The Rachel Incident

As mentioned in "My First 'Tattoo'", I was taking guitar lessons in the fall of 1996 at Chicago's famous Old Town School of Folk Music. There were a bunch of people taking lessons at the school - probably hundreds in fact. At the end of each quarter, people would team up to perform a song they had learned in front of everyone. A kind of mini-concert. Me and four other friends were taking a class together.

We picked Michelle Shocked's "Anchorage" as the song for our performance (also referenced in an earlier post "Assaulted and Shocked"). It's not an easy tune; a bit of an odd strumming pattern that took a lot of work to get down. I found it particularly hard to strum and sing it at the same time - like patting your head and rubbing your stomach - you had to teach your body to do what your brain wanted.

Midway into the quarter, one of my friends dropped out. Still, we felt fine approaching our performance night with four in the group. A couple of days before the big night Frankie (the same guy in my "Heard it from a friend" post) came up with some lame excuse for not being able to perform with us. But we still felt ok. You see of the three left, my friend Rachel was by far the most important. She was our anchor in "Anchorage". Rachel sang and kept rhythm - something me and my other friend Murray didn't have enough of. It was basically all her, we just followed along and tried to harmonize enough that it wasn't offensive.

On the day of the performance Rachel and me got into some kind of fight. As is normal in such things, I can't remember now what it was about. She was so mad at me, she decided not to show up for the performance. I was being punished by Rachel and poor Murray was collateral damage. To be fair, I'm sure I did something that pissed her off and was worthy of a good payback.

Back to the performance. So there we are - just Murray and me - five now down to two. Two lost minstrels about to be shoved in front of everyone. We prayed that Rachel would show up in the 11th hour before if was finally our turn. But she didn't show and we butchered that song beyond human recognition.

It was humiliating. And let me be clear - the teachers and students didn't think it was funny. Especially when we were so focused on trying to the get the strumming down that we forgot the lyrics to the song. Literally, we stopped playing and singing. The room went dead quiet. Murray and I looked at each other and realized we had no idea what came next. We choked, tried to swallow, then looked out at everyone who just stared back at us - they were amazed and pitiless at our utter lameness.

We made a sad attempt to turn the situation to laughter - you know, desperate comic relief - but no one laughed, just cold silence. Even the crickets didn't chirp - no one would "send in the clowns" because they (we) were already on stage. Looking back, I can't hear Anchorage without remembering the humiliation and feel the minutes that turned to hours as we destroyed Michelle's fine tune. Today, Murray and I crack up wondering, "did we forever ruin Anchorage for the other students who even after all these years can't hear it without remembering that traumatic night?"

Shorly after, Rachel and I made up. She taught me a real important lesson: don't piss off your anchor.