I can’t remember my first choir concert, but my parents can, and they love to bring it up. I was 2 years old, in pre-primary school. I went to a Montessori school that was big on music (choir especially), and they had us singing as soon as we began attending. Every year, there would be a few big concerts in the church down the street from the school, and even though our school was very small, there were several different choirs broken up largely by grade level.

The pre-primary kids (ages 2-3, after which they transferred to primary) usually sang about three short songs, and every kid was supposed to have a buddy from the elementary school. It was always a super cute thing, and because of the age, something usually happened that wasn’t supposed to happen. Most of the time, it was really funny and adorable, like when a little boy one year stood up in the middle of a song and yelled out into the crowd “Hi Mommy!” before being pulled back down by his buddy.

I’ve talked before about my crying issues (read my journal entry from a couple of weeks ago, Camping Trip, if you want to get an idea. It’s funny, I promise), and this concert was no different.

Also, at this time, I had several objects that I was very attached to, that helped to comfort me (though at the concert, they didn’t seem to do anything). The first was what my parents refer to as my “piece of garbage”, though it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. It was just a piece of wrapper from a diaper package or something similar. It wasn’t like I didn’t have tons of toys and stuffed animals, but that was what I loved. My babysitter had actually tied a ribbon to it to make it look nicer. The other things were two tubes of Vaseline of different sizes, which I called “mommy cream” and “baby cream”. I would carry these everywhere with me.

So at the concert, during pre-primary choir’s turn, all the kids filed in one by one and sat down on the stage. Then there was me, in the arms of my teacher, Deirdre, screaming and crying while she was walking me on stage, with my piece of garbage and one tube of Vaseline in one hand and the other tube in my other hand. Throughout the entire performance, I never stopped screaming, and I never sang.

And that was my first choir concert.

(Just so you know, even though it doesn’t seem like it from the story, I loved choir, and I still do. I was in it continuously through all my school years, and I’m hoping to be involved with it in some form or another as the years go by. This is just one (hopefully) funny story, and it does not in any way represent my actual feelings about being in choir, or choir in general.)