Oh What A Beautiful Butt Crack

Singing in the new year

I am not a Jew for all seasons. I don’t celebrate Shabbat every Friday night. I didn’t circumcise my kid. And, as I wrote about last year, I don’t even like most Jewish desserts. But I frickin’ love the Jewish New Year, those twin pillars of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and I dutifully celebrate them each fall. Because the Jewish calendar is different from the Gregorian one, the new year comes at a slightly different date every year. Because I am not just a Jew, but an ADHD Jew, I never seem to be able to figure out ahead of time when the new year will be, and so it also brings with it a feeling of surprise and delight that is familiar, like having an asteroid that turns out to be filled with chocolate land in your lap once a year.

I love atoning for my sins, even the ones that are hella old school-sounding and feel highly unconnected to my actual, agnostic life, like worshipping idols and taking God’s name in vain (that last one always confused me as a kid - I wondered if it had something to do with shooting religion into your bloodstream). My favorite is the “sin of omission,” and I think long and hard about all of the things I didn’t say and do this year that would have made my people or my community or the world or my silly-little-self a better place, while I mumble the words to another prayer I don’t really understand that is probably about slaughtering lambs on behalf of a higher power.

serious

This morning, I went to Rosh Hashanah services, led by my friend Isaac, who generously takes me in like a Jewish orphan this time of year, at the UC Berkeley student Hillel. When I was a grad student at Berkeley, I always felt self-conscious in these services, but now, as an old fart who doesn’t really care what 18-year-olds think about her anymore, I absolutely adore them. When is the last time you sat in a room full of young adults, being all earnest-like in their sensible white cardigans (Jews wear white for the new year, why, I don’t know) and the one suit their moms made them to take to college? I had the joy of listening to a person who did not look a day older than twelve, in shiny white platform boots, tell us how much she loved the songs they sang at temple with her grandmother growing up, and how even though her grandmother clucked her tongue at how few of the words she knew, she remembered the melodies, and cherished singing them with us. When we sang the Mi Sheberach, a prayer for healing, and went around and spoke the names of our sick or hurting loved ones, I got to watch a sniffling college student get comforted by another college student in a white, spaghetti-strapped blouse. And I had the rare privilege of having the young person next to me, whose boyfriend was sporting a white button-up collared shirt covered in downhill skiers, compliment my nails, which I will be recalling in moments of feeling culturally irrelevant and uncool for the entire new year. Okay, maybe I do care what eighteen-year-olds think about me.

But the best part of services, hands down, is the singing. It doesn’t matter how little attention you gave these songs when you were young. Like the twelve-year-old explained, if you were surrounded by it growing up, you remember. You may not remember, like, ALL of it, but you can always hum or just say “adonai” periodically. And all Jews will tell you that, annoyingly, different sects have different tunes for the same songs, so that sometimes you will go to a new place and start belting out what your entire life you have been told is the melody for “Adon Alom” only to realize two seconds too late that there is a completely different melody and everyone but you magically knows it. At my beloved Oakland dance studio, Hipline, the instructors make it very clear that if you don’t know the moves, it doesn’t really matter, which is very helpful for someone like me whose brain stubbornly resists coordinating with her limbs. When Isaac leads services, he makes the same clear for the music. You are really graded on effort, not accuracy. And yet, as anyone who has ever gone to karaoke knows, there is nothing more pleasing than a room full of strangers all singing in unison, even if there’s a good chance you are going to get covid.

I have always loved to sing, and been slightly overconfident about my singing abilities. As a six-year-old in hippie arts camp, I had a solo about a pizza place named Joe’s that might have been the highlight of my childhood. In seventh grade, we would stand around in a huddle at recess and sing SWV’s Weak or Xscape’s Understanding, and though I wasn’t brave enough to tuck the bottom of my T-shirt into the neck and expose my tummy like Latoya and Nicole were, I did not hold back on the vocals. At summer school, I was given the “Mariah Carey” award, which I believe they gave each year to the student who had a form of auditory dysmorphia that made her sound like Mariah Carey to her own ears. For career day, I went to a real-life recording studio and made a CD with my own picture on the cover (this was like some sort of technological miracle in 1999). I did Jazz Choir with my mom—I was seemingly the only person under 40. I scatted my heart out in the high school Jazz Ensemble.

