Perhaps you are as tired of reading about political turmoil as, occasionally, I am of writing about it, and reading the same solutions offered for problems that those with the power to fix choose not to.
At such times, even at the New Year's week, my thoughts may turn to the single American element that brings unalloyed joy, completely divorced from the horrors of ISIS, the presidential campaign and the Kardashians.
Yes, I refer indeed to baseball.
And so today I want to relate a story that is absolutely true. Perhaps it is not entirely about baseball, but it takes place at a ballpark and is funny as heck, even if I am the one who looked pretty silly at the end of it.
Way back in 1977, while an opera singer in Boston with a few companies there, I was also an anthem singer for the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. I dressed up in the attire of the time (the leisure suit) and strolled out before "Play Ball" to sing in front of the assembled multitudes. I say "sing" because I actually did move my mouth and have notes and words come out, but not very loudly. That's because Fenway Park, like all the other ballparks of the time, had acoustics completely unsuitable for live performance.
I "sang" before a microphone on a stand in the on-deck circle, with a cord running into the Red Sox dugout ... and ending there, not plugged into anything. It didn't need to be, because I had previously recorded the anthem with the organist, John Kiley, and the tape was played into the stadium sound system so that there would not be echoes throughout. If a singer were performing live, he would hear his own voice three seconds later and the song would drag to a crawl.
That had been the model for all stadiums, including Memorial Stadium, where the Baltimore Orioles were playing in 1991 before moving to Camden Yards the next year. My family had been back in Virginia for years at that point, and my sons were 17 and 10. Having never heard me sing the anthem in person, they encouraged me to contact the Orioles, our nearest team, to do a performance.
Never wanting to disappoint the boys, I contacted the PR department, who were perfectly happy to have me come up do a game that year, and asked me to send a cassette to use for the game performance. We talked for a while and I mentioned that I was singing in a barbershop quartet, Main Street, with a couple of rabid Orioles fans, so they asked me if I would send them a cassette of the quartet doing the anthem as well; that perhaps they'd invite the quartet some time to perform as well.
Cut to game day. It was a Saturday, June 29th, the Red Sox were in town, and the game was being broadcast as a Game of the Week on NBC. Because of the network, and the need to start the game precisely at 2:00, all of the pregame ceremonies were much earlier than usual.
There was a scheduled induction into the Baltimore Sports Hall of Fame, and this was being done on the field at about 1:30 and still was in progress at 1:45. The microphone was in front of the Orioles dugout on the third-base side, and a group of people were dryly going through the ceremony. I was expecting to sing at about 1:55, so I went down to the field early and was hanging out behind home plate while my sons were up in their seats.
At 1:45, without warning, everything stopped. The people in the induction ceremony backed away from the mic but didn't move very much, so it wasn't clear what was going on, except that the induction ceremony had stopped a bit abruptly. Must be an NBC network break, I assumed.
Then the PA announcer began to intone ... "Ladies and gentlemen, will you please rise ..." and I started to panic. It was ten minutes before my call. I was on the field but far behind home plate, not near the mic at the third-base dugout, which was pointed toward the dugout and not the flag in center, where I'd been told to move it before starting the anthem.
"... for the singing of our National Anthem, which will be done by Mr. Robert Sutton of the Boston Light Opera ..." and I started walking very quickly toward the one mic on the field. I was hoping to get there and start mouthing the words before the tape started, the solo a capella version I had sent them.
I was about ten feet short of the mic when I heard the announcer finish and the recording start. I started mouthing "Oh, say ..." five feet before getting to the mic in the hope that only a quarter of the 30,000 people there would see, and also knowing I could not move the mic toward the flag. By the time I got to "... the dawn's early light" I was where I needed to be, and hoping no one would notice anything wrong.
Except for one little thing. As I was trying to synchronize my lips to the playing tape (i.e., stay a little ahead of it), something was clearly not right. Right around when the twilight was doing its "last gleaming", it became clear to me -- they were playing the wrong tape. Yep, there I was on the field, just me, ten feet from the packed Orioles dugout and facing right toward it, one little guy apparently making the voices of four people.
They were playing the quartet cassette.
This fact was not lost on the Orioles in the dugout, who were in their normal anthem pose facing past me toward the flag, holding their caps reverently. As they fairly quickly realized what was going on, several of the caps mysteriously -- I'm remembering you, Gregg Olson -- rose to their faces to keep their owners from laughing out loud.
I'm still out there lip-syncing to four times my capacity and trying to act like nothing is wrong. That got a bit difficult when my lead voice sang "land of the free" and from the speakers came a magical echo of "land of the free" while I was clearly holding a long note on the field. I don't know what color I had turned by the "home of the brave", but I was pretty embarrassed by that point.
Of course, the Orioles organization was immensely apologetic afterward about what had happened, and invited me back to sing at my choice of games the following year in their new stadium -- live, as it turned out, which the new sound system at Camden Yards allowed. It would be a pleasure, I told them, and signed up for the date I wanted, which in a strange turn ended up the only rainout in Camden Yards' inaugural season.
There is one other odd twist. Bob Wilson, the tenor in the quartet and a big baseball fan, was planning to attend the game and was driving around looking for parking, with the radio on. He didn't know I was supposed to sing that day. When he turned on the radio, he heard the anthem, heard his own voice on the tenor part, and got very panicked thinking he had missed a gig. Not knowing I was there, and in those days before cell phones, it was days before he actually found out what had happened.
By the way, I didn't feel offended, I didn't think I was the victim of a "microaggression" and I didn't sue.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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