My body is still aching from being a rock star.
It was a heady ride finding out what Tommy and Gina were up (Livin' on a Prayer). I had to remember where Eleanor Rigby left her face (in a jar by the door) and feel disgrace about a boy kicking a can and a man waving banners (We Will Rock You). Singing in the recent QPAC rock choir concert was a mental challenge for someone who occasionally muddles up the names of their own children.
So just as I was starting to feel Tommy and Gina's personal crisis, our choirmaster throws in some rock moves. Easy really - a fist in the air, a hand reaching out and a bit of coordinated clapping. Oh and just a lot of free rock dance moves for most of the rest of the time. Easy for some, but not so easy for this gumby dancer who can barely manage a fairly basic box step.
It was as I was playing air guitar and doing a bit of head banging, that my world tilted slightly. It was at that point that I realised the choir rises were seriously moving (of course they were given the amount of head pounding that was going on) and that maybe I was past the point of being a credible rock legend.
I did question the movement of the floor beneath me given the amount of blood that had rushed to my eyeballs and the fact that my hair (which is usually untidy) was completely covering my eyes. Perhaps I was just giddy, not only with the delight of my late-age metamorphosis from grandmother to black-t-shirted rock chick, but that I was able to enact this fantasy in the relative and anonymous safety of a choir filled with other people undergoing their own transformations.
Had there been an instrument nearby, I may have had to have pounded that too, splintering it dramatically across my knee.
I was eyeing off the microphone stands (surely any rock star worth her mettle could bend the metal) when a little voice of reason (sounding suspiciously like my mother's) told me it might be best to calm down before I fell down. I slowed the head down to a gentle rocking nod. I brushed the hair from my eyes. I breathed in the spectacle. The music stopped. And one exhausted rock chick sat down.
- Linda Muller
