A couple came into the neighborhood café and began to set-up shop at the long table near the table, where my husband and I were enjoying a quiet dinner.

Because the couple made a small commotion when they came in, bringing several items into the café with them, I glanced their way and into the face of a beautiful woman well-past her youth with lovely, lonely eyes. 

She smiled at me and I smiled back, and then she set some kind of box that looked like a loud speaker or a CD or tape player on the table.

She pulled a portable microphone out of her bag and set it alongside a fishbowl with a few dollar bills in it.

The man with her set a few dials on the box and the woman picked up the mic. She looked at me again, with an expression that might have said, “I hope you like me,” but maybe that was my own projection.

I turned my attention back to my husband and our conversation.

Suddenly, the voice of Karen Carpenter caught my attention, and then, the background music of the familiar and popular "Close to You" filled the room. 

Curious and confused, I turned to the woman I thought was going to be the singer, only to discover that she was not singing at all. She was lip syncing!

I was astonished.  “That’s Karen Carpenter’s voice,” I said in a whisper.

“Are you sure that is Karen Carpenter?” my husband asked, “Maybe she has a voice like Karen Carpenter,” he added, trying to dampen my astonishment.

“I’m sure,” I said. I knew every nuance of the unique voice and singing style of the beloved Karen Carpenter, and that particular song — I had listened to it for years.

And then she began lip syncing "Because You Loved Me."

“Celine Dion,” I said, sighing,

As we left, I felt bad for her and bad for me. I felt bad for myself because I knew those songs and singers so well.

I felt bad for her because she might have thought people believed it really was her voice coming through that mic. I felt bad for her if she was trying to fool us.

Maybe lip-syncing famous singers is a new form of entertainment. Maybe some people thought the woman herself was actually singing. 

Maybe the people in the café didn’t even hear her or pay any attention to her, or maybe that was a way of earning money for the evening, but there was something profoundly sad to me about that experience.

I think I would rather have heard the woman’s actual singing voice than to see her trying to pass herself off as a famous singer, just as I would rather see someone who is authentically being who they are, rather than seeing someone trying to pretend to be something they aren't.

We humans all have moments when our insecurities or feelings of inadequacy make us present ourselves as something less or more than we really are, and the truth is that imitating someone else and presenting yourself as someone you aren’t ultimately fails. 

Living a lie, living behind a contrived mask, hiding in a role, a persona or an image because you can’t stand to be seen for who you truly are ultimately leads nowhere you want to go.

The woman with her fishbowl of a few bills haunts me.  Who knows what she could be if she were free to make her own kind of music and sing her own special song?

Who knows what expression that was in her eyes when she looked at me, but I wondered later if she had sacrificed her real voice for the easy but phony way of channeling someone else’s.  Who knows how many of us human beings sacrifice the True Self for a false self?

One of my favorite quotes attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson rang in my ears as we drove home:



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