Poor Christina Aguilera. The ex-Disney Mouseketeer with pipes of gold committed a horribly huge gaffe during her rendition of the national anthem before last Sunday's Super Bowl game. For the one or two of you who missed it, she forgot the words. This led to a firestorm of media mad-gabbing ranging from titters and confused looks from the sidelines to "How could she?" and excuses as to why she failed to remember the lines (marriage breaking up, strains of motherhood, poor health, et. al.).
I happened to be watching—not that I'm a football nut, but I really wanted to cheer the Cheeseheads on—and cringed during the amazingly gut-wrenching faux pas. But I'm no ordinary listener; I'm a music geek and often notice the tiniest infractions when it comes to musical performances.
Christina is to be congratulated for continuing on to the end, giving the song her all during the last few measures. Me, I might have melted into the field in embarrassment, but I'm not a performer. My son, a classically trained pianist who has reams of musical scores tucked into his brain, once lost his place during the final few measures of a recital. A recital in front of people, being taped. He paused a second or two (which I'm sure must have felt like an hour) and continued on to the end and his bow.
People, being basically flawed, tend to make mistakes with regularity. Look at Tiger Woods. Eliot Spitzer. People who streaked in public during the '70s. Charlie Sheen. Both of Charlie Sheen's wives. Lindsey Lohan's theft of a necklace (along with every other wrong turn she's ever made). Miley Cyrus smoking salvia on video. Emperor Hirohito when he decided to mess with the U.S.
Even I make mistakes. Once I left a banana bread in the oven overnight. I had a terrible cold, took some medicine, and promptly fell stone dead asleep, so unconscious I did not hear the kitchen timer go off, or the alarm clock the next morning, or my telephone later in the afternoon. By the time I turned the oven off, my apartment building was filled with the unmistakable aroma of charred brick.
Article comments