Trapped in a Broken Elevator

A while back I posted a question to r/Choir: What are the most notable excuses you have heard for someone being absent from choir practice?

The directors delivered.

My favorite came from a director who had a student he described as “either the unluckiest person alive, or very inventive.” The student’s personal best: trapped in a broken elevator. Not stuck in traffic. Not sick. Trapped. In an elevator. On a Tuesday at 7 p.m., in a town with maybe four elevators in it.

Another director lost a kid to Costco. Not to a family emergency, not to a fever — his parents took him to Costco. On concert day. Somewhere in that story is a rotisserie chicken that outranked a performance.

Then there is the father who explained that his son could sight read, and therefore would not need to attend rehearsals. The director’s reply is the finest sentence in the whole thread: “Yes, well, so can all our trebles, and they attend all the rehearsals, so your son will not be joining the choir.”

A community choir director noted a recurring problem with singers who get called into work at the last minute. The same singers who then post vacation photos from abroad. Marathon finish lines. A book and a cup of tea at home. It turns out that the modern excuse has a fatal flaw: you follow your director on Instagram.

And then there’s sports. Always sports. There’s always a practice or a game — until Christmas Eve, when the kid materializes and expects to be slotted into a three-part piece that everyone else spent nine weeks learning. We don’t even have a gown for you, because you were never here to get fitted. Are you going to fake the arm movements too? But they have practice on Thursdays and the games are on Sundays!

One director extended this to handbells, and you can feel the blood pressure rising through the screen. We haven’t seen you in four months. You wouldn’t know middle C if it bit you. Four beats to a measure remains a theoretical construct. But sure — here’s a random bell you’ll shake like you’re calling everyone in to dinner, and to hell with the work the other kids put in to get it right.

It isn’t only the kids. “Grandchildren” turns out to be a leading cause of adult choir absence, usually discovered fifteen minutes before a Sunday service.

The rest are the everyday ones. Too much homework. Going through a breakup. A missed weekly hair appointment, which at least has the virtue of honesty about priorities. And one director, after thirty years of school choirs, summarized the entire genre: I had all the “I had to go see/do x/y/z” under the sun.

Here’s what strikes me about the list. Nobody invents an elevator story to get out of a lecture. You can skip a webinar and no one notices. But a choir notices instantly, because a choir is one of the last things left that literally does not work without you. Pull one alto and the chord changes. That’s not a metaphor — it’s acoustics. The excuse gets elaborate in exact proportion to how much the absence is felt.

Which brings me to my favorite response in the whole thread, offered without apology or embellishment:

I’m not going. There doesn’t have to be an excuse.

Honestly? After the elevator, that’s almost refreshing.

Thanks to the directors of r/Choir, who have heard everything and somehow keep showing up anyway.