“Do you still sing?”
Bobbi Munholland posed that question to me when I saw her for the first time since 1993. We were at a reunion of former L.S. Ayres advertising department employees, held at the Benton House. “Oh, yes,” I told her and noodled out a few notes of proof. She told me that I used to come into her office and “make (her) sing a song … from ‘The Lion King.’ ” I don’t remember doing that, but song leaks from me all the time. And I did sing at the wedding of another Ayres co-worker.
Susan Schonfeld must have been one of the attendees at that wedding, for she claims that I sang “Wind Beneath My Wings.” She heard it, so it must be true, but after my brother died in 1999, I can no longer make it through the song without crying. (He was the wind beneath my wings.) I do have a picture of myself in a light-colored window pane double-breasted suit, holding a microphone. I appear to be singing in the photo. I do not remember being pummeled by rocks, so I must have done ok. I do a lot of singing.
Many years ago, in an out-of-character moment in the advertising department of a St. Louis department store, I was whistling a tune composed by Jean-Joseph Mouret called “Rondeau.” I don’t know why it had become stuck in my head, but when my co-worker said she was having it played in her wedding, I found it to be an ironic choice. “Rondeau” (also called “Jenny Kiss’d Me” in some anthologies) is a poem by Leigh Hunt. Jenny, “jumping from the chair she sat in,” did not kiss me, but did ask me to sing in her wedding. She gave me her song choices and I practiced them diligently, and on the day of the wedding, I was told that the church would not permit the singing of songs that were not approved hymns.
I stood beside the organist with the bride’s music crumpled in my hand, high above the congregation, and as he worked the great booming pipe organ, I sang the songs as the organist directed. My background in the church, singing, came in handy as I followed the lead of the organist, singing from the sheets of music he had put before me. That was my first public performance of songs that I had not practiced (drunken karaoke moments excluded) and my second wedding gig.
I was always in the habit of singing in the hallways of the places where I worked, and often treated my fellow heathens to the hymns of my youth. One challenging song was my favorite to belt out in the advertising department’s kitchen, and after hearing it, my boss, Tom Kiehl, asked me to sing “Ave Maria” in his wedding. I practiced that song until the neighbors were pounding on the walls and I got it right on the day I needed to deliver it.
Now that we’ve hammered past Valentine’s Day and are rushing headlong toward June, the favored month for brides, the catalogs will begin to start to feature merchandise and honeymoon locations brides, which makes me think of the three weddings that I have delivered songs for. And I remember one funeral.
When my grandmother died, my mother asked me to sing “The Old Rugged Cross” at her funeral. That was one of the most difficult moments of my so-calling singing life, mourning the loss of my grandmother, yet singing her on her way. I would far prefer to be remembered as a “Wedding Singer.”