A New Name, A New Day

First, the new name.

I had a very hard lesson this past week, which is maybe I'm not an "emerging pro".

Maybe I'm just a middle-aged woman (come on - you're 60, that's pushing it!) with a rather wild, undisciplined, large operatic voice, a truckload of diva personality, a minimum of musical training (I learn almost everything by ear but I do it so perfectly no one can tell), a sexy figure and a great hair dye job.

If anyone has been reading regularly, they will notice that I deleted the recent posts about Dialogues of the Carmelites. That is because I am planning to drop out. I booked an extra session today with the therapist I've been seeing for years, mostly to talk about problems with my partner's physical and mental health issues and how to deal with them and still have a life, to figure out the best way to do this.

Why am I doing this? It seems, according to this director, I can do nothing right, but I haven't a clue what he wants. I came there prepared. I knew my small role perfectly, I speak flawless French, and I sound quite lovely in the little solo secion (most of the bits of recitative are in my register break, which makes it hard to sound "lovely" in them, but I didn't think they were meant to be).

There is one other woman that this conductor has been bullying but at least she has a large role, so to her it's probably worth it.

There are two women singing the larger role that I had originally auditioned for, they are less than half my age, and one of them showed up at the first two rehearsals not even knowing how to speak the words to her part in time to the music.

Well, she's 25! Hardly the age of wisdom. When I was that age I hadn't even started studying singing seriously. It was the year I stopped drinking. And hardly the right age for the character she was playing. I can understand a director not wanting to cast me in a role like Erika in Vanessa (the first role I ever auditioned for for this conductor), but if this conductor thinks I'm too old for Erika, why would he want to cast a 25 year old as Mother Marie?

In any event, I am just no longer used to this kind of abuse. I might put up with it if the stakes were higher (if I were getting paid, or singing a large role that I was dying to sing) but for two pages of solo singing and a few lines of recit? No. This is not how I want to spend the first Christmas after my mother died.

I suppose part of me feels like a failure. This was my first venture in 30 years outside of being an (unpaid) choir soloist and singing in operatic concerts either that I produce myself or that someone else produces, in nursing homes or churches.

If this is what I can expect if I get a role I audition for, I don't think I want to go to any more auditions. This is a huge thing to say. It's a huge admission of defeat. Or maybe it's just that I have different values. Over the past several decades I have spent most of my time when I was not at work earning a living either in 12 Step programs or in churches (even though I have no birth religion, I consider myself a spiritual person) where regardless of what else is going on, it is woven into the organization's mission that people treat each other with respect and that there is no bullying or abuse.

For people who have read me at "the other place" I took quite a bit of abuse over the years from The Mentor Who Shall Not Be Discussed but I brought some of that on myself by falling in love with him and at least he did most of his bullying in his studio behind a closed door. And at least the whole thing started because he heard me singing from a hymnal in the back of a church and chose me as a protegee. I never foisted myself on him.

This doesn't mean I will never sing opera again. I am singing better and better thanks to those new exercises my teacher gave me and I have every intention of getting back to Amneris in preparation for the concert he wants to sing with me next year.

And I will still go to the meetups and aria classes where I can sing the music I love with a piano.

As for my new title? A few years ago I saw a play called I Am My Own Wife about a transgender man living in Nazi Germany.

So I can be "My Own Diva". One of my dreams has been to produce my own one woman show, a little chat interspersed with arias. Maybe that will find a market.