Cry Me a River

This one time, at jazz camp . . .

Seriously, I did go to jazz camp this summer. It was actually a "jazz fantasy camp," but it's hard enough for me to admit that I went to jazz camp, let alone the fantasy part of it. Very mid-life crisis, which I'm not ready to have quite yet. (I expect to live at least into my mid-eighties because my grandparents all lived to that age, and they ate a lot more bacon than I do.)

I hadn't sung in front of anyone in years before this summer. I'd rarely sung in front of my husband except to belt out made-up restaurant jingles about E. coli. I'm not exactly sure what possessed me to go to jazz camp in the first place. I had wicked performance anxiety. When I sang in front of the group for the first time, the instructor asked me, "Are you Julie London?" I smiled and assumed she was paying me a compliment. I didn't know who Julie London was.

That's not completely true. I did know about this Julie London:

the actress who played the sassy Nurse Dixie McCall on Emergency!, which was one of my favorite shows to watch after school when I should have been socializing or participating in team sports or whatever. In one episode, a kid got his head caught between the rails of a bannister and the paramedics had to oil up his head in order to get him out. My sister had a crush on Randolph Mantooth, who played paramedic Johnny Gage. Meeeow.

Anyway, after being compared to the singer Julie London multiple times, I needed to at least find out who she was. It turns out that before the actress Julie London took on her role as the tough but loveable head nurse at Rampart Hospital, she was quite the torch singer. Check out this video of the vocal stylings of Ms. London:

First, how much does this video kick ass? Second, if the way I sing remotely resembles this, then I'm pretty happy.