I can dance, but I can’t sing. That didn’t stop my mom from somehow befriending a local children’s singer and securing singing parts for each of my siblings and me on one of her records. Yes, as recently catalogued by the esteemed Willard Memorial Library of Willard, Ohio, the lending of vocal talents by my sister, brother, and I are forever chronicled on Linda Arnold’s Peppermint Wings.

I don’t remember a lot from that day in the studio. I remember the song “I am a Pizza,” and I remember thinking the older boy next to me, another member of the children’s chorus, was really cute. I don’t remember his name. According to the Horizon Information Portal, he might have been Wes or Brian. (Toby I remember – Toby is Linda Arnold’s son, and though he was another childhood crush, he was blonde. My crush of the moment was brunette. Toby would later unknowingly become part of a scheme to make a “traitor” to my sixth grade clique jealous. Sixth grade girls can be such evil bitches.)

In one song (It must have been “Yam Jam.”), we were asked to sing along and then ad lib a line, “Pretend you’re a potato! You get to talk in this one!” After we left the studio, the producers were going to morph our voices so that we would sound like The Chipmunks. How cool did that sound to me when I couldn’t even read? Very. The potato talk assignment set me on one of my first memorable “OMG how do I impress him?” spells. I wanted to come off as cool to Wes/Brian, so I needed to come up with a clever potato one-liner, but I was six, and probably didn’t know what “clever” meant, just that I needed to come off as such.

So we sang along to the song and it got to be ad-lib time. The entire time that I was mouthing along I was racking my brain as to what words would make obvious my air of coolest six-year old in the studio. “Dude” was cool, because hey, I was born a Cali girl and only the coolest Cali girls said “dude.” The coolest form of potato I could think of was tater tots. They’re more exclusive than French fries, but even more beloved. I was going to be so cool; I was going to say “Tater tots, dude!” for my musical recording debut on the hot [potato] single “Yam Jam!”

One by one, Linda pointed at us to spout off our hot one-liners. So far nobody’s one-liner was as good as “Tater tots, dude!” Continuing on down the line, she pointed at Wes/Brian before she pointed at me. “Tater tots, dude!” he said. He said. Wes/Brian stole my line!

I was fucked. On the one hand, I could have been comforted in the fact that our two children’s chorus minds thought alike, and that we had both come up with the coolest one-liner to grace the “Yam Jam” track. But the fact was now I definitely couldn’t say it myself. That would be incredibly lame. All the other children’s chorus kids would look at me like, “Didn’t you just hear Wes/Brian say it? You can’t steal his line. Psha.” Divas.

The dreaded moment arrived. Linda pointed at me. This wasn’t fair! I had to rethink all over again! Shit, what was I gonna say?

It came out before I could stop myself, “Lookie there!”

Lame. So lame. What the Hell does “lookie there” mean on an audio track which a person can so obviously not see? But I said it. And it made no sense. And all because Wes/Brian stole the line I was going to use to win his heart.

It sounds inconsequential now, but imagine the size of your six-year old heart and compare that to the weight of experiencing your first major letdown. My “Yam Jam” one-liner was now immemorable and uninteresting. Wes/Brian kept dancing along to the rest of the track and I would have no future chances to grab his attention.

When I left the studio that day, as I sat in the backseat of my mother’s car and pretended to nap, I vowed never to revisit the scene of my first music industry heartbreak. I couldn’t face the humiliation of being uncool to other children’s chorus veterans, especially the likes of Wes/Brian. I would never record again.

Editor’s Note: It’s a slow blogging day – I didn’t know how to end the story. Sorry.

I never recorded music again, but I did a couple of performances for Linda Arnold as a backup dancer: the original “Broadway Banana,” (The irony!) and one of four alligators in “Top Hat, Bow Tie, and Tails.”