And then, I just stopped singing. Well, not entirely, just in any serious way. I still made up songs, constantly, about important topics like how tasty my lunch was or how much I really, seriously, right now, was getting out of bed. I belted out tunes around the house, and turned every shower into an episode of Live At The Apollo. But that was about it. Then, when covid hit, I began taking online singing classes with my mother’s voice teacher, a lovely and talented and highly patient woman, and I realized how much I’d missed it all. My vocals improved, absolutely (let it be known that I have managed to nail the high note in Cole Porter’s Easy to Love at least once), but it was more than that. Singing, for an hour a week, just made me a whole lot happier.

Singing with others is harder to come by. I am lucky enough to have children who only complain about my singing about 75% of the time, which leaves a healthy bit of room for me to get in there hard and strong with the good stuff. On the bike ride to school, I sing Oh What A Beautiful Mornin’ from Oklahoma, dramatically cracking my voice every time we go over a pot hole, which is often. My kids chime in with an original, Oh What A Beautiful Butt Crack, and they even let me do the harmony. For a time, my daughter and I sang the respective parts to Somewhere Out There from American Tail at least once daily, and when we finished we would laugh and hug and feel connected but not in a creepy way like this dad and his daughter (is no one else creeped out by this???). My kids like to make up songs too—they mostly feature some kind of homage to the human reproductive or urinary or bowel system—but sometimes they are just about a cool new paper airplane or being brave, or no one can really tell what they’re about (my four-year-old daughter recently sang the words “I let go of my power!!” in a swimming pool, repeatedly, for about 45 minutes), and that’s okay.

Last night, we cooked a Rosh Hashanah meal for 30-odd neighbors, most of whom are not Jewish. When it came time to sing the prayers, I seized up—being part of a chorus is not the same as being a solo act, even if you do, 100%, sound like Mariah Carey. Over challah and kugel, I reminded my neighbor Chris that I had seen him biking home the other day, and he asked, sheepishly, whether I’d heard him singing Welcome to the Jungle on his bike. Sadly, I had not, though my love for Chris doubled just by knowing it had happened at all.

On the way home from services this morning, after an old dude named Mitch, even older than me, sounded the shofar like nobody’s business, after I thanked Isaac and helped collect some of the prayer books and watched the invisible, sacred web that had held me and all those co-eds together for two hours disappear back into the ether, I got on my bike and headed home. The fog was lifting and my tiny, sinful heart was humming from all the melodies I knew and even the ones I’d faked, and instead of finishing a podcast, I put one of my favorite playlists on shuffle and popped in an earbud. Though I probably hadn’t heard Tevin Campbell’s lesser-known ballad, Always in my Heart, in 25 years, something deep inside of me, maybe next to the part of me that believes in a higher power or that I can actually sing, remembered it well. Emboldened by Chris, and Isaac, and the girl who thought my nails were cute, I sang all the words I could recall, and even some I could not, at the top of my lungs, speeding towards home, and another year, and hoped that everyone could hear me.

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Also, this:

If you’re still feeling the anxiety of my last post, you’ll be happy to know that no one is sick anymore and the ringworm is fading like a little bitch. Apartment is still full of flies tho!

• L’shana tova! If you’re Jewish and you have kids, here’s my boy Isaac doing a Rosh Hashanah version of the Macarena about apples and honey that really gets me going.

• My voice teacher, Susan, does virtual lessons or in-person in the Boston area.

• I just found this website that tells you about all of the chorus’s in the SF Bay Area and I’m gonna go to a rehearsal for one near me soon and maybe they’ll even let me sing even though I’m kind of a diva. Maybe there’s one near you??

• What do you like to sing out loud, embarrassment be damned??