Life Story: Chapter Eighteen

For a short period of time, I was a member of the Roanoke Valley Boys Choir. I honestly don't remember much about singing with this choir, so I'll do the best I can with this tale.

Once or twice a week we would rehearse in a room at the Methodist church downtown. The only songs I remember us performing were Consider Yourself from Oliver! and Danny Boy. The only performance that I can really remember is some thing we did at the Hotel Roanoke.

Justin was in this choir too. Our parents worked out a carpool kind of thing. On rehearsal days, I would ride the bus to Justin's house. His mom would make sure we got our homework done, then she'd drop us off at rehearsal. My mom would then pick us up when she got off work.

During that time I got pretty close to the Walkers. To this day I consider them some of the nicest people I've known in my life. Justin's dad was a huge fan of the old show Airwolf. And when I say fan, I think it's a safe bet that's short for fanatic. He had every episode on video tape. Even their answering machine's outgoing message played the Airwolf theme song behind Mr. Walker's voice.

At the time, Justin was the oldest of four kids. He had two sisters, Jessica and Julie, and a baby brother, Jason. Jessica was only a year behind us in school. Julie was around preschool age. I remember that she would never address me by name. She would just call me "boy." Could have been worse. She was also slightly confused over what a kitty said. I'm pretty sure she pronounced it "deedle-eedle-eedle" or something close to it.

Our singing days with the Roanoke Valley Boys Choir only lasted for that year. I don't even know if the program continued once we were done with it. I can only speak for myself when I say it wasn't a very enjoyable time. I mean, hanging out with my best friend a couple times a week, those were good times. But singing in this choir under a pretty pretentious director, not so much.