It's My Blog and I Can Not Post if I Want To

As Dabysan has been rehashing this week, the real secret to winning KttD is song selection.  Many a kinda-sorta decent singer have pulled near and actual wins with the shear genius of choosing the right ditty.  In considering B's song for his defense of the cup, it was important to really pinpoint WHY "Killing Me Softly" brought the prize home last year.

Listen all you dandy high talkers, most of you get this grammar point wrong. Every.  Time.  You think you sound better educated when using the following pronouns incorrectly.  In fact you are just wrong.  Sure, sure, you went to Harvard and are running for president.  Even though our current president only speaks "Texas Hillbilly," you don't get a pass to speak incorrectly.

Waaaaaah I want to smack this woman - smack her hard.  Shhhh Beotch, it's NOT OK to vote Republican.  

Anyone else sick of the Democratic Primary?  More importantly, anyone else a bit stunned by the behavior and attitudes of a shockingly high number of self-described democrats?  

Man, I so love me some Olympics.  I love watching obscure sports, marveling at the freak show of modern gymnastics, and damn I love opening ceremony extravaganzas.  This year's show will be piped in from the land that invented fireworks and will be backed by the wallet of an extremely wealthy dictatorship that can spend more money than god.  It is guaranteed to blow our minds.  I get misty eyed just thinking about it.

Beijing

So part of having a yoga practice is that you're really not supposed to kill things, even gross and/or scary things.  I'm not a full vegetarian, but I really do try not to harm living things when it isn't necessary.

And I did feel pretty guilty after washing a 4-inch scorpion down the shower drain on the first day of my yoga teacher training in Costa Rica.  Normally, I wouldn't think twice about having to do a dirty deed to rid my shower of a dangerous foe, and actually I didn't when I was doing it.  But afterwards, as my teacher's "om" washed over us to signal the start of our session, I felt pretty crappy.  My excuse is that I didn't really have a choice.  That is until I realized there was a broom and a long-handled dustpan in my room.

I knew my karma was going to be totally out of whack.

The scorpions didn't avenge the death of their own until a week later -- enough time for me to become complacent in my several-times-a-day visual sweep of my jungle casita.  It struck at 5:45am, assaulting my right pinky finger as I rummaged through my dirty laundry deciding what to hand wash that day.  I saw the bugger scurry away, although I was already in too much pain and shock to notice exactly where.

I'm writing this story, so obviously I'm fine.  The pain was acute and strong for about an hour before tapering off to a burning sensation when I touched the surface of my finger.  By 8:30 that morning, it was all but forgotten.  I'm actually very lucky that I didn't happen to be allergic to its poison.  My tongue could have swollen and gone numb along with half my face.  Still, I was about as keen to get stung again as I was to be mauled by jellyfish in Australia a few years ago.

I recruited reinforcements in the form of my new yogi friend, R.  R, a valiant power yoga warrior, helped me rummage through all remaining dirty clothes.  His broomstick down each pant leg strategy was brilliant although ultimately unsuccessful.

The battle ended in a draw a few days after B had arrived, adding another pair of eyes to my visual sweep rituals.   I had been hand washing clothes in the sink, which some of you may not realize means rubbing pants legs together to remove sand and mud, scrubbing a t-shirt corner under the arm pit to remove layers of deodorant.  This was hands on hand washing.  My hands and half my arms had been all over those clothes in murky water.

I stepped away for a very short moment while my garments soaked.  When I returned, I saw my nemesis, the size of a prawn, trying to claw it's way out of the corner of the sink.  I could hear his crustacean-like legs and pinchers scraping the stainless steel basin.  The mo-fo was big, around 6 inches including the tail.  He was mostly light, almost translucent brown with dark black splotches.  I can't believe I survived any battle with that thing.  And what the heck was he still doing in my dirty laundry?

I handed B the broom and dustpan.  The plan was to try to shoo him into the pan and take him outside, far from the duplex casita that we shared with W.  Instead the scorpion clung to the hairs of the broom, his long stinger dangling and striking madly at the bristles.  We'd have been in trouble if he'd decided to drop to the floor.  Thankfully he didn't, and thankfully he didn't return after B wiped him onto a shrub down the hill from the house.

News travels fast among 30 people spending 8 hours or more a day together.  Everyone wanted to know about the scorpion attack and my subsequent kitchen sink showdown.  It was pointed out by W that just earlier in the week I had been IMing Dabysan about my desire to perfect my scorpion pose, an up-side-down arm balancing yoga posture that features ones feet dangling over ones own head - very Cirque de Soleil.  W and R decided I was the Scorpion Queen, and they presented me with a dead scorpion-in-resin necklace, a trophy if you will. 

