BoomerGirl Diary

"Will you puh-leeze turn down the music?"

It's a common refrain heard around the house these days.

Only it's not me yelling at my kids.

It's them, beseeching their mother, whose favorite pastime of late is cranking Bonnie Raitt and singing in front of the mirror in the living room.

I have joined a rock `n' roll band, you see.

Now before my prospective fans start jamming the Ticketmaster phone lines, I use the word "band" loosely.

I'm not professionally trained. I've never sung in so much as a church choir. I've hardly sung into a microphone, unless you count the plastic ones you get at toy stores.

I just know I like to sing, and though I haven't gotten word from Paula Abdul yet, I might actually be pretty good at it.

As for the rest of the band, we are a sales rep who happens to play guitar, a tattooed lawyer who plays the same, an art history professor who sings and a guitar teacher who drums. Our average age, and I'm only guessing because nobody much talks about it, is 51.

Together, we are "Weekend Warriors," participants in a nationwide program brought to the masses by local music stores: Any "mature" Dixie Chick or Bono wanna-be submits his or her name and instrument, including voice. The store puts like people together in a band. They meet once a week at a studio inside the music store. They practice songs of their choosing. They perform on stage six weeks later.

To date, our group has only met once, to work out the songs we want to play. Lisa, the only other female and the only one among us who's ever been professional when she sang Joni Mitchell in college at local coffee houses, wants to do something by the Dixie Chicks. (I can hang with backup vocals on this one. I like the Dixie Chicks.)

Meanwhile, the tattooed lawyer wants to play something from some hard-driving all-female sex pistol group called The Donnas (shudder). The other guy wants to sing "I Need Your Love" by the Beatles (retro). Somebody else wants to play that sad song about having the time of your life by Green Day. (I'll cry.) Another guy wants to do Scottish pop vocalist Gerry Jerry Rafferty's "Right Down the Line," circa 1989 (yawn).

We obviously have some Yoko Ono issues to work out.

As for me, my choice can only be Bonnie, whom I first saw 30 years ago when I lived in New Orleans.

Donning my black halter-top and my khaki short-short skort, I stand on the ottoman in front of the mirror in the living room. Closing my eyes, I move my hips to the intro and begin to feign the bluesy soul of the nine-time Grammy winner.

"I was in a daze,

Moving in the wrong direction,

Feeling like I'd always be the only one,

The lonely one."

While someone happening upon this scene might shout, "Midlife crisis!" to my way of thinking, midlife crisis sounds like an old person in a car accident.

I choose to see what I'm doing as a direct response to all those years of paying for piano and viola and cello and voice lessons for my kids. After all those years of watching them on stage while my chosen venue was the minivan and only when I was by myself, I've gotten just frustrated enough to say, "Hey! I think I can do that, too!"

Weekend Warriors is, definitely, yes, I admit, filling a newly realized void, made particularly vast by the fact that my first child is leaving home for college this year. It is potentially meeting a longtime desire that has been buried in soccer schedules, peanut butter and ear infections.

Whatever. All I know is since I started singing on the ottoman in the afternoon, I've lost five pounds. I no longer eat chocolate at 4 p.m. Nor do I talk about how boring it is to live in the Midwest.

I am developing a side of myself that was always there, waiting for me to share it with the world — or at least my family, who are digging on their newly realized mom.

"True love or perfection

It seems like it's overdue.

Then just when you least expect it,

It comes sneaking up on you."

"I had no idea you could sing like that, Mom," my youngest says.

I rest my case.