Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory (20 page)

If there is a lesson to be learned from all this, it’s not about class warfare, or even underage drinking. It’s about dedication. It’s also about jealousy—and the attention paid to a cappella singers. For all of the ink spilled, the media largely ignored the fact that the BDs
continued
their winter tour. Just a few days later, black eyes and all, dressed in their standard coats and ties, the BDs showed up for a previously scheduled gig at one of San Francisco’s toughest public high schools. The school has seven full-time security guards and one full-time police officer (armed). One of the BD alums, Lance Alarcon ’93, is a teacher at the school. Following the show that morning, Lance sent a message to the alumni listserv of the Baker’s Dozen. “Our cop literally felt the need to personally escort the group—when he saw them arriving in their coats and ties—because he feared for their safety.” It was a triumphant performance. “Despite what all these guys went through, with several of them sporting black eyes, that BD magic absolutely transcended socioeconomics, race, clothing style, culture, musical taste,” Lance wrote. “It is not an exaggeration to say that it was more than a concert for our school. Our most badass security guard—he does ‘scared straight’ seminars at San Quentin with young juveniles—told me it was ‘a beautiful experience.’ Months later I still have students and faculty asking me about the BDs.”

The BDs showed up at Bruce Cohen’s annual Christmas party too. “They were in a little bit of denial and they were closed off,” Bruce says. “On the one hand, they wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened and go on with their tour. On the other hand, they didn’t want to trivialize it and say, ‘We’re over it. And we’re fine.’ Because they weren’t. I think they really didn’t know what had happened, how to contextualize it. Was it a bunch of college boys in a brawl that got carried away? Or was it something much darker and more serious?” Amanda Bynes was a nice distraction.

In comparison, what happened to the Hullabahoos wasn’t so newsworthy. Though it certainly felt like they’d been kicked in the face.

Our fabled Hullabahoos were on their way to the Staples Center to sing the national anthem at the Lakers game—a gig that had been on the books for months. Joe Cassara had just gotten off the phone with his contact at the Lakers. He had a pretty good poker face, and tried not to let on just how dire this traffic situation was. If they somehow missed tonight’s performance, Matt Mooney, a Semitic-looking freshman with perma five o’clock shadow and frogs on his robe, would be particularly crushed. At a dorm picnic on the first night of school a few months ago, Mooney had made the mistake of admitting to Chad Moses, the Hullabahoos’ treasurer who (as luck would have it) was also the kid’s resident adviser, that he’d come to UVA
specifically
to join the Hullabahoos. Chad already knew this about Mooney because, earlier that afternoon, while Mooney was unpacking his things, the kid’s mother had cornered Chad to grill him about the Hullabahoos. Chad’s first thought? “Oh, shit.” Mooney wasn’t just one of Chad’s advisees. The two were neighbors. “We share a wall,” Chad says. “Awkward!” It would have been a long year had Mooney been tone deaf. Luckily, the kid could sing.

Sitting in the van, Joe Cassara was thinking back on the day they’d just had. The thing is, it had been a lazy afternoon. After lunch at Spago, the Hullabahoos spent hours lounging around. They took showers. They fell asleep on the couch. They watched television. They warmed up their voices. One sentence kept running through Joe’s mind:
We could have left earlier.
That’s when Morgan (in the minivan) called to say, “We gotta stop for gas.” The gas gauge was reading close to empty.

“What?” Joe said.

“We gotta stop for gas.”

“I heard you.”

Pause.

“We don’t have time to wait for you,” Joe said. “Give me the directions to the Staples Center.”

Morgan passed the phone to Pete Seibert, who’d lived out in L.A. last summer interning for Warner Music. “I think I remember how to get there,” Pete told Joe. For all the time spent putting this gig together, no one had bothered to print out directions.

Joe looked around the big white van. It was six-forty. He was fairly certain the minivan, once they stopped for gas, wouldn’t make the show. The twelve Hullabahoos in the white van began to rehearse the national anthem. “We have all the voice parts,” Joe said. “We could do it.”

They wouldn’t get the chance. The Hullabahoos pulled up to the Staples Center at seven thirty-five. Joe Cassara was cursing, loudly. The Hullabahoos had officially missed the gig and Joe took his aggression out on a phone booth. Morgan, driving the Dodge Caravan, pulled up a few minutes later. No one was smiling. And for once, the Hullabahoos were dead quiet.

