A few weeks ago, I was on Kijiji looking for a job and decided to check out the community musician section of the site. After sifting through a bit of the posts, I happened upon a band looking for a female singer. Intrigued, I clicked no it to read further.
Their criteria was that you had to like Tom Waits, Billie Holiday and the Ramones. I like all those things...but could not for the life of me figure out a cohesive way to integrate those styles. So I emailed them gushing about my love for Tom Waits, old jazz and a variety of other styles.
A day or two passed and I received an email back. They wanted to have an audition/jam session at night time and gave me the address of a part of the city I'd never been to before. I Googled it so I knew where I was going, and it seemed alright. Close to bus stops. Walking distance to downtown. The email was sent by, I kid you not, Zoltan.
Upon reading that name, all I could think of was that bad teen movie Dude Where's My Car? in which there's a creepy group of nerds in bubble wrap suits who enthusiastically yell ZOLTAN! to pay respects to their alien leader.
In the meantime, I was given a few songs to learn so we could 'jam'. I'd never jammed before...this was a foreign concept. I wrote music quietly in my kitchen by myself...sometimes I sang in the shower. But it was always a solitary thing. I was once in a band...but we only played one song and it was really awkward and weird. I was pretty nervous.
So the day came when I would be jamming with Zoltan. I got into a bus that I'd never gone on before, got off at what I thought was the right stop (it wasn't) got momentarily lost and then was able to get back on track. Looking around I noticed that though I may live in the West ghetto where everyone lives in a crappy apartment building where people do crack in the parking lot, this was definitely the East ghetto where everyone lives in a run-down house that has plastic wrap instead of windows and old, rotting 2x4s instead of lawn furniture. Finally I got to my destination and noticed that the building looked very much abandoned.
After a few minutes of peering in dusty windows and trying to open the locked doors, Zoltan showed up. Turns out he's from the former Yugoslavia so the name makes a wee bit more sense. He showed me inside the building, which was an old abandoned factory, and I met the other band member: Brian. Then I made the mistake of asking where the bathroom was. Zoltan looked around and laughed a bit nervously. He mentioned something about talking to the guy that owns the place and how it needs to get worked on. When we arrived at the bathroom, I was a little horrified. It looked like a prison cell, but dirtier than you'd expect a prison cell to be. Like, if they were in the process of destroying a prison cell. But I had drank excessive amount of water because I was nervous and wanted my voice to be in good condition. I had to pee.
I will leave out the gory details, but I'll just say this. I am never going to drink any amount of liquid before band practice.
After the bathroom incident, I was able to keep it together enough to go through with the jam session and it was incredibly fun. I was nervous, and that negatively impacted my abilities, but they seemed to think I was still good enough so now I guess I'm in a band. A band that practices in an abandoned old factory at night in the East ghetto, with Zoltan and Brian, the two most juxtaposed names in existence.
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