It’s 19 minutes till showtime when the New York Mets staffer delivers the bad news. The game and performance are in delay due to rain.

All the preparation which came before this news — attaching microphone packs, adjusting blue skirts, brushing hair, gulping water, snaking ear piece cords up shirt backs — leaves Libby Weber and Megan Murphy in an awkward limbo. They’ve prepared — Weber’s hugged her father, Murphy’s stepped into heels — but cannot perform yet.

“This is a little bigger than the average thing,” Murphy said to a question about if the rain delay throws off rhythm. “But I think it helps that we’ve done it before and that it’s easier to do it in a twosome than by yourself.”
Sunday, the Mets hosted “Syracuse University Day,” at which Weber and Murphy, both Syracuse University sophomores, sang the Star-Spangled Banner in front of the crowd 32,531 strong. The two brought practice, water and experience to the anthem. They knew what to do — Murphy sang the melody and Weber, the harmony — and neither said they were nervous in the moments before singing. And yet, Weber and Murphy were challenged by something they couldn’t have predicted.

 

When the grounds crew peeled back the tarp, Weber and Murphy left the large, block blue “42” in the Jackie Robinson Rotunda where they’d been waiting. They walked through a short tunnel, into the stands and onto the field.

 

On most singing days, Weber tries not to eat before the performance, but if it’s later in the day, she just eats breakfast.

 

“And drink a lot, a lot of water,” Weber added. “I drink three waters a day because I don’t drink a lot of waters normally.”

It’s important to stick to water, Murphy said. Milk and dairy make the voice phlegmy.

While waiting to perform, the two sang a soft, quick rehearsal in front of the backstop netting. They discussed spots when they’d pause and breathe. The last minute tune-up added to the 50-plus times they’d practiced together before when they’d honed pitch, refined phrasing, measured tempo and ironed out “vowel color,” where they made sure to pronounce each vowel and word the same way.

“Yesterday Libby got to the city,” Murphy said. “We practiced yesterday and practiced this morning to get back in it, but it’s muscle memory at this point.”
At 1:17 p.m. — exactly 20 minutes after they were scheduled to go on — the pair approached their microphones in the grass behind home plate.

 

This wasn’t the first time the two had sung together, that had been at an awards ceremony before graduation in 2014 from Jamesville-Dewitt High School in New York. Less than a year later, as freshmen at Syracuse, the pair won Honda’s “Oh, Say Can You Sing?” competition and sang in the Carrier Dome at the Florida State basketball game on Jan. 11.

 

Weber tugged at her skirt and smiled. The public address man introduced them.

Just as they opened their mouths to sing, an airplane flew overhead, drowning out the first note with its roar. (Citi Field, home of the Mets, is 2 miles from LaGuardia Airport.) Weber looked at Murphy.

The two just kept singing. Distractions such as those made the earpieces, called “in-ears,” so indispensable. Hooked up to the stadium’s audio system, it essentially lets the singers hear themselves without the time lapsed echo, Murphy said.

“It can be really hard for a lot of people to stay in-tune and in-sync with each other if they can’t hear each other,” Weber said. “Especially if they’re singing two different parts of the same thing. It’s really important.”

And just as the crowd applauded Weber and Murphy’s final crescendo, their whistles and claps of approval were drowned out by another low-flying jetliner.

 

Excellent! Brava,” Mark Philips, the manager of Mets group sales support, said after Weber and Murphy walked toward the door in the backstop away from the field. “We have a lot of large choruses and solos, but duets are tricky for the anthem. It’s a tricky song anyway, but that was just superb.”

So the two walked away from the microphones — which is the part where Weber gets nervous, she said, after everything’s over — successfully finished with their third performance together.

She and Weber feel like pros by now, Murphy said, which is good because in each of their three anthems they’ve risen in difficulty, performing first at a high school, then a college, then a pro stadium.

“I don’t know where we could go from here,” Murphy said. “Presidential? We’re booking.”

Published on June 29, 2015 at 11:03 am

Contact Sam: sjfortie@syr.edu | @Sam4TR