“It was poor planning,” Joe said to no one in particular, shaking his head. He takes count of the group. “Where’s Dane?”

Dane Blackburn hadn’t wanted to come on this trip to begin with. “I wanted a break,” he says. “It’s called winter
break
.” He saw enough of the Hullabahoos on campus. But the group had pressured him to come. Dane had some family in Los Angeles, and so he relented. He’d come for the Lakers game. With that obligation erased, he took off.

“His aunt just picked him up,” someone said. “He said he’d meet us at the airport.”

“What?” Joe said. “That’s it? It’s
Thursday
. We won’t see him again until Sunday?” Joe dialed Dane’s cell phone. It was a tense conversation. “We’ll talk about this later,” Joe said.

“Are we still going to the game?” Matt Mooney asked.

Brian Duhon, a baby-faced sophomore, sat fifteen rows behind the backboard. These seats had a face value of a hundred dollars. He looked like he might cry. “Seeing how big this place is makes it worse,” he said. He did not crack a smile for over an hour—even as the Laker girls danced to “Fergalicious.”

This was not the only disappointment for the B’hoos that week. They’d come to Los Angeles with dreams of hanging out at the Playboy Mansion—swimming in the Grotto, flirting with Hef’s girlfriends. And darn they were going to try. So one afternoon, they pulled up to the front gate of the Mansion and innocently rang the bell. Brian Duhon talked into the video intercom. He told the voice on the other end that they were an a cappella group from UVA. He wasn’t getting anywhere. In a hail mary bid to prove their worth, Pete Seibert blew the pitch pipe and the Hullabahoos sang “One” into the intercom. When it was over, some say they heard clapping on the other end. Others insist it was merely the crackle of the intercom. Regardless, the gates did not open.

Postscript: Despite what Lisa Estrada—the first director of the Los Angeles Laker Girls and the game entertainment coordinator—told the B’hoos, in the six years she’s been with the Lakers, no one has ever missed a performance of the national anthem. “Never,” she said. On the night the Hullabahoos were scheduled to perform, the organist subbed in. “At least
he
was happy,” she says.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DIVISI

In January, Divisi took first place at the ICCA regional quarterfinals in Eugene, Oregon. They’d also earned fourteen thousand dollars from hosting that show. They wouldn’t have to hold a single bake sale, let alone one demeaning car wash, to get to the regional semifinals in San Francisco. Still, if they stood any chance of winning once they got there, they would need to tweak their set. The girls pored over the judges’ scoring sheets from that first round. There were some positive comments. “Nice intonation,” one judge wrote. “Good ‘tude,” wrote another. But when it came to “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” the troubled Stevie Wonder song, one judge was refreshingly critical. “Don’t bury the soloist in the lower register,” he wrote. Translation: You just couldn’t hear Betsy Yates. It wasn’t the girl’s fault. And it certainly wasn’t the fact that she’d had her tonsils taken out a month before the ICCAs. One of the highlights of Divisi’s repertoire has always been the theme song to television’s
Full House
. And Betsy kills it every time, because she’s talented, and because the song falls comfortably in the sweet spot of her voice. But with “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing,” the solo lived in that awkward space between her head voice (what guys call falsetto) and her chest voice. In short: great soloist, wrong song.

The scores only confirmed what Sarah Klein and Peter Hollens (the group’s godfather, who was now engaged to Evynne Smith, one of the original Divisi Divas) already knew. If Divisi stood a chance of defeating the one-two Mormon punch of BYU’s Vocal Point (the reigning ICCA champions) and Noteworthy (“We’re wearing
green
ties and black shirts,” their director said) come March, they’d need to cut “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing” from their set.

Sarah didn’t waste much time, broaching this sensitive subject at one of the group’s first rehearsals in February. “I spoke to Peter,” she began gingerly. “He thinks—and we should
discuss
this—that it would be best to drop Stevie.” Betsy Yates had known this was coming. She’d heard the chatter. She tried to stay out of it. “I want you to do what you think is best for the group,” she allowed, and that’s pretty much all she said. It would be a tense two hours. There was very little eye contact; some girls never looked up from the floor. Andrea Welsh—the den mother—was adamant that Divisi keep the song. “We’ve worked so hard on the choreography,” she said. She blamed the tepid performance at the quarterfinals on nerves. It was like arguing in a vacuum. The girls hadn’t yet seen the video of the quarterfinals. And when they did, a week later, Andrea was relieved she’d lost that round. “It’s interesting to think you look and sound one way onstage,” she says. “Then you see the video and it’s like an entirely different group. We weren’t crisp. We weren’t sassy. I was totally off-base.”

