And Now: For Something Completely Positive

I have written a lot lately about negative people who hurt me (I'm sure unintentionally).  In fact I would go so far as to say that these people don't even know how much negative energy they put out.

Well, here's a refreshing change.  A breath of fresh air.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ch9sOjLHLk&feature=youtu.be

 I have had a virtual relationship with this lovely woman for a long time, and she has said supportive encouraging things to me.  And she is every inch a professional.

On another note, I seem to be having more success at the shallow end of the pool lately.  By that I mean places to sing (solo arias and songs, not with a choral group) where I don't feel totally out of my depth.

Rather than being obscure and cutesy, basically what I was trying to say about the "shallow end of the pool" is that it's fine to stay away from singing overly challenging repertoire in public. Although the times I've done it the only criticism I've gotten has been from my voice teacher and one or two other high level singers - and none of it was unkind as in "you shouldn't have sung that" and none of them accused me of being "selfish" by singing it.  What I have found frustrating is the lack of places for trained (but not quite up to the level, apparently, of people singing at the no pay opera groups) singers to do solo singing in front of audiences, even just audiences of peers, and talking to each other about their small triumphs and frustrations, which seem to go with the territory if you've discovered a passion for an art form when you're older and living someplace where you're drowning in an ocean of people who are more talented (Oh wyo wyo wyo, wasn't I born in a backwater in Ohio??)

Yesterday I got an invitation to the Hispanic Heritage event at the Spanish woman's house, where people are invited to bring Spanish songs (any genre) to sing.  So I ordered the book of Jaoquin Nin's Canciones Populares.  Feeling, as I do, so at home with Carmen (other than the B in the Sequidilla, which can be got around), I know that the Spanish song repertoire will suit me, and I am really excited about exploring it.

So now there is an actual date on my calendar for me to sing something!!

And Valerie's video has inspired me to continue on....

The View from the Shallow End of the Pool

No matter what I do, I can't shake the tremendous sadness that the two online fights I got into have left me with.

It's not a feeling of loss.  The person I removed from my friends list on Facebook and the one who removed me (the subsequent two who removed me made me slightly regretful, as I had no quarrel with them, but not deeply sad) were not people who cared about me or even liked me, so it is no great loss.

All I can think of is that this is really the first period in my life when I have had no listeners, not really.  I have a therapist, whom I pay, and some friends and acquaintances who care about me, but not people whom I can bounce ideas and thoughts off of, who give me positive feedback for my incisiveness, even when they don't agree with me.

I think the overriding factor with the two people I quarreled with is not that they are singers or voice teachers, but that they are preachers, and I don't like being preached at, directly, indirectly, or by implication.  I'm too old for that.  If my voice teacher wants to lecture me about something that didn't sound good (he has done that), or if someone who loves me and cares about me wants to point out (privately) that I did something thoughtless or selfish, that is ok.  But I am not stupid and I am not ignorant, and I don't need anyone telling me what to think, how to feel, or how to define myself.

I was interested to see this article, because it spoke to a lot of what I have been doing that has fueled my unhappiness. This article refers to people reading posts from (basically web stalking) people they hate or dislike. For me, it is more an issue of stalking people who don't like me, or even worse, people to whom I do not matter.

One sentence particularly resonates:

“I usually hate-read alone, late at night when I’m procrastinating, drunk, bored or all three,” she wrote. “When I finally walk away from my computer, I feel like I’ve just binged on a butter-sogged bag of popcorn before the movie even started: I’m slightly nauseated, but still can’t help licking my fingers for more fatty flavor.”

It is not a complete one on one match:  I am never drunk, and I don't do this type of reading late at night.  I do it when I am bored to near suicidality by having trawled through pages and pages of work cleaning up punctuation.  At that point any emotion is an improvement, even a negative one.

But I am left feeling exactly as if I have had an unhealthy binge.  This is, in fact, how I felt after those two escalating online quarrels.  I don't take back anything I said, it is all true, and I meant every word of it, but why didn't I just remove, particularly the second person, from my friends list before I got into all that?  Why do I keep combing over her every word, even now, in my head, which, in fact, is where I got the title of this post.

The message I have been given is that if I (or people like me) don't want a shark to bite off my toe I should stay at the shallow end of the pool. Over the weekend I gave that a lot of thought.  Is that giving up?  Never to sing anything except art songs and church solos in a limited range?  Never go to any more opera auditions?  Never sing "big girl opera rep" except in my bathroom?

Now I don't for one minute regret having sung the Habanera in the bookstore, basically, to get a Youtube video.  Even though now it has another "dislike".  I said I didn't want to die anonymous, and so that will be there, forever, for posterity.  And I am still planning that spoken and sung Carmen (even if out of self protectiveness I decide to transpose the Sequidilla down). But I have gotten burned once too many times to go to any more auditions.   Really, what's the point?

