penfield | He rambled 'til the butcher cut him down

"And if dreams and memories sometimes get confused, oh well ... that is as it should be."
- Daniel Stern as the voice of Kevin Arnold, from The Wonder Years

This year, the University of Rochester Midnight Ramblers celebrated their 10th birthday. You know, I was there when they were born.

A cappella is a strange musical genre, in that it inexplicably surges in popularity within the very specific environment of the college campus. The tight harmonies and wacky personalities apparently have a unique appeal to individuals between the ages of 17 and 22, commonly known as the hippest of the hip, despite the fact that even 13-year old girls and my parents -- neither group renowned for fine aesthetic tastes -- know that A cappella music is insufferably lame.

I've never really understood the phenomenon, even while I was an enthusiastic part of it. When I arrived at college I thought I was a real smooth operator in the vocal department, having carved out a respectable reputation in high school. Meanwhile, the preeminent men's A cappella group on campus, The Yellowjackets, surveyed the student body the way King Henry VIII surveyed the British Empire; at and after every concert, nubile freshmen girls lined up three-deep to be casually objectified by these otherwise dorky-looking individuals.

I knew I had to be a part of this group.

But I was not good enough. I auditioned three times, with dwindling confidence and diminishing returns, and by the second semester of my sophomore year I reached the actuarial conclusion that any additional rejection would cost more pride than I could possibly gain even in a positive outcome, the odds of which were already soaring in the wrong direction.

Fortunately, there were other outlets for my singing: the shower, the car, the occasional personalized telegram. Most significantly, on an ad-hoc basis, I would join with a handful guys from my fraternity -- including my close friend and former roommate -- to sing at formal events, sorority mixers and (in one unfortunate case) funeral services. We participants dubbed ourselves "The Gentleman Callers."

Early in my junior year, an eager sophomore fraternity member (and then-Yellowjacket) assumed control of the six- or seven-person group. We had a few gigs but lost steam around the middle of the year and eventually just stopped scheduling rehearsals.

At least, I thought that's what happened. But apparently they just stopped inviting me. Just before the annual spring festival, I was informed -- via flyer -- that the "Midnight Ramblers" would be giving their debut performance that weekend. I called my former roommate, a breathless A cappella afficionado, to ask if he had heard about it.

Yes, he had heard about it, he said, because he was in the group -- with the aforementioned sophomore, and all the other former Gentleman Callers, except for me, plus a few guys from the defunct co-ed group (whose name I can't remember, though I recall it was excessively punctuated) and one guy from the Eastman School of Music. When I asked why he hadn't mentioned anything during the several months they had apparently been rehearsing, he said that the sophomore had told him to keep it a closely guarded secret, as if they had been practicing nuclear fission or something. If I remember correctly -- and this is fuzzy -- I think he mentioned that I would be permitted to audition for the group in the fall, if I wanted to.

Yeah.

Now, I could appreciate that maybe I wasn't quite good enough to be in the group, which had serious aspirations of challenging the Yellowjackets for supremacy; I had little formal training and I couldn't read music. It's also quite possible that the organizers assumed I had enough on my plate already, since I was serving as editor-in-chief of the paper at the time, although it would have been nice to actually participate in the conversation about it.

What really astonished me was the total absence of class -- or even mere politeness -- practiced by the founders (who, not to sound naive or anything, were ostensibly my "brothers"). I never looked at any of them the same way again.

The truth is, I never looked at anyone the same way again. It's one of the most important lessons I learned in college: never trust anyone who's smiling; it means they just took advantage of someone, or is about to.

Today I'm grown up enough to recognize that "brother" is just a word and, by itself, never really meant much. I'm also somewhat comforted by the reality that the whole scene is pretty much irrelevant to anyone who's not a teenage biology major. I try not to hold a grudge anymore about how I was treated. (I'm still friends with my former roommate: he was the only one to apologize without smiling.) The bitterness is still there, but it's only a fleeting, fading aftertaste.

So happy 10th birthday, 'Ramblers. Hopefully by now you've learned the difference between right and wrong.