Just to Catch You Up

I briefly mentioned a while ago that I was going to sing O Holy Night at my church's christmas eve service. I also said that I was a little nervous that I would mess up or something. To recount the scene as it was that Christmas Eve night...

I was sitting on my narrator stool as planned, perfectly cool and calm, and I heard my cue line. "A special night. A holy night..." and I stood up, feeling surpisingly not nervous at all. However, in the four yards or so to where the microphone was set up I could feel all the muscles in my legs seize up, and as I gazed out to the audience, most of which were people I had never seen before in my life, I listened to the opening notes and realized I could no longer feel my toes. Have you ever been able to feel every detail of your pulse? Not just when it was, as a simple ker-thump, but to have it overwhelm your whole breathing/circulation system. I managed to get out the first notes with pretty darn good sound, but on the seventh word my air just randomly caught in my throat and the sound died. It sounded something like, "the stars are brightly shi-" and then I had to inhale and realize that I had just stopped in the very middle of a syllable. Thank goodness I had the sense to take that word's time and take a couple deep breaths so I could come back in on "it is the night..." and so on. After that, throughout the whole first verse and chorus my knees were shaking like crazy and I was surprised the people in the front row couldn't SEE my pulse pounding in my chest. By the time I got to the french lyrics I could once again keep my legs relatively still and I could breathe like a normal human being, but I'm really hoping no one in the audience could understand french because I'm pretty darn sure that my pronunciation was way, way off. But at least the last notes sounded fantastic and that's all that people really remember, right?