Preface: The bulk of the following body of writing is written from the perspective of what was a very frustrated Alisonian teenager. Present-day Alison earnestly deems the Nevada All-State Choir as a wonderful organization that is run by exceptional and talented people.
I was a high school senior. I was possibly the biggest choir nerd my school had. I and somewhere around four other choir nerds from my school had all made it into the Nevada All-State Choir. (That choir’s audition process can be found in the dictionary underneath “nerve-racking,” and blessed were we to have been able to survive it.)
It was a particularly rainy day, sometime in the springtime. 'Twas the day before the huge and hugely fantastic concert for which we had been preparing for months. We had roughly a dozen amazing songs memorized. We’d even gotten to know the extravagant Jabberwocky by heart (and my heart still knows it till this day). It was dress rehearsal day. Dress rehearsal was to occur on the college campus. There were only a few minutes till call time. Tropicana Avenue was the best route from our neck of the woods to UNLV. Tropicana was where we were for what seemed to be time and eternity, stuck in the worst traffic I had seen in all my eighteen years. What made it bad? Bad rain that contributed to a smorgasbord of nasty automobile accidents. Yucky slugs on the sidewalks parallel to us probably got to UNLV swifter than we did. But we finally got there. Rehearsal began at 10:00:00am and we made it there in one piece at 10:00:11. SCORE! Right? Nooo.
Nope. They kicked us out. Kicked us and cursed us for being terrible children because only the most horrendous of children show up to the illustrious Nevada All-State Choir’s most important rehearsal of the season a measly eleven seconds after start time, when they soberly understand and revere that rehearsal to be most important above all other rehearsals, so they brave the ridiculous weather and treacherous-above-all-
The total number of kids they kicked out of the Nevada All-State Choir that stormy and dismal day was more than ten, close to fifteen. It wasn’t just us from our high school. It was several more from other high schools who courageously endured the same travel hardships we did. Vividly, as if it were just this past springtime half a year ago, I remember entering the rehearsal room—soaked and breathless—witnessing the rest of the Choir barely beginning their first warm-up of the session, desperately wishing I were safely sitting and warming up among them with no fear of being under condemnation, watching one stern administrator walk toward us and then lead us to the corner of the room near the glass doors through which we’d just come, waiting for “the boss” to decide what to do with us. I remember us standing there in that corner of shame for many grueling draggy moments, thinking they’d possibly let us just take our seats and we’d all let bygones be bygones. Falsehoods. Bygones were not to be bygones. The boss and all the boss’s administrative minions were determined to make frienemies of us, but in reality they failed to do that by instead making pure enemies of us; for, a frienemy is someone who likes you but secretly despises you in a tiny way or two, but an enemy is someone who doesn’t like you at all. How could you like anyone who hardheartedly sends your glorious and well-deserved All-State dreams through the shredder of doom?
There’s a moral to this story, and it comes in two halves. (And no, the moral is not “Well, uh, duh… just give yourself more extra time to get to your destination” because we DID give ourselves plenteous time, thank you very much.)
The first half of the true moral of the story is “Bad stuff happens to good people…” Like we’ve all heard multitudinously in our lives.
The second half is what we, as good people, can do about the first half: “…so try to help lift each other up.”
Here’s the positive way the worst day of my teenage life turned:
After gloomily trudging out the glass doors, departing from the beautifully-sounding Nevada All-State Choir that would forevermore be our destroyed destiny, we dejected rejects—we remarkable choir nerds from across the Battle Born state—decided to drown our sorrows together, as newfound friends in misery, in a Denny’s breakfast. We went there, sat down in there, circled around a big ol’ table, consumed our scrambled eggs, pig meat, pancakes, French toast, and juices, made each other laugh and smile, and resolved to shove our tears off a cliff.
I recall there being a girl among us named Beth, who I think attended Las Vegas High School, who was kind and bubblesome, who had really long, pretty, and curly brunette locks. Aaaaand that’s all I have to say about her. I just mentioned her because I remembered her specifically.
Now, the story I just told depicts “bad stuff” that wasn’t deeply heartbreaking, but it was rough enough for a sad teenager to notice her spirit significantly brighten when she was surrounded by friends who wanted to share cheer on a misfortunate day. Similarly she noticed her spirit brighten when she reciprocated sharing the cheer.
The point is: tough stuff, of varying degrees of severity, happens to all of us. When any one of us is undergoing a trial, whether it's kind of big or kind of small, our heart feels so much lighter when someone shares cheer with us. It's especially such a lovely feeling to know that we have helped make someone else's heart light when that heart was once very recently heavier.
