One of my community partner organizations recently won a substantial amount of money and yesterday was the big celebration. So I took myself and the three students who volunteer there to the lunch-time party. Our adventure started at the Obs station where we squeezed onto a crowded train. It had started to rain and the train had that distinctive misty windowed damp smell. It was pouring by the time we got to Retreat and we had to do some deft puddle-hopping to keep our under-prepared and under-socked feet out of the raging pavement rivers. A man at the bus shelter missing only his bottom teeth told me to drink some OBS* to warm-up.
One of the organization's volunteers came to pick us up and for the first time in years I crouched in the back of a bakkie*, trying to strike a balance between not settling on any of the wet surfaces and not being thrown from corner to corner as we bumped our way along. We reached the director's house, to a rousing chorus of "you're the one that I want" from Grease; karaoke-style. I sing about as well as a goldfish can survive out of water, so karaoke is equally as punishing to my dignity as it is to those in earshot. I gave my students a weak smile, accepted a glass of wine, and found a table to perch on.
A couple of hours later (in between doing shots with the women from Lavender Hill who dedicate their school-day afternoons to looking after neighbourhood kids, and trying out the director's secret blend of red wine and coke) I belted out a bit of Celine Dion, followed by some Bruno Mars, interspersed with more than a smidgen of Disney classics. Two of the women tried Micheal Jackson's moonwalk, then Elvis's pelvic thrust, and my students alternated between giggling on the couch and yodelling their hearts out.
It rained all day.
Last quarter, one of my students who I placed at this organization spoke about how the womens' warmth, their nurturing, their sense of humour and their uncompromising demand that everyone has a talent worth sharing, enabled her to break her Ivy League-inspired silence and find her metaphorical voice. I don't need to find my metaphorical voice, I have all the self-assuredness I need in life. I'm a metaphorical voice on two legs. But, sometimes I need a safe space, a couple of drinks, and a group of women whose overwhelming energy deafens off-pitch, off-key, un-harmonised, un-dignified singing, because sometimes, just sometimes, I like to share my absolutely horrific non-metaphorical voice with the world.
What was left of my dignity when I walked out the front door was lost in the conversation with my students on the way home.
'So you know you're always complaining about our singing?' they asked, referring to the Monday morning Xhosa class that happens in the classroom next door to my office. The class involves a mandatory singing component, which my students take very seriously.
'Yes, you sound terrible.' They do. Terrible. As a tone-deaf totally unmusical lay-woman I pronounce this with certainty.
'Well,' I was told, 'you really don't have much room to complain, now do you?'
I smiled in reply. They have a fair point.
*Old Brown Sherry
*truck
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