Regular Poem: Hypothetical Casting Call

that before time
back when i had regularly scheduled extracurricular activities five days a week
all kind of blurs together in my memory
just as the days do now
with no discernible time markers or dialogue tags
a block of indistinct happenings both before and now

i’m going over vague events and trying to piece them together
as fully as i am able
to extract some joy from them–
in remembrance create hope
that similar things might occur in the future
when the fuzzy now time is over
when the malaise of this current season dissipates.

an anecdote i suddenly remembered today that made me smile:

the hottest soprano in praise band

(she is not my soprano
i’m alto b and she’s soprano a
but c team was on mic for the evening
so we were in the front row of the worship center sitting next to each other
because she likes to make fun of me for texting so much during rehearsals
and i like to make fun of her for balancing her checkbook during rehearsals)

and i

for some reason i do not recall
started talking about musical theater and that quickly devolved
into a flirty fake argument about which one of us
would be the better sandy in a production of grease

well you already know from the exposition i provided
that she is both very attractive and a soprano
what you don’t know is that her singing is like if there were a disney princess who was voiced by a ’90s country-western-pop-crossover diva
what you also don’t know is that my singing is more a ’30s cabaret alto who might voice a disney villain

(when her assigned alto is indisposed and i fill in
or when my assigned soprano is indisposed and she fills in
or when soprano c is doing keys 2 and alto c is out of town and we’re the people available
or whatever other circumstance forces us to sing together

we blend so well
sound so good together
and look so good together as a bonus

[in my opinion alto c is the hottest alto
but my proclivities for 60-year-old women with sharp jawlines are not ubiquitous unfortunately
so in popular opinion
i’m the hottest alto])

so she’s the obvious choice
for this not real production

but the way she was issuing challenges to me and waggling her eyebrows and flipping her long straight blonde hair and laughing to expose her slim pale throat
made me realize she was adamant that we should have some kind of manufactured rivalry about it

just for the fun of it

and she was so flirtatiously competitive
that it made me want to be equally flirtatiously competitive
and belt out the correct lyrics to the chorus of “hopelessly devoted to you” after she had botched them

(don’t worry
rehearsal was over by this time
so we weren’t being disruptive
as we sang at each other
increasingly ardently
in a showdown at the metropolitan baptist corral)

it concluded when i capitulated by saying
“i’m more of a rizzo anyway”

and that seemed to satisfy her
because a sandy is not actually a sandy
without a rizzo to be contrasted against