All I Want Is Everything

Interlude

What would you think if I sang out of tune
Would you stand up and walk out on me?
Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song
And I'll try not to sing out of key
Oh I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm I get high with a little help from my friends
Mm gonna try with a little help from my friends.

The Beatles, With a Little Help From My Friends

After a few days of rest, the band started to acclimate to life off the road. They might get recognized more, but they weren't big enough to be approached often by fans. And it was New York, where famous people and those on the rise weren't uncommon. Ella went to the store to stock up the kitchen, and was able to go out with Becca, Bucky's little sister, home for a week between spring and summer semesters at law school.

"So how was it?" Becca asked, leaning forward over the table at their favorite diner as they waited for their breakfast order.

"I'm glad to be home, but I love performing," Ella said. "All the stresses offstage just melt away and we have this amazing gestalt. The music just hums in my bones."

"Sounds like a lot of work," Becca said. "But that's cool."

"Because law school is such a doddle," Ella teased. "Let's see, in addition to all your coursework, you're an editor on law review, a member of the Phi Delta Phi legal fraternity, and you were a TA in the legal writing course for 1Ls. Yeah, so much free time. If anything, I'm the slacker. I'm just doing music, showing up when I'm supposed to and doing my best." Becca rolled her eyes.

"You get used to the pace by the time you're a 3L, honing in on graduating in December thank god, basically I made sure the citations for the articles we published were correct. It's satisfying to help the 1Ls learn legal writing, it's a whole different animal and it's something I'm good at. My audience is a lot more narrow. But you stand up in front of hundreds or thousands of people and perform music that you've written. That's terrifyingly exposed to me."

"To each her own," Ella said, and they clinked their coffee mugs. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing the right thing, though. I love engineering, and I actually passed the Fe exam, the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, and I wonder if I'm doing the right thing. I wonder if I thought we were going to flame out early and I'd be able to pick it up fairly rapidly."

"I get that," Becca said after thinking this over. "But music is important too. And you're really good at it. And just like not everybody can be an engineer, not everyone can be a musician either. Much less a successful musician."

"I know," Ella said moodily. "I just... what if I can't get a job after this, Bec? I mean, not many bands make it for more than a few years, not everybody can be the Rolling Stones. Or the Beatles, either, whose music is timeless and huge despite the band breaking up. They're still selling albums. It's hard enough to be a woman in engineering as it is. I worry that I'll be seen as a dilettante. Music's not easy for women either. And I don't want to have to get married because I screwed up my opportunities."

"Yeah, my law school class was about 10% women, and this was stated with the air of 'look how things have improved!' There's still hostility toward women in the profession, both from the professors--all men--and the other students. There's kind of the feeling that we're taking up places that could have gone to men, that we'll just quit once we get married and pregnant anyway. They're trying to steer us into family law, even though most of us don't want to do that." She rolled her eyes. "I swear the guys get hysterical about any infringement on their perceived prerogatives but they tell us we're the emotional ones."

"It is not easy being a woman," Ella sighed. They took a break from the conversation to appreciate the delivery of their breakfasts. "If anybody saw me eating a carb, I'd catch hell. Don't tell anybody I had pancakes today. Seriously."