Just Give Me a Reason to Roll in the Deep

After taking a few years off from competing in Salmon Idol, a fundraiser for the high school music department, my friend Amanda talked me into singing a duet with her in the competition. We picked the song "Just Give Me a Reason" by Pink and the guy from Fun, and started practicing it together in August. We memorized it, and came up with an idea for costumes and props for the song, and we were both so excited! Auditions were at the end of September for the performance which would be a month later. We didn't do our best at the audition, and we were worried that we wouldn't make it into the show, so we went around that night singing and performing it for family and friends, and we got rave reviews from them which made us feel better. The following week, we found out that we made it on the list of performers! We were so happy!

We went to two group practices together, and starting purchasing items for our costumes, and we were feeling so good about our plan of action as the performance neared. But then, everything changed...

I had purchased tickets for Josh and I to go see Pink in concert on October 17th. On the afternoon of the 16th, the day before we were to leave for SLC, Utah, I received word that Pink had changed her concert date--to the 29th, which was also the night of Salmon Idol. I FUH-REAKED out!!! I couldn't believe it. I had to make the choice between going to her concert and singing her song at the Salmon Idol competition. Ultimately, I decided to go to the concert because the tickets were non-refundable and were the most expensive tickets I'd ever purchased. That night, I went to a group practice for Salmon Idol, and informed Amanda that I wouldn't be singing with her anymore. She didn't want to sing by herself, so she told John to give our spot on the line-up to someone else.

Amanda and I were both really sad that we wouldn't be performing the song that we'd practiced for and that we wouldn't be able to show the audience our fun presentation that we had planned with the costumes and props.

A week later, I received another notification that Pink changed her concert date AGAIN. This time, it was moved to January. I couldn't believe it! I called Amanda and told her, then I called John. Unfortunately, though, he'd just given away our spot in the show the night before that. The timing was sooo off. By this time, I was pretty much hating Pink for messing up my life!!!

So, John and Amanda and I talked and discussed just singing a song for fun in between the junior and senior show. We sing karaoke together about once a month, and we have some songs that we always do, so we picked one of our regular songs "Rolling in the Deep". For this song, Amanda has the main vocals, and John and I sing her back-up. It was a lot to spring on her on such short notice--even though we'd done the song probably twenty times together, the words were always on a screen for her to see; it's a long song to have to memorize in such short time!

The night of Salmon Idol was a crazy one for me...I raced home from school, started making cookies for the fundraiser, then my stove caught on fire, so I took the cookie dough down to Grandma's house and waited for the oven to preheat, told the boys to make themselves some dinner, baked just enough cookies at her house to be sufficient, came home, changed my clothes and got all ready, and drove the boys back into town to be at the Junior Idol show at 5:30. Amanda and I went backstage after the junior show, and ran through our song together. Then we stood backstage waiting for a cue for our turn. John was running around (because he's the music director and was in charge of the whole thing), and all of a sudden, our song's music was playing on the loud speaker. John came running up to us and told us to go out on the stage and start singing, even though we already missed the beginning of the song. We told him that wasn't going to happen, and that he needed to start the song over again. So Amanda got on the stage, all ready for the music to start over, but then John struggled with the system, and couldn't get it to go to right cue. First, he went forward, then too far back. Amanda stood alone on the stage for 2 minutes...first there were cheers in the audience, but then it went silent as everyone was waiting. It was terrible. Finally, she decided to walk off and wait with me off stage and just then, he got the music started, so back out she went. The whole situation threw us off our game, and our performance wasn't near as good as it has been before or since then! But we had fun together and I'm proud of us for putting it all together last-minute, and I'm super impressed with Amanda for memorizing it all and following through with performing at Salmon Idol for her very first time!

Here's the video that Josh recorded of us singing that night:




Perhaps next year Amanda and I will be able to perform the song that we'd worked so hard on actually performing this year but didn't!