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they featured dance and read everything I could find about the great ballerinas, including Maria Tallchief, who was not only an Oklahoman, but also part Native American, just like me. Paging through those books, looking at the pictures of stages, lights, and roses, I felt sad for Miss Jane. I thought, She didn’t make it . And I wondered if maybe that was why she tried so hard to get us girls to take it seriously. Of course, it’s possible that she was doing exactly what she wanted to do and it was teaching she took seriously. Either way, I soaked up every ounce, striving to rise to her level of self-discipline.
    Dancing was work. Singing came naturally.
    Church was a big part of my life, and singing was a big part of church. Mark and I were both in youth choir, and I lived for it, but one evening, riding home with a friend, I saw Mark hanging out at the 7-Eleven. He’d played hooky from choir . Sacrilege! But Mom was surprisingly cool about it.
    “Music isn’t his gift,” she shrugged.
    And it really isn’t. Mark should not be allowed to sing. Ever. Mom quickly recognized this and let him off the choir hook, supporting his unique talents the same way she supported mine. He was a brain, which made my school life about as much fun as his choir life. Every year on the first day of class, teachers would sing the familiar strain: “Oh, you’re Mark Chenoweth’s little sister!” They always leaped to the conclusion that algebra was in my blood. Disillusionment invariably followed. Mark was a whiz with numbers, who couldn’t understand my mathematical tone deafness. Pressed into service as my tutor, he’d laboriously explain the integer over the squared root of blah blah blah, and I tried, truly, I did, but it always ended in frustration.
    “Aaugh, Kris! How can you not get it? I told you ten times. Mom?”
    Mom would rotate in, make a valiant attempt, eventually calling, “Jerry? Help?”
    Then Dad would come in, calm everyone down, and basically do my homework for me.
    Poor Mom had to wait for the sports gene to skip a generation; both Mark’s kids are athletic. (Heck, my dog, Maddie, is athletic compared to me and my brother.) When bookish Mark and artsy me were little, Mom was still playing tennis, and she was good . She competed in a nonpro championship the year I was in third grade. I was invited to a roller-skating party that day. One of the events was a race, and as the only girl who stepped up to participate, I was determined to beat those boys. Unfortunately, halfway through the event, I fell and broke my arm just below the elbow.
    “It was the darnedest thing,” the party mom told my mom, who arrived breathless and still in her little white tennis dress. “She just got up and kept going. Came in second.”
    I asked Mom later if she was mad about having to leave the tournament when she was doing so well.
    “Of course not!” she said, looking at me as if I’d suggested she might pull the oven out of the wall and reinstall it upside down. “That’s not how it is when you love someone, Kristi.”
    One of the first solos I sang at our church was “Jesus, I Heard You Had a Big House”—a Bill and Gloria Gaither song about the completely welcoming warmth of Heaven. Jesus, I heard you had a big house where I could have a room of my own. And, Jesus, I heard you had a big yard, big enough to let a kid roam. And if I do say so myself, I sang the livin’ you-know-what outta that song. Someone at a church in Tulsa heard about it and asked if I’d like to come and sing it for them, and naturally I liked that a lot. Another church across town asked me to come, and then another and another, and pretty soon churches across the state were asking me to sing, and it eventually became sort of a family hobby. Dad bought a little sound system for me because sometimes we’d arrive and the church’s system was lacking, and he saw how much it bothered me if I couldn’t do well. Evie, Sandi Patty, and Amy Grant were