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This article appeared
in BrassRing Campus.
job alternative:
lead singer Colleen Monaghan is a singer by night, office worker by day.
by Sarah Jersild
by Sarah Jersild
Colleen
Monaghan, 26, has been singing with Gonzo's Nose, "D.C's dopest party
band," since 1997. Like many musicians, she also holds down a day job,
serving as assistant to the executive director and assistant to the recruiting
committee at the law firm Banner and Whitcroff. She tells BrassRingCampus
what it's really like to sing all night when you're holding down a full-time
job.
How much of your
time does Gonzo's Nose take up?
We practice every Wednesday. We generate a random set list at the beginning
of every week. At the end of rehearsal, we cover business things, like
upcoming gigs. If we have to pick new songs, we leave extra time at the
end of rehearsal, because we have to listen to the songs, vote on the
songs and mercilessly tease each other about our choice of music.
We play at least one
time a weekend, but we try to take one weekend off a month. In January
we had six gigs, in March we have five, and in April we'll have six or
seven.
In May 2000, Gonzo's
Nose will tour USOs in Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia and Hungary for 17 days.
How did you work this out with your day job?
For me it was easy -- my boss is a retired Navy Captain, so when I told
him about the tour, he said "Of course you're going to go." I'll end up
taking all of my vacation time to go. Everybody had to talk to their bosses,
and some are taking unpaid leave. One just started a new job, so it wasn't
easy for everybody.
Will you be paid
for the tour?
I'll make in 17 days what it would take me a month and a half to earn
at the office. We get a $150 per diem, we get paid for all our expenses,
we get to ride in a Humvee, and I'll probably get all the camouflage underwear
I could ever want -- I'm the only woman in the band, and I gotta play
to the audience, right?
How else does singing
with the band overlap with your day job?
For gigs, sometimes I have to leave work about two hours early, but if
I know early enough I can make it up earlier in the week -- I'll just
work more hours on Monday or Tuesday. My job is really cool about it.
Some jobs are less cool. If it ever came down to it, I know we'd quit
our jobs to do this tour. I know I can get another job, but this is an
opportunity I'll never get again.
Could you support
yourself without your day job?
I could make enough money to support just me, but not when I have a car
and live in a house. I could do it if I moved and I had a lot of roommates
-- I hardly eat. But the big problem would be not having health insurance.
I could get it through my school, but it's really expensive.
Besides the tour,
if it ever came down to a choice between the day job and the band, what
would you do?
I don't care about what I do; I care about who I am. There are always
positions open in D.C. I absolutely wouldn't quit rashly, but if my job
said no to something that wasn't an outrageous request, I wouldn't have
a problem saying, "Thanks for all the time you've invested in me, but
there are other things out there I need to do."
What are some of
the hard parts of being in a party band?
Sticking to the floors, putting up with a lot of really bad come-ons --
that's how I got the nickname Freak Magnet -- stupid things like that.
Also, it's very hard to keep up with people actively, unless they come
to one of our shows. It's definitely a trade-off. I'm exhausted a lot
of the time, but I'd rather be exhausted because of this than because
of something I didn't even like. The first Friday morning I had to go
into work after a Thursday night concert, I had maybe four hours of sleep.
I had my IV of coffee, and I was just wiped out.
And the perks?
When I go to my favorite bar, which is the place we play most often, I
never have to pay to get in and I almost never pay for drinks. I get a
lot of compliments, which is a big ego stroke. Plus someone gave me a
pair of boxers -- I was the first person in the band to get underwear
thrown at me.
Do your day-job
life and your band life ever collide?
I have the Gonzo's Nose schedule posted by my desk, and one day a guy
at the office came up and said, "Hey, that's one of my favorite bands.
Do you like them?" And I said, "You do realize that I'm the girl in the
band, right?" He was totally surprised. People in the office think it's
cool that someone they work with is doing anything creative.
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