Oh, Say, Can You See?!? No, Really! Right Over There!

Happy Fourth! What a great holiday. No need to shop, unless you include going to the store for brats and the fixings for a root beer float. No pressure on making the best dessert or the loveliest centerpiece. Heck, you don’t even need to shower if you don’t want to. Just jump in a pool, lake or leaky hose and that’s close enough.

I hope you have the chance to massacre sing the national anthem today. I will be forcing my children to listen as Marc and I attempt two-part harmony and inevitably wind up in a different key and laughing so hard, our root beer float escapes our nostrils.

In a land far, far away, I sang the national anthem before a basketball game. This was a defining, disheartening moment of my life and one which I hope never to repeat. I sang it a cappella, which sounds simple and moving, right? No. No, it was not. It ended up more on the screechy side of moving. Screechy and amplified in a gym.

Never again.

The one redeeming attribute of that performance was that I remembered the words. This earns me some points, I feel, since the song does include the words “perilous,” “gallantly,” and “ramparts.”

In retrospect, though, the words should have been secondary. I should have taken a page from Miss Maya Rudolph. B to the R to the A to the V to the E!

Happy Fourth and happy antheming! Break out the sparklers and sing loud, sing strong, and sing whatever words you can remember!