Heather was an alto with dirty blonde hair and crooked teeth. She wanted to be a pop star.

One day, she came by one of my dance classes and watched. It turned out that she was choosing four of us to approach later, and I was one of the four.

The other three were Tanya, Latrina, and another girl whose name I completely forgot. Tanya once dated a major league baseball player who gave her a super expensive formal dress for one of their dates, and Latrina’s mother—believe it or not—didn’t actually name her daughter LaTrina (à la The Trina) but really, most sincerely liked the sound of the word latrine.

So anyway, the four of us apparently were the best dancers in the class, and Heather had a proposal for us: How would we like to be her backup dancers for a show she was doing?

The four of us exchanged looks and shrugged. Sure. It sounded fun. Why not? We got to working on a routine right away. Heather, of course, provided the music; she had the “Fame” instrumentals, and the vocals were going to be sung live by her. Latrina and the nameless girl, being the better choreographers, came up with the moves. And Tanya’s mother provided colorful scarves as part of our costumes.

The whole affair was rather roughshod. We had very little time to prepare and no place to prepare it. We rehearsed just outside the studio classrooms in our spare time, with Heather dancing her own part with us. In the evenings, Heather and her manager would meet with us at a Denny’s or a Coco’s and discuss a potential partnership: gigs at the casinos on the Indian reservation, $5K a night, backup singing as well as dancing, etc., etc.

At such times, the three other dancers and I would simply exchange looks—doubtful about the whole thing, but willing to go along with it in case it turned out to be a break.

You see. The problem was… Heather was a karaoke singing star.

True, she’d been in various vocal performance groups at the college and had a fabulous alto voice. True, she had more than enough determination for the five of us—at the very least, enough not to be discouraged by her father, who’d insisted that she give up the dream and continue her college career. And true, she had an incredibly aggressive, enthusiastic and persistent manager, one willing to upend her own pockets to invest in Heather’s stardom. In short, Heather had the vocal talent, the drive, and a manager who believed in her.

But Heather’s biggest marketing advantage again… was that she was very well known in the karaoke circuit.

Now, the problem with karaoke stars is that they think that’s all they need—background music, their drive, and their voice. Heather didn’t write her own songs; she didn’t have a sound editor or a band; and she wasn’t exactly attractive in the Madonna or Britney Spears kind of way (the crooked teeth I mentioned is only the least noticeable thing). But she wanted to be on the same level of stardom as the aforementioned pop divas.

“We’ve got to really attract the attention of teenagers,” her manager kept saying, and the two of them would dream big dreams of albums sold and concerts seats packed.

What they didn’t seem to understand was packaging. Packaging is everything in the music industry. Everything.

And Heather simply didn’t have that.

She had us, a rag-tag bunch of dancers doing this in our spare time. She had her manager, so faithful to the dream that she was blind to the obstacles in the path. And she had that karaoke special event where she would be performing—a supposed big break, with all three major networks shooting some film for the 10:00, 11:00 news.

I learned later that the whole event—which turned out to be some award show for karaoke performing fanatics (no money-spending teenagers there)—was organized and paid for by Heather’s manager; and the press releases she wrote, the phone calls she made—they resulted in only one network being there, and likely in the form of young and hopeful interns.

Heather played her flute (of all things!) during one of her two acts, hoping that it would further impress the audience and the network’s cameraman. But her debut wasn’t what she had hoped it would be for two of many reasons: one, a karaoke audience isn’t easily impressed because everyone in that audience thinks that they can do it better, and two, the cameraman (for some stupid reason) had his camera trained on me. Me. How do I know this? The tiny bit of film on the event that did manage to make the nightly news was of me with my braided hair—messing up just a little bit on my moves, no less.

So Heather might as well have been invisible. That was her biggest break (a karaoke event), and the audience wasn’t wowed; the only exposure on TV was mine.

This is what happens when wannabe pop stars get involved in karaoke. Nothing. It’s just one step up from singing in the shower, and no one takes you seriously.

For all I know, Heather may have since given up karaoke and gotten a more reasonable singing job. I hope she did. At least two or three other people I knew from my vocal performing groups have gone on to sing professionally; it would be neat for Heather if she managed to do the same.

But for now, I hope she is staying far away from karaoke because, as everyone knows, karaoke kills a music career.

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