Oh! Those are the words? Interesting!

Sometimes I have a tendency to not learn words to a song. It’s not because I’m being deviant (for the most part!). It’s because I used to sound a little too trained because as a Broadway/opera style singer, my diction was way too intelligible and I’d be ridiculed by the common pop folk! The pain!…I decided that as long as I didn’t know what the words were, there’d be no way that people would understand me. It’s actually a good rule to live by. Have you ever noticed that there are things that we have been unclear about for our entire lives? Like for instance, I just recently found out that Puff the Magic Dragon wasn’t “frolicking in the ottomus.” I always thought that it was a place…like where hippopotamus’ lived. There are so many things in our lives like this that could take a lifetime to notice. The strange thing is that people know that we have it wrong a lot of the time but just don’t bother telling us. It’s like having something in your teeth. People notice and think, “gee. She has something in her teeth. I hope she picks it out soon so she doesn’t look stupid.”…then they walk away. We could actually go a lifetime with something in our teeth if we all lived by this rule. That can’t be good!…though I did it to my singer myself one day. He had a raspberry blacking out his front tooth for a couple of sets and I kept meaning to tell him and then when I finally did, he said, “Thanks a lot! Don’t count on me to tell you the next time your dress is tucked into your underwear!”…oops…sorry…From that day on, I always told him when his dress was tucked into his underwear…wait…no…I always told him when he had something in his teeth.

I think that people need to be a little clearer. Action definitely speaks louder than words and sometimes we intentionally mumble our actions so people are deliberately deceived so we can feel more comfortable in the moment. I had a supreme court judge call me and ask me out one time. I said, “No thank you.” He kept pushing. I finally said, “You know how when you’re Jewish, you can’t marry someone who isn’t Jewish, so you just don’t go out with someone who isn’t?”…he said, “Are you Jewish?”…I said, “no.”…well…as a way of fixing the trouble I apparently have with balancing my lack of interest with kindness, I have just decided to use an unintelligible string of consonants as a response. That way there’s no way that the person will misunderstand my intentions. They are going to deduce what they want to hear anyway. I give up! Why learn the lyrics if people accept the song without them?