I sing Elton John songs while driving home from work. It’s dusk, everyone else is getting off work too, and I don’t try to hide the fact that I feel like a tiny dancer deep down in my soul. There’s something about the way I sing while driving that makes me feel rock-tastic. Most people are tired and don’t pay attention to the road, let alone a young woman rocking out in her car. But someday I’ll be famous, and they can tell their grandchildren, “I saw her sing in a car once!”

I fantasize often about being a Rock Star. Mostly, though, this wish comes to me after a good day of teaching, when I love my career and think Okay, I’ve perfected this whole “Professor” thing. It can’t get any better. Now what? My answer is in the way I drum the steering wheel—as if I’m wearing a fuchsia feather-boa and pink sunglasses, and working my fingers like I’m playing a white baby grand even though I’ve never had a piano lesson. Actually, I had one. Mom’s played piano since she was six, and the one afternoon we sat down on the bench I couldn’t remember where middle C was. My fingers didn’t want to play F-sharps. The only musical thing I was interested in, I told Mom, was singing. So she said I could sing the notes while she taught my sister, Deidre, the piano. “Okay, sing a B-minor,” she said to me. At the moment Deidre hit the note, I belted. Then Mom sent me into the yard to ride my bike.

The tradition of singing in the car began when I was three and Mom would drive me over to Grandma’s. I’d sing “Drivin My Life Away” from the backseat of Mom’s old Ford while she turned up the volume. I’m not sure if it played on the radio or Mom had it on eight track, but over and over again I sang, and Mom would turn up the volume and at Grandma’s she’d say, “Boy you should’ve heard Joyce in the car!” My fantasy about pink stage lights, sweating foreheads, and screaming fans was born. 

*

Before they each married, Mom and my aunt were a duet known as The Victor Sisters. They cut a 45 record. When I was very young I would play the 45 on my Sesame Street turntable. I learned all the words to Mom’s music. I thought I would impress her one day, so I set up a little stage in the living room. I put on my yellow Easter dress, used a hairbrush as a microphone, set the record going, and sang. Halfway through the first verse Mom took away my microphone and pulled up the player’s needle. There was horror on her face. “Don’t sing that,” was all she said.

I wasn’t deterred. I tried out for the Christmas Carol Choir at school. The little women in a black beret who held the auditions hit piano keys and said to each of us, “Sing that note.” Each time I did. Each time her eyebrows rose. She put me in the front row of the choir and when we gave the concert it was my job to throw snow-like confetti up into the air.

By the time I was a teenager I knew I had to master the standards if I wanted to be successful. So I bought all of Elton John’s albums. I found out quickly the only way for me to achieve the right pitch was to be in the shower, so I started bathing five times a day. It was no big deal while I lived at home, but once I went away to college my dorm mates complained. “She’s always in the shower,” they told my RA. “We’ve gotta use the one upstairs. And she’s always singing The Bitch is Back. It’s creepy.”

My RA wanted to hear it from me. Although my hair was nearly green from the chlorine, and my skin was raw from hot water, it wasn’t obvious to her they were telling the truth. “Well,” I said, “I’m practicing my singing. The acoustics are best in the bathroom.”

“Auditioning for a show on campus?”

I enunciated each word perfectly so they’d get it. “No. I’m going to be a Rock Star.”

My RA held back fits of laughter and finally said, “I thought you were a Biology major.”

Embarrassed by her narrow-minded view of my future plans, I escaped to my car. I didn’t want to live in a building where dreams, especially my own, were met with such jealousy. I spent the hours between classes in the parking garage or driving in circles around campus. I sang until I knew I could hit the notes and if I couldn’t, I just hummed them. A little improvisation never hurt a star. I hardly spent any more time in my dormitory and practically lived out of my trunk. I wouldn’t give any of them the satisfaction of saying that they once heard me sing for free.

I should’ve auditioned for a musical or production. I should’ve learned to play an instrument and write my own music instead of imitating Elton John. But each time I showed up at an open call I remembered standing at the piano with Mom or throwing confetti at the Christmas show or the look on my RA’s face. I’d stare at myself in my rearview mirror and trace the creases around my eyes. I was far too old at nineteen to break into the music scene without my own lyrics or instruments. I cleared out my trunk, moved back into the dorm and only hummed in the shower.

Nowadays when I sing in the house, it’s to my cats or my husband. I make up lyrics to other songs. They’re always funny words, sometimes set to a John Phillip Sousa tune, and they mostly include lyrics about farting or smelly litter boxes. 

I got inspired by the television show American Idol and watched it for two seasons, thinking to myself I could audition. I could get up and sing and at least get to the final twenty-four, that’d be good enough for me. I’d sing along with the contestants and during the commercials complete my own renditions of the tunes they sang. My husband would smile and say, “Wow.” In the end, I decided I’d never be able to fit into ridiculous outfits or style my hair the way a real Rock Star should. The pink stage lights would blind me for sure if I couldn’t wear my prescription glasses. 

The last thing I need to hear when I’m about to deliver a lecture is, “Wasn’t that you singing in the parking lot, Professor?” Not a good way to spend a class hour—staring at the smug, Brittany Spears-looking student in the front row who made the comment, hoping to God her paper or test score is low enough not just to swipe her smirk away but to humiliate her. It’s on those days, when every person I see looks like they belong on stage, that I hate my job, my career, my car, and my voice. And the Rock Star stays hidden away.

When I was nineteen, I used to be able to crank my car, pop in a tape and begin singing before I’d gotten into first gear. Now I have to remember to wait until I’m out of the Faculty Parking Lot, clear of campus, and onto the highway before I can really crank up the sound. By then I’m nearly home and have hardly had enough time to warm up my vocals. Sometimes I take a longer route, turning onto a narrow country road. On evenings like that, if I close my eyes while sitting at a red light, I can feel myself as a teenager again, driving home in the California dusk, smog and exhaust and mustard grass filling my nose, nothing but me and pink lights and my Rock Star future in my eyes. I have an uncontrollable smile on my face then, and sing exceptionally loudly, fantastically out of tune.

J. W. Young is a California high desert native and graduate of The University of Mississippi's MFA program, where she edited The Yalobusha Review for 2 years. Currently she lives with her husband in Bonaire, Georgia and is an Assistant Professor at Middle Georgia College. She has published fiction and memoir in several journals, and has appeared recently in Random House's anthology Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: The Best New Voices of 2006. She is currently finishing a collection of memoir essays titled My Father's Daughter.