cooltunes

There I was, sitting on the sidelines at some bizarre audition-like situation with a band whose music I was less than enthused about. Not metal, but something akin to. The large woman beside me and I were supposed to be singing backup, which she knew how to do, but when I asked for the music, there was none.

It gets better.

She got up to solo, and knowing this kind of music, she rocked out to the enthusiastic response of the crowd. Then it was my turn.

Every song I ever knew vanished immediately from the repository in my brain. I stood for some awkward moments, then began. The only thing that popped back into my mind was “‘What a Wonderful World”, the Louis Armstrong classic. It’s the kind of music played in front of stores that don’t want teens to loiter. Lots of teens in the audience.

But what saved me was that I sang the Eva Cassidy version. And because my mom is freshly in another world watching over me, I woke up. But the dream hung on, as early morning ones tend to do, and I was explaining to the audience that I picked it as a tribute to a singer who died at 33.

“What a Wonderful World” was the last song she performed in public.

Her recording of “I Know You by Heart” works well as a lament of someone losing a lover. But in a chapel as part of my mom’s funeral service, it was unbearably sad.