Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin

affair—all expenses paid. In Alaska, the girls conducted a beatboxing workshop. They sang five songs at the festival—the only five songs they knew. “We were so new,” says Rachelle Wofford, an intense sophomore. “We didn’t even have choreography.” But the music wasn’t really the point. Keeley and Sarah hoped the group would find some common ground.
    There was the bonfire down at the beach. There were late nights at the hotel. Invariably the conversations turned personal. And that’s when Michaela Cordova pulled back—when her old fears and doubts surfaced. It was a particularly difficult, tense moment. Michaela (by her own admission) never got along well with women. But this was different. “We were being so silly,” she says. “We were sitting around with high ponytails on top of our heads, just acting ridiculous. It was so liberating to be goofy with this group of girls I’d just met.” But on her last night in Alaska she quietly left the hotel room. “I was respectful,” she says. “It’s just hard for me to talk about my feelings. I don’t want to say my life’s been harder than everyone else’s. But I had to remove myself. ” Which she did. Quietly the other girls wondered what had spooked Michaela.
    There were highlights. Sometime that week, Divisi’s new catch-phrase was born. At the hotel, messing around on the Internet, the girls stumbled across a YouTube video in which a transvestite goes shopping for shoes. The whole thing plays out over a techno beat, with the tranny uttering (again and again, in various inflections) the word shoes . The women of Divisi adopted the phrase and made it their own. And defying logic, Shoes became their battle cry.
    Alaska had been a step in the right direction (well, maybe not for Michaela), but despite shoes , the girls remained fractured, cliquey even, during the fall of 2006. As a countermeasure, Sarah introduced Thursday-night bonding sessions, but even Keeley admits you can’t force these things. “Just because you’re wearing the tie and the red lipstick doesn’t make you Divisi,” she says. She pauses. “I almost hope we lose at the ICCAs so the new girls will learn what it takes to be competitive.”
    Divisi worked on refining their competition set that fall, which included Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap, and a Joss Stone power anthem, “You Had Me.” Divisi worked on little else. Still, the disparate personalities, the poor leadership—Lisa Forkish would have been embarrassed.
    At the final Friday-afternoon performance before winter break, Divisi got a glimpse of just how much work was left to be done before the ICCAs in January. “Hide and Seek” was consistently flat. “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing” sounded like noise—a bunch of unrelated notes that never really locked. The applause was tepid.
    “What key were we in?” Keeley asked after the show.
    “G,” Sarah said.
    It was a rhetorical question. “I meant we weren’t singing together, ” Keeley said. Worse: On the Rocks, the all-male group on campus and Divisi’s brother group—who would be their primary competition for the first round of the ICCAs—burned the house down. OTR’s music director, wearing a satin On the Rocks jacket, stepped forward to make a joke. “We have On the Rocks T-shirts for sale after the show,” he said to the crowd. “But these jackets ... they’re Members Only.”
    After watching the On the Rocks set, Keeley turned to the ladies of Divisi. Two groups from that first round of the ICCA competition would advance to the regional semifinals. “I guess we’ll be second,” she said. The ICCAs were starting to look like just another gig on Divisi’s calendar. Or maybe not.
    A few days before leaving for winter break, the girls threw a very Divisi Christmas party at Emmalee Almroth’s house. (Emmalee, one of the new girls, has been listening to Divisi and On the Rocks