn what it takes to be competitive.”

Divisi worked on refining their competition set that fall, which included Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap, and a Joss Stone power anthem, “You Had Me.” Divisi worked on little else. Still, the disparate personalities, the poor leadership—Lisa Forkish would have been embarrassed.

At the final Friday-afternoon performance before winter break, Divisi got a glimpse of just how much work was left to be done before the ICCAs in January. “Hide and Seek” was consistently flat. “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing” sounded like noise—a bunch of unrelated notes that never really locked. The applause was tepid.

“What key were we in?” Keeley asked after the show.

“G,” Sarah said.

It was a rhetorical question. “I meant we weren’t singing together, ” Keeley said. Worse: On the Rocks, the all-male group on campus and Divisi’s brother group—who would be their primary competition for the first round of the ICCAs—burned the house down. OTR’s music director, wearing a satin On the Rocks jacket, stepped forward to make a joke. “We have On the Rocks T-shirts for sale after the show,” he said to the crowd. “But these jackets ... they’re Members Only.”

After watching the On the Rocks set, Keeley turned to the ladies of Divisi. Two groups from that first round of the ICCA competition would advance to the regional semifinals. “I guess we’ll be second,” she said. The ICCAs were starting to look like just another gig on Divisi’s calendar. Or maybe not.

A few days before leaving for winter break, the girls threw a very Divisi Christmas party at Emmalee Almroth’s house. (Emmalee, one of the new girls, has been listening to Divisi and On the Rocks since she was in high school, and some nights, when the girls are hanging out with the boys of OTR, she still can’t believe she’s actually there.) Divisi organized Secret Santa—ten dollars or less—and each girl quietly placed her gift beneath the Christmas tree. But Keeley had her own game planned for that night. In a last-ditch effort to light a fire under the new girls, she’d brought the competition video with her, the one with Lisa Forkish and Divisi performing Usher’s “Yeah.” She popped it into the computer. It was eye-opening. Andrea Welsh, sipping her pink champagne, kept getting close to the screen and then stepping away again. “I’m so nervous,” she said. She didn’t use the F-word, but she was probably thinking it.

Keeley saw the look in their eyes. And it wasn’t hunger—it was fear. Unfortunately, the one girl who might have inspired Divisi to rise to the challenge felt too out of place that night to say much of anything.

Marissa Neitling, a fifth-year, is petite, with big bangs and bigger eyes. She’s a modern-day Mary Tyler Moore. Wacky things just sort of happen to her. Like freshman year, when she accidentally wound up living in the university’s lone designated twenty-four-hour -quiet dorm. “I was this little bubbly girl who likes to stay up late,” she says, “and I was living with these superquiet kids.” She joined Divisi in the victory lap year—the year after the ICCAs—and she loved it. Lisa Forkish was still running things. Even though Divisi wasn’t competing, “the hard work came first,” Marissa says. “Then the friendships.”

There was so much Marissa wanted to say that night at the Christmas party—about unity, about the old Divisi, about what the new Divisi could be. “My mom always says to me, I’ve been your age but you haven’t been mine,” Marissa says. “And that’s how I felt.” But because Marissa is too polite, because she felt some of the new girls might misinterpret what she had to say, she kept quiet. Besides, having missed so much rehearsal herself that semester—she’d landed a featured role in the campus production of Sondheim’s
Company
—she wasn’t sure she’d earned the right to say anything.

There was more to the story, of course, more going on behind the bangs.

Marissa had been a precocious kid, always more of a tiny adult than a child. When she was in the first grade, she was called down to the principal’s office. “Your mother is here to pick you up,” the receptionist said. Marissa’s eyes welled up with tears. Her grandfather had been sick and now, walking out to her mom’s car, she feared the worst. “What happened?” Marissa said, opening the passenger-side door. “Get in quick!” her mom replied. “We’re going to miss the two-thirty showing of
Edward Scissorhands
.”

Which sort of explains how Marissa ended up double-majoring in math and theater. Growing up, Marissa always loved to perform. She’s had many music teachers over the years, and they’ve all said the same thing:
Don’t think, just sing.
But quieting that analytical part of her brain, giving herself over to the performance entirely—that’s always been Marissa’s problem.

This 2006-2007 year is Marissa’s final in Eugene, and she’s at work on her thesis—an autobiographical one-woman show that includes (among other things) the story of an ex-boyfriend, the first love who broke her heart in the way only that first one can, the one who just seven months after the breakup was already married. (He is Mormon.) But mostly, the play she is writing is about acceptance, about letting go.

