True Colours

Last year, for my company annual dinner, I got up the nerve to go in costume as a zombie, to the surprise of many, including myself. This year, I didn't go in costume, but at the behest of my boss, I did something that arguably took even more nerve -- I took part in a singing performance.

We had a group of nine people and had a mix of solos and group songs with my boss playing the guitar. We had English, Chinese, Malay, and even Hindi songs. I had a solo, singing an excerpt of True Colours. We practised almost every day after work for about a month. It was hard to get everyone together because we're all so busy, but we made it for the most part. We even had slides prepared by yours truly to sync with the songs. It was a love story of sorts.

Come show night last Friday, we went to the venue at lunch time and proceeded to the stage for sound checks and rehearsal on stage before the actual dinner. We got a little nervous when we saw that another team had a full band, but then we were just there to have fun. We finished up our rehearsals and last minute preparations in a holding room (which was strangely arranged like we were having a conference, notepads and all).

At the appointed time during the dinner, we went to wait in the wings as the MC played some silly game with some of the audience. The wait was rather long or maybe it just seemed that way. We were psyching ourselves up for the performance -- the whole company was watching after all. Oddly, I wasn't really nervous at all; I was kinda eager to go up on stage and finish it.

Our performance went just the way we wanted. The music was good, the singing was good, and I think the slides even synced up most of the time. When it came to my turn, I took the microphone and went to the front of the stage and bowed my head for my super-dramatic rendition of True Colours (I'm no musician but I made up my own arrangement, mostly inspired by the arrangement used in Glee). I couldn't help but smile when I heard the applause, even though I was supposed to be 'sad'. My song came out mostly the way I was hoping it would and I really hammed it up, glad that the glare of the spotlight made it basically impossible to see anyone's face. It was weird to zone out like that but the applause was worth it. Very cool :)

We finished up our set with Feliz Navidad and took our bows. I think we were quite exhilarated by the whole thing as evidenced by the Whatsapp messages flying around between our phones (despite most of us being at the same table). We were proud of ourselves and rightly so :)

In the end, we actually got 3rd place out of three acts (the band won). It was somewhat disappointing, but we didn't really mind (well maybe a little). We did have a lot of fun and came together as a team and at the end of the day, that's what's really important.

If you're reading this, Team, thanks for everything. I'm happy to call you friends and it was an honour to perform with you. I'm proud of us all for having the guts to go on stage in front of hundreds of our colleagues and sing our hearts out. Tomorrow we're corporate grunts, but for one shining moment, we were 'stars' :)

So here's to us... and to next year ;)