Ryan and the Requiem

Let me introduce you to Ryan.

Ryan and I have known each other for about 25 years or so. I played hide and go seek with him and his neighbor Eric a couple of times when we were in grade school, but we weren’t very close when we were young. Truthfully, I’m not sure how we ended up being best friends.

We have always been different from each other. He was tall and handsome and I was the shorter, scrawnier sidekick. He played football; I was a music geek. He had his first girlfriend when he was in 8^th grade, I kissed a girl for the first time a year later. Somehow, though, we ended up getting thrown together and forged a friendship stronger than time or distance.

I think 7^th period chorus was the glue of our young friendship. We had a choral instructor named Mr. Wenzel who was a stroke just waiting to happen. Not that I would ever wish that on him…I grew to love him as I grew up. But the man had very poor eating habits, was overweight, and wasn’t particularly adept at handling stress. Seeing how 7^th period chorus was a sort-of “get out of jail” card, a bullshit credit ripe for the taking, he got a lot of people in his chorus who were more interested in an easy “A” grade than in singing. Ryan and I were interested in both. And, while we were at it, we decided to make each other laugh as much as possible. It wasn’t a successful day in Chorus if Ryan and I didn’t make Mr. Wenzel turn red with rage and watch him fight to not say the four-letter words that we all knew he loved and we deserved so much.

After getting screamed at for the day, Ryan and I would try very hard to not raise his ire any more than we had. There was a fine line between getting him fired up and getting sent to detention, one that we walked delicately along. But by trying to be inconspicuous we would often find ourselves reduced to fits of silent laughter, unable to speak or sing. Unwilling to make eye contact with each other for fear of losing it we would spend the rest of the period holding the sheet music in front of our faces so that Mr. Wenzel couldn’t see us and so we wouldn’t set each other off. We truly had the time of our lives.

While our friendship developed outside of Chorus and still is strong today, Chorus continued to be a strong bonding agent for our friendship. It only got us into trouble, serious trouble, once…

The spring of our sophomore year Mr. Wenzel decided that the fine singers in Monticello High’s accomplished chorus were going to sing John Rutter’s requiem from start to finish at our final concert. Without music. I admire Mr. Wenzel’s faith in us as young vocalists. It may have been misguided, but he had faith that we could pull this off.

For those of you unfamiliar with this particular piece of music, it’s a bit ambitious. I think it was between 40 and 50 pages long and fairly complex musically. I might even use the word “tedious” to describe it. Ryan and I certainly thought so, which is why we made up alternate lyrics.

Alternate lyrics were a trick Ryan and I had used several times to inject fun into the often-boring process of learning music. We are both fine vocalists with a natural inclination towards learning music, so making up alternate lyrics (especially of the dirty variety) was a great way to learn the music and have fun.

The original Requiem has a passage that begins “Make a joyful noise” and is a very praise-heavy piece. For the life of us, Ryan and I can’t remember the actual lyrics. But we remember our lyrics to this day:

“Make a sexual grunt!
Unto the late John Holms!
The late John Holms!
Make a sexual grunt
A sexual grunt
A sexual grunt
Make….a sexual grunt
Unto the late John Holmes!”

It was high poetry. And sung along with the Requiem, it was a masterpiece. Never before had we come up with something so raunchy, so dirty, and so perfectly matched to the music. We were immensely proud and sang our lyrics, which were re-written for almost the entire Requiem, during every rehearsal.

We hadn’t anticipated the disaster that lay ahead of us. Concert night arrived, and we dressed in our ties and our sport coats. We all found our places on the risers without our music, Ryan and I standing next to each other. We launched into the piece, at which time Ryan and I both had the dreadful realization that NEITHER OF US KNEW THE REAL WORDS! In an effort to not stand out, we began the standard “Banana, banana, banana” approach to unknown lyrics. It got us only so far before we began to laugh as we thought of our made up lyrics.

Faces red from holding in the laughter, we stood in front of a community of parents and family who were in attendance. What a treat for them, our families who had come to be made proud by us. I bit my cheek so hard attempting to control my laughter that my mouth was bleeding at the end of the concert. Ryan had dug his fingernails into his palms so hard he had marks for days afterwards. You could practically see the steam coming out of Mr. Wenzel’s ears he was so pissed at us. The guilt was overwhelming…almost. It wasn’t quite overwhelming enough to make us forget the dirty lyrics we made up, to make us stop laughing. The verbal beating we got from our parents that night was brutal.

And yet, if you asked either of us, I think we would do it again. The memory is too priceless. There are so many stories to tell of Ryan and I getting into trouble. He’s the kind of friend that every parent wants for his or her child, really. He’s well grounded in his faith, he’s a nice boy, he has manners and is courteous and smart and fun and safe. It’s just that when we got together, trouble was only one step away in either direction. And it was too tempting for either of us to resist.

As a tool for learning music, making up dirty lyrics to sing along is second to none. Ryan and I can still sing that part of the Requiem flawlessly. But it’s always a good idea to memorize the real words, too.