Or, you could believe L who stayed in the same casita for a month the year before.  She also encountered more scorpions than anyone in her group.  L believes that the house is infested with them, and is probably sitting atop a colony.  She may not be far off for in W's bathroom light fixture was a grim reminder of who will ultimately win the war.  Imagine brushing your teeth with the eery shadow of dead scorpion cast across your face. 

Scorpion

The formula for a winning KttD performance is at once obvious and elusive.  Of course you must sing badly, but as has already been pointed out this year, merely not hitting a few notes here and there with less than crystal clear tone is not going to bring home the prize.  Now that the truly tone-deaf have mustered up the guts to put a lifetime of ridicule behind them and willfully put their vocal non-stylings to the ultimate test, those who can kinda sing may never take the podium again. 

As Hotrod has chronicled these past few weeks, song choice and presentation is as much part of the game as your inability to carry a tune.  One of B's challenges would be learning the lyrics to any song he chose.  He would also need to project.  And anyone who knows B also knows that he mumbles most of the things that he says.  When he speaks up, it's just louder mumblings.  His biggest hurdle would be annunciation, so that there would be no question as to whether or not he knew the song.

The inspiration for Roberta Flack's already vaguely atonal "Killing Me Softly" came to me a year ago.  Even though we were held hostage in Holland for two years, B's eventual showing at KttD was never far from our minds.  Fantasizing about his rise to glory was mostly nostalgia for our lives lost in America.  Perhaps, though, it was fate that when Emma took the crown in 2007, the first seeds were being sewn for our to return to the U.S. 

To illustrate why I knew that "Killing Me Softly" would be the perfect song for B, you have to reach back in time a bit further.  Not being able to sing is not a new revelation for the tone-deaf that walk among us.  Look into Emma's eyes, and you can almost see the little girl with her stringy pig-tails, hand earnestly placed over her heart, receiving sideways glances from her classmates during "My Country Tis of Thee."  In B's case, his own family rejected his froggy renditions of holiday favorites.  These are people who have been unwittingly humiliated their whole lives, and for them to put that aside and take the stage anyway is no small achievement.

I was telling people last night that the inspiration for "Killing Me Softly" came from the movie "Little Miss Sunshine," but I was mistaken.  In fact, the fog cleared when I saw this scene in the Hugh Grant movie, "About A Boy" -- one of the many Hugh Grant movies I secretly rented in Holland when B was away on business.

While the kid in the movie doesn't resemble B in the slightest, it wasn't hard to imagine little B standing in front of his peers, all knobbly-kneed in his school uniform of 70s-style short-shorts and a golf shirt.  He would have been shy and sincere, his little out-of-tune voice shaking and occasionally cracking.   Always smiling, B's big, toothy grin would have overshadowed the fear in his eyes.

Over the past few weeks, we'd been analyzing and reanalyzing the fate of this song in B's KttD war chest.  Our biggest concern was whether he could learn it, and that it might just be too hard.  The real song , as we all know, is barely in key.  It's whininess is almost too putrid to listen to all the way through.  We knew that B's rendition would make your ears bleed, IF he could piece it all together. 

In the run up to the main event, he began to abandon "Killing Me Softly" for the safer "Greatest Love of All" by Whitney Houston.  Houston's cryptic ode to self-determination and the inspiration of children took on a whole new, creepy dimension when B turned his pipes on it.  The clincher in that song, of course, would have been the irony of singing about dignity in a competition that trades on humiliation.  Don't get me wrong, he can't sing that song either, but with "Greatest Love of All" he'd have had to rely more on the fact that it's just not right for a man to sing about children.

Contrary to popular opinion, B designed his own training regiment, practicing his songs in the bathroom with its unforgiving acoustics.  All this going down with his work colleague, who we don't actually know very well at all, listening in the other room.  It was Clay, who I'm sure is still skeptical about the whole thing and who is now more certain than ever that he doesn't want to live in Old Town, that convinced B to lead with "Killing Me Softly."

Even though there are those that cast a shadow over B's KttD VIII victory, I think the proof is in the audio.   B's vocal warblings sent shutters through the audience.  On several occasions, B himself could hear groans from the crowd.  As his wife, I couldn't help but take on some of his discomfort as note after discordant note rolled off his tongue.  It was much, much worse than any of his bathroom renditions. 

I felt my own embarrassment and tinge of humiliation as I considered the monster that I had unleashed on that unsuspecting crowd of drunk townies and miscreants.  THAT guy was going to come back to our table and sit next to me.  He would probably put his arm around me and lean over for a drunken, triumphant kiss.  I think I know what it's like for those parents of undeniably ugly babies.   In your heart, you know that god is punishing you.  But you smile and pucker up. 

The Cup

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