Ten years ago, Marissa’s dad, a brilliant orthopedic surgeon, had his license suspended. The official report said he’d been diverting all sorts of medication from his patients, which was another way of saying he was an addict, smart enough to get drugs any way he could. But he went into a recovery program. And, just as suddenly it seemed, life proceeded, the incident destined to be just a footnote in Marissa’s childhood. Or so the family hoped. But in the summer of 2004 the dark times returned. Her father went to rehab again. It was terrible for all involved. Because the man was a highly functioning addict, he’d actually convinced his co-workers that his wife and kids were crazy. “We were the
bad people
,” Marissa’s mom says. He closed his practice—having lost his license, he had no other choice. And in February of 2005, without much warning, he served his wife with separation papers. Now, after rehearsals for
Company
, and her class work, and Divisi, there’s that manuscript on Marissa’s computer, that one-woman show about this man she no longer knows, this man she has not seen in over a year.

On the night of the Divisi Christmas party, Marissa Neitling finally breaks down. It’s not what you think. “I don’t know what
shoes
means!” she blurts out. Marissa had missed the trip to Alaska. Someone clicks over to YouTube and shows her the video. And the conversation returns—as it often does—to the ICCAs.

Keeley McCowan attempts to rally the troops. Forget the video. She’s enlisted the help of Lisa Forkish and Erica Barkett, legendary Divisi alums who will come back to campus in January to work with the girls on their competition set. Keeley has the best of intentions. But what she doesn’t know, what she can’t foresee, is that this, too, will end in tears.

CHAPTER FIVE

Deke Sharon is commonly referred to as the father of contemporary a cappella, and while he may have bestowed that title upon himself, the name rings true. In 1990, Deke started the Contemporary A Cappella Society of America (CASA) out of his dorm room at Tufts. The organization’s mission was (in part) to foster communication between all of the disparate a cappella groups popping up across the country. CASA began with the “Collegiate A Cappella Newsletter,” which featured album reviews and classified ads, where groups like the Bubs would offer their services to other schools. Like everything in a cappella, the newsletter was better known by an acronym, the “CAN.” (Letters to the editor were printed under the rubric KICK THE CAN.) When Deke graduated, so, too, did the “CAN,” which quickly expanded to include coverage of the professional a cappella scene, where groups like Rockapella (which grew out of the Brown University High Jinks) were suddenly thriving, touring as far as Japan. “The Collegiate A Cappella Newsletter” was reborn as “The Contemporary A Cappella Newsletter,” so as to keep the acronym. “The only reason this whole movement isn’t called
modern
a cappella,” Deke says, “is because I needed to use the letter
C
.”

In 1992, Deke founded the Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards—the CARAs. He started the ICCAs (then the NCCAs) with Adam Farb in 1995. He and Adam also created the BOCA series—the Best of College A Cappella compilation. If there’s an acronym in a cappella, Deke Sharon probably had something to do with it.

In the mid-nineties, collegiate a cappella exploded from an Ivy League curiosity to a full-blown coed pursuit. “We went from two hundred and fifty groups to more than twelve hundred and fifty,” Deke says. He credits the growth spurt to a number of factors, from Boyz II Men to the Internet. Deke’s role is easier to quantify. While collegiate a cappella groups everywhere were singing four-part harmony reminiscent of the choral tradition, he began arranging music instead for a vocal band. In short, it was the difference between a bunch of guys singing an A chord or a bunch of guys singing the guitar part. This innovation might have remained a local phenomenon had Deke not figured out a way to get the music played on campuses across the country.

While Deke may be a critical figure in contemporary a cappella, as an undergraduate at Tufts, the kid was rejected by the Beelzebubs. Twice.

Deke grew up in San Francisco, a gawky kid with little control over his limbs. On weekends he’d troll the aisles at Revolver Records in the Haight, picking up recordings by a cappella groups like the Nylons. In what would be a seminal moment in his life, the Tufts Beelzebubs performed at Deke’s high school. Deke bought one of their LPs,
Score,
which he wore out playing “Ticket to Ride” and “Rainy Day Man.” A few years later, he enrolled at Tufts. And he was hard to miss. As a freshman in a sea of khaki, he was the kid in the orange T-shirt and leather
man
dals. “I was from northern California!” he says.