What is the sound of one geek clapping?

Sometimes I wonder if I should treat this blog more like, well, a blog. I read so many great articles during the day and I think about sharing them with people, but I never bother linking them on this site.

I have to share this, though: Andrew Sullivan wrote a great article for the Atlantic that attempts to describe how “straight” the concept of gay marriage has become, especially for people of my generation and generations that have come after mine.

My favorite (and rather moving) part:

It happened first when we told our families and friends of our intentions. Suddenly, they had a vocabulary to describe and understand our relationship. I was no longer my partner’s “friend” or “boyfriend”; I was his fiancé. Suddenly, everyone involved themselves in our love. They asked how I had proposed; they inquired when the wedding would be; my straight friends made jokes about marriage that simply included me as one of them. At that first post-engagement Christmas with my in-laws, I felt something shift. They had always been welcoming and supportive. But now I was family. I felt an end—a sudden, fateful end—to an emotional displacement I had experienced since childhood.

and this:

Ours was not, we realized, a different institution, after all, and we were not different kinds of people. In the doing of it, it was the same as my siste’s wedding and we were the same as my sister and brother-in-law. The strange, bewildering emotions of the moment, the cake and reception, the distracted children and weeping mothers, the morning’s butterflies and the night’s drunkenness: this was not a gay marriage; it was a marriage.

I sure as hell hope that if I ever have children or grandchildren, by the time I do they won’t even understand the concept of a difference between straight marriage and gay marriage. We can all hope.

One of my favorite Broadway composers of the last decade is Jason Robert Brown. I’ve long had dreams of performing in one of his shows, professionally (yeah, right) or even in a local theatre group. In fact, last year I wrote about auditioning for a show (and later about not getting the part). That show was one of his.

Anyway.

Last week, he posted an entry to his blog stating that he had found a few rehearsal recordings he’d made for a production of one of his shows (Songs For A New World, a song from which I sang on my senior recital), and thought that it would be fun to host a little Jason Robert Brown karaoke contest. He posted the recordings of him playing the piano and asked people to record themselves singing the songs.

I decided that this would be a lot of fun.

So here are the two entries that I posted. And here’s the deal: If you listen to these and you like them, then I ask you to send an email (before August 10th, mind you) to jrbkaraoke2008@yahoo.com, and in the Subject line, put “I Vote For Andrew Coutermarsh”. I don’t hold any delusions that I would win the competition, but it would be nice to be a finalist. It’s hard to tell, with some of the fan clubs that people have online.

The songs:

(If you can’t use the flash player, the title of the song is also a link to the MP3. The flash player is for ease of use.)

She Cries

King of the World