There is a wonderful world of funny things that happen during rehearsal. Most of the time, they are just a natural outgrowth of the camaraderie and relationship that any conductor has with singers. Recently, for example, at a Gold Coast rehearsal that I led, we were working on a part of David Foley and John Parker’s song, “Home on the Rock,” where there are a lot of changes in dynamics toward the end. I was modeling for the singers—just with rather dramatic speaking, not with singing—how I thought the crescendos and decrescendos could be approached. All of a sudden, I felt like I sounded like Bela Lugosi doing Dracula—or the Count on Sesame Street pretending to be Dracula—or something like that. It was very funny, it just cracked me up, so I told the singers about the mental association that had popped into my mind. And they started laughing, too! I told them, “Well, it is fun to be kind of an auditory mimic; I’ve been that way since high school. Just wait till you hear me do my George Carlin imitation of the weather forecast!”

It’s so much fun when goofy things take place in rehearsal. I suppose it’s true anywhere in life; something ordinary and funny happens that you didn’t expect, and suddenly you’re belly-laughing because it tickled your funny bone somehow. Sandy and I talk about this a lot, partly because the comic styles that we each inhabited when coming into our marriage were so different. In the early part of my life, maybe due to my growing up in an overly intellectual neighborhood where many of us were know-it-alls, there was a lot of humor that was only at the expense of someone else, where one person was being elevated while another person was being put down. And then there was the sibling rivalry I certainly had with my little brother: with your sibs, you quickly  learn how to stick in the verbal knife on a rather routine basis, jockey for position, and put each other down. I also was a royal pain in the tuchus when I was a sassy 12-year-old and my dad took me to Bangladesh on a research trip; apparently, I was putting him down at every opportunity, which I now regret… not my most endearing period of life.

But Sandy’s mother, Ruth, of blessed memory, had a whole different kind of sense of humor: it was just made of the ordinary stuff of life, when something would strike you as funny when you were baking a pie, or changing a diaper, or letting the dog out, or doing the dishes, or describing something funny that happened at work that day. It took me a while to understand this kind of sense of humor, because it was so foreign to mine. Sandy’s mom would be relating the whatever-it-was from her day, and her face would just light up with delight, her eyes full of mirth, and her cheerful smile widening to reveal, with all of her top teeth showing, how funny she thought it was. Sandy has a similar sense of humor. Another characteristic of her humor is that it’s gracious, and as much self-deprecating as anything else, not in the sense that she needs to put herself down, or that someone else would be elevated over her, but more that she just knows how to laugh at herself in a sweet and appealing way. It took me a long time to learn how to do that with myself, partly because of my own insecurities and, again, because my family of origin had taught me that humor came primarily at the expense of someone else.

Sometimes humor is helpful in producing what the conductor wants. During an Evanston rehearsal, when we were working on Graham Nash’s “Our House,” we came to the “la la” section, and the way the choir was singing it sounded way too “legit” for me; it felt like the singers were trying to sing, to be all fancy and accomplished. So I teased them, very lovingly, and demonstrated what I was hearing (which made them laugh), and then told them I just wanted to totally lighten up vocally. I reminded them that “the mood at this point in the song is simply, ‘Graham Nash is happy that he’s living with Joni Mitchell… they just did the dishes, and life is awesome’—so you don’t need to over-sing it.” And of course, we all cracked up at that, too. And then they totally lightened up, and it was a source of great joy for all of us to be able to turn it on a dime like that.

I’m sure that at every rehearsal there’s at least one thing that’s very ordinary and funny. I actually imagine that, at probably any hour of anyone’s life, there’s likely something that will crack you up if you’re open to it. Part of my joy at being on this journey of getting older is that I think I am a little less rigid than I used to be… a little less concerned that everything has to go my way. This leads me to believe that I am a little more open to things just being the way they are, including when they are goofy and funny in that delightful everyday way that I’m describing. I am so grateful to Sandy, and to her wonderful mother, Ruth, for showing me a new way to let joy in. I suppose, too, that you have to pay attention in a different way for things like that to register on your antennae, if it’s not your native style, but I’m glad that I was able to learn.

If you have a story to share of the perfectly ordinary things that make you laugh, music-related or not, I would love to read it. Send your stories to me.