On the stage, Lauren Wood is in her element. Her voice blends with 23 others and reverberates throughout the Singapore Convention Center. An audience of 30,000 listens intently. Wood’s mind is clear and her nerves are calm. She reminds herself that this is the same routine she goes through every day – just with more onlookers.
When the performance ends, applause erupts and the choir walks off the stage together. But the only thing Wood can hear is her heart beating in her ears, shocked by the grandeur of the crowd she performed for. Yet, the knowledge that she’ll be back onstage in a few hours doesn’t faze her in the slightest.
Wood is a sophomore at Grant High School. She spent her summer performing about 200 shows at schools, factories and concert halls in Southeast Asia. She sang with a humanitarian choral group called the New American Singers, a Baptist choir based in Riverside, California that recruits young vocalists from all over the country.
Every summer, the group travels around the globe and performs at a variety of venues, participating in charity work and singing for the homeless or for children in orphanages. Wood joined the choir last April but has had a passion for singing her entire life.
Singing “is a way that I can express myself,” she says. “There are really no words to describe it.”
A born singer
The oldest of three children, Wood showed a love for singing very early on. Angela Henderson-Wood remembers the first time she noticed her daughter’s love for singing. “When she was six, she did a production at our church at Christmas time,” Henderson-Wood recalls. “She sang and danced for 12 songs for this huge production. We were like: ‘Wow, she’s really good at that.’”
Wood sang and danced her way through the Madeleine Parish & School, where she attended elementary and middle school. When she was eight, Wood’s parents divorced. She was encouraged to join the school’s choir after talking to her music teacher. Immediately, she began to feel better.
“Joining choir made me feel like I had a place,” she says. “Because home didn’t really feel like it was home anymore.” -Lauren Wood
Ever since the divorce, Wood has used singing as self-medication. Singing, she says, is “a way to let go. You don’t have to be anything. You can be yourself.”
Like most kids, Wood played sports like soccer and volleyball. She also participated in dance and cheerleading. While she enjoyed these, singing was the only thing that had continuity. “Singing has always been there,” she says. “Like, ‘Oh, soccer didn’t work out. Oh, volleyball didn’t work out.’ I still have singing.”
Not afraid
Wood’s parents say she was a fearless child, unafraid to put herself out there and meet new people. “She doesn’t mind being in a situation where she doesn’t know anybody,” Henderson-Wood says. “She sees that as a challenge.”
As a toddler, Wood would always go off and explore grocery stores and shopping malls by herself. “She got lost in Nordstrom’s three times,” recalls Henderson-Wood. “If I would turn around for one second, she would climb out of her stroller, shove it aside and be gone.”
Her mother remembers only one time that she saw her daughter scared. They were at Disneyworld in Florida and Wood, who was ten at the time, rode the Tower of Terror – a ride that drops 100 feet in a simulated elevator accident. When she stepped off the ride, Wood was shaking. “I was like, ‘Wow. In 10 years, she has never been afraid of anything and this is the first thing,” her mom recalls.
Wood has always been outgoing. She realizes that her personable nature has allowed her to meet new people and experience new things. “I’ve been able to throw myself into really difficult situations that most people would not be comfortable with,” she says.
The New American Singers
Last April, Wood’s father, Bruce, suggested she audition for the
New American Singers. Bruce Wood was a member as a teenager and loved the experience. “I had a great time,” he says. “My best friends to this day are people I traveled with in the group.”
The director, Ted Campbell, had contacted Wood’s father, looking for people to audition.
This occurred in the middle of a social dilemma for Wood. She had recently skipped a youth group meeting organized by her church and hung out with an older boy. Her parents and church officials were concerned that something might happen, so she was told she couldn’t hang out with him anymore.
“I felt that no one was really on my side,” recalls Wood.
So when an opportunity allowing her to travel, sing and escape the recent turmoil in Portland presented itself, Wood agreed to audition.
She wasn’t nervous flying down to Riverside for the audition. Nothing about meeting and singing with the 23 current members of the choir intimidated her. Her father remembers watching her board the plane. “When she left onto the plane, I asked her if she wanted to stop and take a picture,” he recalls. “But she didn’t even want to turn around. She just left.”
Although Wood got along well with the other members, she wasn’t sure she wanted to join. But when the group performed for 300 Marines at a California military base, Wood realized what she wanted.
“There is this one song that we do called ‘Days of Elijah’ and all of the Marines stood up and sang it with us,” she recalls. “And right then, I knew that this was what I wanted to do.”
After the auditions, Wood flew to Portland. For several weeks, she received e-mails about rehearsal times for the New American Singers. That’s when she realized she was accepted into the group. This was confirmed with a phone call from the director. Wood was ecstatic. “I was really, really excited, and kind of freaking out,” she says now with a laugh.
She flew back to California the day before school got out, having to take her finals early. On the plane ride her thoughts wandered, but she wasn’t nervous about the next seven weeks of performing abroad. For Wood, the shock of her accomplishments always comes after the performance.
Back in California, the group performed in schools and other small venues, which Wood described as their dress rehearsals for the Asia tour. After a week and a half, the singers flew to Hong Kong. There, they spent three weeks performing around the city. Then they stayed in Singapore for eight days, where they sang in front of 30,000 people. “In Singapore, we were treated like movie stars,” says Wood.
Next was Shenzhen, China, where they sang in schools and factories. Wood remembers experiencing culture shock when she saw the conditions of some of the workers in Shenzhen. The residents live in tiny, one-room apartments with filthy mattresses on the floors. The daily discomforts many of the workers faced made Wood’s conflicts at home seem trivial. “When you leave and go to a completely different culture and completely different place, your whole perspective changes,” she says.
The tour was over before Wood knew it. Though it was hard to say her goodbyes to her fellow singers, she was glad to be back in Portland. “It was so nice to come home and be back in my own bed,” she says.
The choice
Upon her return, Wood – who had attended Central Catholic for her freshman year – was approached by her parents about possibly attending Grant. Because of the expenses required to send Wood on the tour, there wasn’t enough money for her attend private school. It was either stay at Central Catholic or continue to sing with the group and face the daunting challenge of changing schools.
Wood didn’t hesitate. Most kids might find transferring schools in the middle of high school to be intimidating; Wood saw it as an opportunity.
“I have never heard Lauren say, ‘I’m nervous’ or ‘I’m scared.’ Those are words that I have never heard come out of her mouth,” says her father. “When she switched schools, she wasn’t nervous at all. She didn’t mention any apprehension or anything.”
The memories of the Asia tour are fresh in Wood’s mind, but she’s back into the post-tour routine since returning at the end of the summer. She is currently performing in the Grant One Acts and hopes to rejoin her church’s choir. Once a month, she flies to Riverside where she rehearses and catches up with her peers.
Wood is already looking forward to the New American Singers’ next tour, hearing rumors that it might be in Russia.
Although Wood admits Russia would be amazing, after her tour in Asia she says she’s ready to go anywhere. “I don’t feel like I am nervous,” she says. “If I were to graduate high school tomorrow, I would say: ‘Okay, let’s go pack up my stuff.’ I can’t wait for it to begin. I am so ready to get back out there.” ♦
