The Very Bad, Very Good Mexican Choir--and Me
Sometimes Giving Your Neighbor a Ride Leads You Down an Unexpected Road
Welcome to Mexican choir practice, folks.
There is nothing like singing songs you don’t know, with words you don’t understand, in a language you haven’t yet learned to speak.
It all began so innocently with a lady I had met recently. She took me by the hand and led me into a dimly lit room. Strangers sat silently on folding chairs around the perimeter.
I asked her, “What’s going on here?”
In a dark brown voice, she said, “¡Hola! H-O-L-A, ¡Hola!”
My fate was sealed.
I had just stumbled, unaware, into the community choir at the local senior center in Patzcuaro, La Estancia Del Adultos Mayores.
Someone handed me a book of song lyrics. The choir leader began playing an unfamiliar tune. As everyone began to sing, I froze. What have I gotten into now?
I looked at Lola. She smiled and gave me a nod as if to say, “You can do it!”
No, I can’t!
The community choir at the senior center in my small town in the mountains of Michoacan consists of five men and 25 women, over 60, a bearded, young choir leader named “Eddy” on electric piano, and his two capable and talented assistants, big, tall Moy on guitar, and soft-spoken Elisabeth on mandolin.
The other men (Javier, Aurelio, Beto, Calle, and Alberto) belted out the tune, while I stared at the unfamiliar lyrics and tried to mouth the words written in Spanish.
The women hopelessly outnumbered us; their high voices drowned out our low.
But why was it so? During a break between songs, I asked the guy to my left, “Why are there so few men?”
He turned to me. With a sad look, he shrugged and said, “The other men our age are all dead.” I looked again at all the women. A terrible thought occurred to me.
“Did … the women … kill them?”
He rolled his eyes up, tilted his head to one side, then shrugged.
He said, “No … At least, I don’t think so…”
But he didn’t seem too sure.
It was all so confusing. I was used to church choirs back home in the US. Choir members had to be able to sing on key, in the same key, and in unison.
Not here.
Without musical notation, I had no way to know how long or short the notes were, or what key to sing.
On the other hand, it didn’t matter. I had never been able to sing on key.
The other choir members overcame these obstacles with enthusiasm. Some sang high, others sang low. Some held onto the notes; others spit them out like bullets.
The choir leader soldiered on, a peaceful look on his face, as if he could not hear anything wrong. The guitarist and the mandolin player looked oblivious to the gaffes, too.
Every Monday and Wednesday, I drove Lolita to choir practice and participated. Some strange force drew me back, like a drunk to his drink, or a racetrack bettor to his horses.
I wasn’t here only because of Lola, or Lolita, as they called her, who was my landlady, although at first, I only went because of her.
She told me that she had a car accident and totaled her car. She looked sad. I offered her a ride to choir. To me, she was a very nice, older Mexican lady.
Then I found out that in the choir, my landlady had a secret alter ego.
I knew her as Maria Dolores Contreras Rodriguez, but in choir, everyone called her “Lolita.”
(Someone told me Lolita is a Spanish nickname for a woman named Dolores)
She was often sad about life when we talked, but never sad at choir practice. Dolores means pain in Spanish, and she had encountered her share of it in life.
Despite being in her mid-70s and having white hair, when a song starts, she pops up out of her chair and begins to dance the cha cha cha. She never gets tired.
And she takes care of me.
On the first day, she sat me next to the other men, then sat on the other side of me. Why?
Perhaps, I thought, it was to protect me from the other women, who smiled sweetly at me from across the room and waved shyly.
How should I respond? I gave them a stiff gringo nod, unlike the other men.
Before choir practice, I watched the other guys give the women “safety hugs,” leaning in so their cheeks touched, but no contact below the shoulders.
At first, as a newcomer, I was too shy to hug them.
I felt like a fish out of water, flopping around on the floor, gasping for breath.
Our songbook consists almost entirely of Mexican ballads I had never heard, dating from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It was Greek to me, but written in Spanish.
A couple of the tunes sounded familiar to me, such as Chiquitita, by ABBA, and Cielito Lindo, which was used for the now-infamous Frito Bandito commercial in the 60s. (“Ai yi yi, I am the Frito Bandito.”) It sounds way better in Spanish!
