I wanted to sing

Shakira Sison

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I wondered if I did sing better, would I be less shy?

The first album I ever had in my hands was Lea Salonga’s Small Voice. I played that cassette over and over, flipping it from side A to side B, back in the days before MP3s and CDs, and even before cassette players had an auto-reverse function. It was 1981 and I was a five-year-old singing at the top of my lungs in our living room. I played it so much that the tape broke and we had to stick the two ends together and hoped it wouldn’t skip.

I loved to sing and dance so much that my yaya thought she might become my stage mother. I even joined my grade school’s Glee Club sang a solo of Tomorrow (from the musical “Annie”) in one concert, and again for my father’s company party at the end of the year. And then one day it occurred to me that I might not be good. Nobody ever told me I wasn’t, but the following year the Glee Club decided they wouldn’t do solos anymore because they felt the singers didn’t really sound that great. I continued as a soprano in the group rendition of Chattanooga Choo Choo instead. The director had a thing for Broadway I guess, and for classics our parents liked. This was before MTV’s popularity after all, so we eagerly learned the songs and the choreography and performed.

The good singers continued to shine, and they took on a personality I knew I wouldn’t have. If you are a decent performer as a child, you are used to beaming faces and open mouths in awe at your performance. Crowds are spellbound when they hear your voice or as you bust a move when you dance. You reveled in applause. You bowed after your first number and started taking requests. I wasn’t this child, but my cousin in the Tahitian grass skirt dancing to Pearly Shells was. I retreated to my non-pearly shell, not wanting to be the center of attention at all, nor to shine in the sun, nor to cover the shore….

“I like singing, but singing does not like me.” A younger Shakira Sison during a rare moment with a microphone.

My best friend in high school was a gifted singer. She would begin humming a tune and the classroom would fall silent. Whenever there was a party or a program, it was a given that there was a song performance from her. I was among the audience captivated by her voice, and she just stood there in the middle of the room, microphone in hand, absorbing the limelight, the clapping hands, and the cheers of her name. She was a natural, and she walked around with this acknowledged talent on her sleeve, and rightly so. She had a magical voice she used whenever she wanted, and all around her we would just say, “Wow.”

I’ve always wondered what I would be like if instead of writing, I had a more “visible” skill like singing, dancing, acting, or visual art. I wondered how it would feel to move an audience with a physical trait like a golden voice or with my grace and coordination. I probably would be different, knowing that people’s faces changed at my presence. As a child I’d be pulled from whatever I was doing and be asked to perform. Everyone would wait for any sound from my mouth. They would say I was wonderful, that I should really pursue it, and that I could be a star.

I wondered if I did sing better, would I be less shy? Would I be making YouTube videos of myself singing popular songs and asking my friends to listen to them on social media? Or is my introverted nature something that would keep my singing to a minimum anyway, or make me into one of those tortured artists who resented their craft for being the only reason they felt loved?

I don’t know, but I write this still knowing all the words to that first album, and my siblings still tease each other with the song “Someone’s Waiting For You (Be Brave, Little One).” I memorized the lyrics to Lea’s Miss Saigon album, and once in a while I’ll break into song at home with matching dance moves. Friends say I sound like Alma Moreno because I have a voice that’s like a mouse being crushed. When my wife hears me sing, she jokes and asks if I want voice lessons, and that she’ll even pay for them – please. She’ll turn up the music in the car to drown out my less than ideal voice and I’ll sing even louder, knowing that even if I don’t do it very well there is no crime that prevents me from singing, nor is there a requirement for anyone to listen. Maybe it means more to me knowing I don’t need that applause I know I’ll never get, and that there is a person inside all of us who just wants the music to take over them, and carry all of these worries about audiences and impressions, talent and recognition, into a melody that takes them all far, far away. – Rappler.com

Shakira Andrea Sison is a Palanca Award-winning essayist. She currently works in finance and spends her non-working hours singing inwardly in subway trains. She is a veterinarian by education and was managing a retail corporation in Manila before relocating to New York in 2002. Her column appears on Thursdays. Follow her on Twitter: @shakirasison and on Facebook.com/sisonshakira. 

 

  

 

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