A surprise gig

Merry Christmas :)

It's a bit of a tradition that Ben and I catch up for dinner with the Reading crowd sometime between Christmas and New Year. (By Reading crowd I mean people Ben went to college - aka senior high school - with.) As it happened we had a very nice dinner on Boxing Day at a place called The Jazz Cafe in Reading. The place was empty so we had the small restaurant room to ourselves. Best of all, they had a jazz pianist playing, so in effect we had our own private pianist. He was excellent, and played lots of numbers we enjoyed bopping along to in our seats. I must have bopped pretty enthusiastically, because Ebru started demanding that I get up and sing a song. To be honest, I really wanted to - it was a brilliant opportunity to sing informally in front of people I knew, so I didn't need much persuading.

I got up and sang 'All I want for Christmas is you' - the Mariah Carey version, slightly adapted for people like me whose voices don't span four octaves.

It was great, I got a huge round of applause and lots of compliments and felt really good. So good I wanted to get up and do it again. So I did. This time I sang 'Nobody does it better' (Carly Simon). I sat down again, but it wasn't long till everyone had me up singing a bunch of songs. It had been so long since I'd done that that I couldn't think of any songs to sing! I ended up doing 'Cheek to Cheek', 'Let's stay together', 'Blue Moon', 'I only want to be with you', 'These arms of mine' and probably a couple more I can't remember. A veritable set list!

It was a really wonderful experience, everyone was really pleased I'd done it and kept giving me compliments. I guess I feel a little rusty and my confidence has suffered for it but this little surprise gig has really inspired me to learn more jazz tunes and revive and revamp my songlist. I even exchanged cards with the pianist... who knows, I might even gig professionally with him one day! My dream is to have a regular gig in a jazz bar, say one night a week, so this really was a taste of a dream come true... Thanks to the powers that be!!