Why, I wondered, was I so often out of synch and getting off-beat with the others?
Aha! There is a dastardly secret to singing along in Spanish, known as sinalefa.
Not knowing about it, I fell behind every time words ending in a vowel met words beginning with a vowel. Like a guy who doesn’t hear the starting gun in a race, I got stuck trying to figure out how they fit together, while the others took off.
I finally figured it out. They bridged vowel endings to vowel beginnings and picked up a beat on me each time they did it.
My biggest difficulty was trying to express the sense of deep, passionate love and the cruel anguish of heartbreak, which are the blood and guts of Mexican ballads.
As a guy from the Midwest, I had been brought up with two basic emotions: OK, and not so good.
That was what my Mom got whenever she asked my Dad how he was doing.
I was out of my league emotionally in Mexico. My canned gringo reactions felt like toggling between a pair of pale, happy-sad emotions: I was emoji man.
Not so with the others. During an upbeat carnival song, my Lolita and another woman also named Lolita jumped out of their chairs and began dancing.
I almost fell off my chair. Spontaneous dancing in public without permission?
Unthinkable in the USA! But here, no one even blinks.
Mexican ballads are an emotional rollercoaster in the amusement park of life.
During the happy bits, the women clutched their hands to their bosoms as they sang, eyes closed in rapture. During the sad passages, their voices wobbled, and they looked close to tears.
In clutch sections, my wingmen lifted their heads and went all high tenor on me.
It wasn’t just the singing; the complex rhythms made me want to bust a move.
We had aspiring percussionists: one woman thrashed the maracas about with abandon; another woman used an egg whisk to play an instrument that looked like a cheese grater. It made a raspy sound like a Latin guiro.
I pointed to her and asked the guy next to me, “What … instrument is she playing?”
He said, “Oh, her? She is playing a cheese grater with an egg whisk.”
And to think we Americans just use them for cheese and eggs.
(actual guiro photo)
As the days and weeks passed, the faces of the choir members became more familiar to me. The women were no longer strangers.
Now, I saw each face, worn with age, but sensed a heart brimming with hope, while still struggling with the twin sorrows of late life: divorce or widowhood.
At 67, I could relate to both.
I realized that, like the Hotel California, leaving the choir was not an option.
I wasn’t just one more guy; I was now one of the guys. We always sat together.
But after attending choir practice for a month, something puzzled me: We never improved. Wasn’t practice supposed to make perfect?
Sometimes, the choir leader stopped practice and spoke to us at length.
Unable to understand what he was saying in Spanish, I watched as everyone nodded along. Perplexed, I asked the guys what he was saying.
They replied: “He wants us to sing better.”
Gee, thanks.
We resumed, but with no change. If ignorance was bliss, this group was ecstatic.
Finally, one day, I had an epiphany.
This was about more than learning to sing old songs. My long dark noche was coming to an end; the light of understanding began to dawn.
One, most Mexicans do not need sheet music. Everyone knows the songs already.
Two, because music is such an integral part of life in Mexico, everyone sings, whether they have a good voice or not. Maybe they can hit the notes, maybe they can’t. No matter.
This, my friends, is what tequila is for. After a few shots, everyone sounds good.
Was I imagining it, or was something deeper going on in the choir?
These days, you don’t call Ghostbusters, you ask Google.
I found out the main purpose of community choirs in Mexico is to encourage participation and to ensure that seniors have a place to go to meet each other.
Participation as the goal of choir, I mused; that’s radical. Revolutionary, even.
It’s not how we do it in America, where only the best singers are invited to join the choir.
But, somehow, I enjoy it. For the first time in my life, I feel comfortable singing in public.
The choir still sounds awful, but even after a bad practice, I feel good.
But that’s not all.
I enjoy hanging out with the five guys, my new Mexican brothers. Each time I go, they include me a little more in their conversations. And I understand a few more words.
We have given ourselves a new nickname, los rompecorazones – the heartbreakers. We can’t figure out how the women resist our charms, but somehow, they do.
I’m back in high school again; the girls still ignore me. But now, I can handle it.
So, what do you think? Does the Mexican choir sound like fun?
Come and join us. Lola is waiting for you. Stick around after practice. We’ll drink champagne that tastes just like cherry cola.
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As a fellow Midwest person, I can relate!