Tuesday Reminiscences: In which I contemplate Nora Ephron

I'm a big Nora Ephron fan. For those of you who don't know that name, she wrote some of your favorite movies: When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail, Mixed Nuts and most recently Julie & Julia. (And no, I didn't name my child after her... but her name might have served for, um, inspiration.)

Yesterday, I was reading about Julie & Julia and Ms. Ephron and thinking about the book that she wrote, I Feel Bad About My Neck. It's pretty funny, and there's one part that I think of all the time. She talks abouy how there's a song that Edith Piaf sings called Non Je Ne Regrette Rien, and it's a great song where she sings about she has no regrets. Ms. Ephron then says something to the effect of, "Not me. I have a lot of regrets."

I think this stuck with me because I feel like people are pressured into accepting all of their decisions as they all add up to the person you are today. But, there are decisions that I regret. One of the ones that, for whatever reason, sort of haunts me is one I made during my senior year of high school.

Brace yourselves.

I dropped out of show choir.

In my experience, show choir doesn't really exist outside of Southern California. It's best to experience show choir, so here's a video of the choir I was in performing Heartbreaker in 2007, which is a few years after I was in it (and dropped out).

I performed with the lesser show choir for my freshman and sophomore years of high school. My junior year, I decided to take the year off and switch to drama, which I did and had a lot of fun. Then, senior year, I tried out for the top women's choir (pictured in the video) and made it in. After a few weeks of school, I decided to drop choir. The show choir schedule is pretty hectic (competitions every weekend and a big show once a quarter), and I was taking 4 (or 5?) AP classes, 6 AM seminary, mutual every Wednesday night, aaaand I was filled with that snobbish teenaged antipathy that sabotages most everybody. I decided that to do my best in my AP classes (which is funny, because I ended up getting my first F in one, but that's a different story), something had to give, and that was show choir.

But, memories are made out of the stuff you do, not all that late-night studying for AP tests (although, sometimes if it's real late, it gets pretty funny). So, in looking back, I can't help but think all that snobbish teenaged antipathy would have been helped by singing and dancing, instead of being fed by isolating myself in my room with a comparative politics book.