Playlist: Video 5/67
751 Words
Playlist: Video 5/67
Music school was a daily t*****e for Aura. Perhaps as equally a t*****e as was her screeching voice in her professor’s ears. Another day, another test, another t*****e.
Aura Nightingale, daughter of the world-famous Nightingale couldn’t possibly have had anything less than the same melodious voice as her father. People expected her to love singing with the same passion as him.
Silly fans.
She knew the theory, the breathing, the exercises, the scales. O. o. O. o. ooo. She knew how she was supposed to sound like, even those filthy unloved drummers could manage a 6 out of 10 in song practice.
Aura would never fail her class, simply because her father wanted her not to. Despite her sounding like a lamb getting slaughtered with a blunt knife, the teachers would sign off a passing grade.
Her father was self-taught of course, or at least that was the back-story spun by Dionysos Entertainment, when he was discovered and signed an exclusivity contract. He had some coaching and seminars after that, but he was an authentic Greek folk singer. Raw and alive. Mitropanos meets Kazantzidis. That’s how he was fed to the public, and Dionysos had revived the traditional Greek song. His success was meteoric and raised Nightingale to the poster boy of Dionysos. The company provided everything to Aura’s poor family, and they gave back by building on the company’s myth.
So, when some suit at the Marketing department had the bright idea of making up for a bad sales quarter by having Aura sing-along, her fate was sealed.
The single with her vocals that accompanied her dad stayed at the top of the charts in almost every music steaming site. It barely broke even for the company. The expert, who turned her screeching voice to a melodious creature worthy of accompanying the people’s voice, was paid in millions.
God bless Autotune.
She never did a proper recording after that, but her father wanted to keep the myth intact.
That’s why Aura coughed through her vocal exams and her professors turned a blind eye and probably a deaf ear.
No room for improvement, of course.
“Why don’t you try something else?” Orestes asked while she was storming out of the exam hall. There was nothing mean in his expression, contrary to everyone else’s around the place.
Aura sighed. “You know why.” She grabbed her bicycle’s steering wheel and imitated her father’s voice, “The company gave us all we have Aura. You were young when we had nothing Aura, but surely you remember how hard it was. Your brother wouldn’t be alive Aura.”
“He has a point… But there’s more than singing. There must be something you can do under Dionysos, something that you like.”
Aura brought the index finger to her chin and pretended to think hard. “Lemme think. Possible careers in Dionysos Entertainment. Singer. Musician. TV host. Actress… Dancer! Yeahsure. I can’t do anything like that without getting kicked out. A waitress is more plausible.”
“Try a new instrument. You never know, you might like something you’ve never played before!”
“Orestes,” she said and pulled down her t-shirt to present her bare neck to his face. “This scar is from the last baglamadaki that died in my arms and tried to take me with it down to Hades. Her argument left him speechless and blushing. Aura blushed too and stepped back. “Music hates me. You can’t possibly understand. You pick up a bouzouki and people start looking around for Tsitsanis.”
“I’ve been practising since five years old, it didn’t just happen one day…” he said apologetically, repeating the same line he had used hundreds of times.
“Yes, but when you got past the basics it was as if you were born for it. I got to six years old to figure out how to ride a bicycle… Look,” Aura said and opened her social profile on her phone. She clicked on a video some schoolmate had taken mere minutes before during her test and uploaded to make fun of her.
Orestes stared patiently. He knew very well what he'd hear. They practised together, he knew how she sounded. It was t*****e to the ears. Some schoolmates were looking at them and laughed. Orestes seemed to struggle coming up with something to make her feel better but he had nothing.
The video stopped, and Aura retried it. “They took it down. The spider caught it. You do know they have an exclusive spider to take down ‘non-approved,’ meaning non-fixed footage of me off the internet? How pathetic is that?” she asked rhetorically. Then she mumbled, mostly to herself, “Daddy thinks I don’t know.”
Orestes fumbled on his own phone, looking for the video.
“Nevermind that. Come on, let’s go for those strings you want to replace,” she said and they took off on their bicycles.
- Writer
