Read Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory for Free Online
Authors: Mickey Rapkin
away. Instead they’d focus on recording an album, Undivided. The inside jacket photo showed the girls, arm-in-arm, onstage at Lincoln Center. Nothing could divide them. The album, featuring “Yeah,” was released to wide acclaim, snagging the Contemporary A Cappella Recording Award for Best Female Collegiate Album. “Yeah” was selected for inclusion in Varsity Vocals’ Best of College A Cappella compilation (BOCA). The group even traveled to California to perform at Disneyland. But there were tough days too. Like when one of the Divisi members was busted for embezzling money from the group’s bank account. Or when they traveled to New York again for a gig at Columbia University—and got in a disagreement with the host group, an all-male group from Columbia who’d promoted their concert with an image of Terri Schiavo, which upset the women of Divisi. But Divisi had established itself as a powerhouse.
Where to go from there proved problematic. Lisa Forkish sang for one more year, even though she’d dropped out of school. (She’d reapplied to Berklee, didn’t need the Oregon credits, and decided to get a teaching job in Eugene.) She’s not the only one who stuck around campus for a victory lap. Several of the original Divisi girls were still singing with the group even though they’d graduated. They couldn’t shake this thing they’d built.
This would nearly cripple Divisi. Most a cappella groups, on average, lose four members in the spring and replace them in the fall. It helps maintain continuity. But in June of 2006, Divisi graduated eight girls. Two others, though still students at Oregon, decided the time commitment was just too much, and so they retired. Divisi had committed to competing in the 2006-2007 ICCAs, but they’d need a whole new roster to get there. Not to mention soloists. One of their best singers, Katie Hopkins, had graduated. “She sang like Mariah Carey,” says Keeley McCowan, one of the last members still around in the fall of 2006. “We need a new Mariah.”
There’s an a cappella tradition at the University of Oregon. Every Friday at four-thirty P.M., On the Rocks and Divisi invade the campus student center, the EMU, to put on a free a cappella concert. And no matter what is happening in class or in their personal lives, these singers can count on getting a boost every Friday afternoon as three hundred students crowd into the EMU to watch them perform. (This self-same student center famously played home to the food fight scene in Animal House . That it’s since been hijacked by girls singing Annie Lennox covers would no doubt kill John Belushi—if he weren’t already dead.)
On this late September afternoon in 2006, Evynne Smith (now a performer on the Royal Caribbean cruise line) pulls into port in San Francisco. Her cell phone goes off. She looks down. It’s a text message from Lisa Forkish, who is now (finally) a student at Berklee. Four years after leaving high school, Lisa has begun her undergraduate degree again. From scratch.
Evynne looks at her watch. It’s four-thirty P.M. on Friday. The text message from Lisa reads: “Hello, Divisi ladies, I love you.” Her phone buzzes again. It is Erica Barkett, who has written more or less the same thing. This will repeat itself every Friday for much of the next year. At Berklee, Lisa starts an all-female a cappella group, but even she acknowledges it’s not the same thing.
Back in Eugene, meanwhile, Keeley McCowan and Sarah Klein, the only two girls who remain from Divisi’s first incarnation, stand in the rehearsal room looking at the twelve girls gathered before them. Keeley (pale, stern, with twenty pounds she’s been meaning to lose for years) and Sarah (like a Jewish Marlee Matalin) will lead the group through the first Friday-afternoon performance of the year. They look around the room at this group of mostly strangers. They are the only two who remember firsthand the work it took to get to Lincoln Center; the only
Where to go from there proved problematic. Lisa Forkish sang for one more year, even though she’d dropped out of school. (She’d reapplied to Berklee, didn’t need the Oregon credits, and decided to get a teaching job in Eugene.) She’s not the only one who stuck around campus for a victory lap. Several of the original Divisi girls were still singing with the group even though they’d graduated. They couldn’t shake this thing they’d built.
This would nearly cripple Divisi. Most a cappella groups, on average, lose four members in the spring and replace them in the fall. It helps maintain continuity. But in June of 2006, Divisi graduated eight girls. Two others, though still students at Oregon, decided the time commitment was just too much, and so they retired. Divisi had committed to competing in the 2006-2007 ICCAs, but they’d need a whole new roster to get there. Not to mention soloists. One of their best singers, Katie Hopkins, had graduated. “She sang like Mariah Carey,” says Keeley McCowan, one of the last members still around in the fall of 2006. “We need a new Mariah.”
There’s an a cappella tradition at the University of Oregon. Every Friday at four-thirty P.M., On the Rocks and Divisi invade the campus student center, the EMU, to put on a free a cappella concert. And no matter what is happening in class or in their personal lives, these singers can count on getting a boost every Friday afternoon as three hundred students crowd into the EMU to watch them perform. (This self-same student center famously played home to the food fight scene in Animal House . That it’s since been hijacked by girls singing Annie Lennox covers would no doubt kill John Belushi—if he weren’t already dead.)
On this late September afternoon in 2006, Evynne Smith (now a performer on the Royal Caribbean cruise line) pulls into port in San Francisco. Her cell phone goes off. She looks down. It’s a text message from Lisa Forkish, who is now (finally) a student at Berklee. Four years after leaving high school, Lisa has begun her undergraduate degree again. From scratch.
Evynne looks at her watch. It’s four-thirty P.M. on Friday. The text message from Lisa reads: “Hello, Divisi ladies, I love you.” Her phone buzzes again. It is Erica Barkett, who has written more or less the same thing. This will repeat itself every Friday for much of the next year. At Berklee, Lisa starts an all-female a cappella group, but even she acknowledges it’s not the same thing.
Back in Eugene, meanwhile, Keeley McCowan and Sarah Klein, the only two girls who remain from Divisi’s first incarnation, stand in the rehearsal room looking at the twelve girls gathered before them. Keeley (pale, stern, with twenty pounds she’s been meaning to lose for years) and Sarah (like a Jewish Marlee Matalin) will lead the group through the first Friday-afternoon performance of the year. They look around the room at this group of mostly strangers. They are the only two who remember firsthand the work it took to get to Lincoln Center; the only