Auditioning in Aisle 3

No microphone, No problem.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Written by me and AI-assisted for polishing.

I was in my early thirties when I walked into Street Corner Music, back when finding a song required either knowing the title… or having just enough confidence to embarrass yourself in public.

It was one of those neighborhood record stores—narrow aisles, shelves packed tight with CDs and albums, music you could actually hold in your hands. No algorithm. No search bar. Just you, your memory, and a guy who may or may not be able to help.

I was looking for a song, but I didn’t know the title. I tried describing it—the groove, the chorus, the way it lifted. He looked at me and said, “How does it go?”

So I sang it. Right there in the aisle. Hearts of fire… love desire… Except—wait. It wasn’t “hearts of fire.” It was Hearts a’ Fire. But I kept going anyway.

Not quietly, either. With commitment and swaying hips. I kept going just long enough to wonder if I should stop… but not long enough to actually stop.

The guy watched me with a smile that, in hindsight, definitely meant he knew the song immediately and was just letting me finish.

“Oh yeah,” he said finally. “We’ve got that.”

I smiled back. Of course you do.

He walked me over to the rack and pulled out an Earth, Wind & Fire Greatest Hits CD. There it was. “That’s the Way of the World.”

And just like that, my performance career came to a quiet close.

Now whenever Alexa plays it, I’m back in that narrow aisle. The music starts, and for a moment the world slips back to a time when songs waited patiently on shelves—and finding one meant singing it out loud to another human being and hoping, deeply, that they recognized it before you had to get to the second verse.