The problem then became: What would replace the Stevie Wonder song? And this question blew open the tragic flaw in a cappella competitions, and Adam Farb’s biggest fear: Divisi had spent so much time perfecting those three songs that they hadn’t learned much else. They had, of course, a repertoire of ten or so songs, but those were standard fallback tunes and certainly not competition-worthy. “Every week we were singing the same songs at the EMU,” Emmalee Almroth said. There were just two songs on the table: “Sunday Morning” by Maroon 5 and a Guster tune, “Two Points for Honesty,” which this incarnation of Divisi sort of learned but never bothered perfecting, because the soloist, Marissa Neitling, had spent last semester in the school play.

“Sunday Morning” was a slow burn, and it would be a risk to open their set with something so quiet. Plus, Maroon 5 was fast becoming the new Coldplay of collegiate a cappella—everyone was covering their music. But at least Divisi had performed that song. They didn’t have time to start from scratch and so it was settled. There was something sweet about the decision. Keeley McCowan was the soloist on “Sunday Morning,” and she was one of just two girls who’d performed at Lincoln Center almost two years ago when Divisi was robbed of the ICCA title. It was fitting she’d get a chance to make things right.

Still, there was a matter of choreography. Erica Barkett, the Divisi alum who’d made the girls cry a few weeks ago, somehow agreed to choreograph “Sunday Morning.” She couldn’t fly out to Eugene, though. Instead, she called Megan Schimmer and taught her the steps—over the phone. At rehearsal, when the girls wanted to know how a certain difficult dance move went, Megan threw up her hands and just said, “This is what it sounded like on the phone.”

The girls had four weeks to prepare for the next round of the competition. If they won the regional semifinals in California, they’d return to Lincoln Center. That Divisi could start from scratch, essentially, with a new squad and
still
be the best—that was the goal. That would confirm that the Divisi name meant something. And these were tense rehearsals. Jenna Tooley had recovered from mono (and had her braces taken off) but was still missing rehearsals, still mysteriously absent. Rachelle Wofford was one of the first to speak that night when Divisi—as a whole— confronted the girl. “If you don’t want to be here,” Rachelle said to Jenna, “I know a thousand girls who would take your spot.” There was a lot of back-and-forth. Some of the girls just felt like they needed to speak—it wasn’t that they had anything new to add to the conversation, they just wanted to air their resentment. Jenna pledged her allegiance to Divisi, and the matter was settled. Sort of. Jenna would remain in the group, provided she could handle the constant rolling of the eyes from the other girls every time she opened her mouth to speak.

Musically, Divisi was making progress. “Hide and Seek” had matured, as every swell, every note, every bit of the understated choreography was ironed out. On some deeper level, they’d connected with the music. “The group realized that every part of a song needs to go somewhere,” Keeley says. “Even if it’s a two-beat rest it’s important. Even if there’s no sound coming out, you need to keep that intensity.” It had finally sunk in. “There’s nothing in a piece of music that wasn’t deliberately put there. And that includes a rest.”

The week before leaving for San Rafael, California, Betsy Yates invited her new boyfriend to watch Divisi’s regular Friday-afternoon performance at the EMU. The girls call him “Underwear Guy,” and he showed up with Emmalee’s boyfriend, better known as “Short Hot Guy.” Divisi was happy for the support— even though the two men showed up drunk. When Betsy asked her boyfriend why he’d show up drunk to an
a cappella
show, Underwear Guy shrugged his shoulders. “Sometimes we like to preparty before a concert,” he said.

Noteworthy—the Mormons who’d e-mailed Divisi about the dress code, throwing down the a cappella gauntlet—was heading into the West Coast semifinals with the highest point totals in the nation (an arbitrary number, which Divisi still obsessed over). But they were not resting on their laurels. In fact, as Divisi was working on “Sunday Morning,” Noteworthy was upgrading their own set.