If you clicked on this expecting a transgender awareness manifesto, prepare to be disappointed.
Last March, I was doing homework in my dorm room at Notre Dame when all of a sudden I heard this band begin performing outside on the quad, playing gorgeously arranged pop songs with pitch-perfect harmonies. I'm not normally one to spontaneously drop what I'm working on to do something else since once my brain is locked into work, it's locked into work. But the music was so beautiful, and what I was working on wasn't particularly urgent, so I closed my books and went outside to listen to the group. Besides, it was 8:30 pm on a Thursday night which meant 97% of my class was half-blacked at a bar downtown. If my version of a crazy Thursday night was stopping homework to listen to acoustic performers outside my dorm, I was ready to go wild.
I sat there, by myself, in the drizzly March evening weather, leaning back on a tree, listening to this incredible group for maybe an hour. The group was called Girl Named Tom, and they made every song they performed sound amazingly delicate and moving, be it Dolly Parton or Fleetwood Mac or Phoebe Bridgers. I was one of maybe 15 people watching. I really fell in love with them.
Flash forward to last November and I'm sitting on my couch with my friend Julia as she's showing me YouTube highlights on the TV from the most recent season of The Voice. As she was scrolling through the results, a name caught my eye, and I immediately yelled, "WAIT! GO BACK! Did that say Girl Named Tom???!!!" Sure enough, the group from the quad was not only on Season 21 of The Voice, but they were absolutely crushing it. I don't remember what stage of the competition they were on at that point, but the group was doing ridiculously well. I couldn't believe it. I had just seen them on North Quad at Notre Dame in front of my dining hall performing for as many people as they had songs on their setlist, and now all of America was watching them on TV.
Flash forward to this morning when I found out that Girl Named Tom won the entire competition. They are the Season 21 champions of The Voice. My mind flipping erupted. I have almost no right to feel proud of them having only seen them perform once in my life, but considering how far they have progressed from that rainy night in March to now, I do feel proud of them.
I think this whole incident was a great reminder to me of how important it is to stop working sometimes and just listen to the music. I need to get better at that.
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