;I was talking to a friend of mine recently, a man who I will—for the sake of anonymity and my own personal satisfaction—refer to as Hernando Innocent Atlatl III. He sings with me, and has been singing most of his life. I asked him why he hadn’t ever taken singing lessons. He prevaricated (Atlatl has turned prevarication into an art form, let me tell you). He said that he didn’t have enough time—he was too busy. As we talked more and more he eventually told me that he had decided not to take singing lessons because he had been singing for years and years. He was an excellent amateur singer, but taking lessons made him a serious singer, a professional. He’d been singing too long to risk finding out he wasn’t any good at it if he ever really tried to make a go of it. There were some opportunities in life, he had decided, that you should chose to miss.