Here's the problem with the shallow end, and here's what still surprises me.  There don't seem to be very many people there, certainly not ones who are talking about and sharing about their experiences and supporting each other.  If there were, I would be happy to stay there.  Or if we had our own little "Forum" and our own little soapbox exchange.  Did online journaling and bucked each other up.  But that doesn't seem to be happening.

I know I have said this before, but my two biggest surprises when I started singing again were:
1. The level of the singers auditioning for the no-pay opera companies and
2. The level of the singers babbling and navel gazing via blogs and online fora.

I had really thought that those things would have been the shallow end.  The deep end, I  had thought, would have been interviews in Opera News. I felt so terribly sad all weekend, not because I don't sing as well as I want to, or because some blowhards don't like me, but because I keep feeling that none of this matters. 

How could something (by "something" I am referring to the transformation I underwent that is described here) that was probably one of the five peak experiences in my six decade and counting life, not matter?  If I'm supposed to shut up and stay at the shallow end (where there are apparently few swimmers and fewer sightseers), what was it all for? This weekend I was so unhappy I actually threw myself into cleaning (for my SO, not for myself).  I didn't feel like singing, not at all, for at least four days.

Tonight I went into my bathroom and sang through "Amour Viens Aider".  And I know that God is not done with me yet.

Imagine (with Apologies to John Lennon)

I was going to make this post before someone with whom I had (felt I had?) an adversarial online relationship with unfriended me.  Well, I had been thinking about unfriending her; I just had been too much of a wimp to do it.

The title of this post came from my pondering "suppose I just deleted all the people who make me feel bad about myself from my online reading life"?  It doesn't really matter why they make me feel bad about myself, whether it is about me or about them.  The issue is, they do.  Taking count, I see that I still have at least four voice teachers and several working singers on my friends list, all of whom are supportive and affirming, so a person being a singer or a voice teacher is not really the issue.

Some people have very sharp tongues.  Whether or not this means they also have mean hearts is debatable.  My mother had a sharp tongue and a generous heart.

I don't think I need to be around people with sharp tongues.  This is not what I want in my life.  It doesn't mean that I won't get the constructive criticism I need, or guidance, or being called up short on my character defects.  But there was an old saying "she who gossips to you will gossip about you".  And certainly you can substitute the word "snark" for the word "gossip".  Today Miss Kansas, tomorrow me.

So what's left?

Practice.  Learn new material.  Plan concerts. Stay on top of having a choir solo every season. Enjoy improving my musicianship singing with the choir. Make friends. Spend time places where I will be listened to.  Get away from the Upper West Side and hang out with some accountants, dentists, secretaries, bankers, pediatricians, anyone who isn't a musician or theater person who will make me feel small, whether that is their intention or not.  Take care of my SO.  We don't have that many years left together, most likely.

ETA: Well it turns out that now two other voice teachers, one whom I had just had a pleasant exchange with, and the other whom I scarcely knew, unfriended me as well.  I find that rather surprising.  Only one of them is a blogger and she sticks strictly to the nuts and bolts end of her craft.  I have never heard her say an unkind word about anyone.  The other is someone who puts on concerts.  I guess I just have to let it go.

Life Goes On

I should be working, but I wanted to check in with people to let them know that I am feeling much better.

First of all, just because someone is an articulate bully with a following, and a certain ethic, doesn't make that person less of a bully.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the "don't consider myself the equivalent of" thing.  Are people so mistrustful of the world at large that they think people who know won't know that I'm not the "equivalent of"??  That must be why I can't get cast even in an opera produced by a company that does not pay people.  And if people buying books at the Strand, or some residents in a nursing home, or some less musically educated parishioners at the church think I'm the "equivalent of", well, I guess I must have done a really good job of fooling them, so "go me!" as they say.  I think it's a bit arrogant to tell people what they can and can't think about themselves.  When it comes to politics, I am certainly not a "free market" person, but when it comes to entertainment, I will let the marketplace decide.  No one is going to tell me what I can or can't think of myself as and no one is going to tell me that I can't take part in a conversation.

What I need to do, is stop trying to get the approval of people who are not generous-hearted.

Whew!

So OK.  Last night was choir practice, and when I got home there was an email from the woman who produced the September concert mentioning something about an event for Hispanic Heritage Month and she ended it by saying "Keep working on your Spanish songs!" Just that tiny crumb, that some one wants me to sing something, work on something, now is keeping me going.

Tuesday when I was so depressed I had a voice lesson, and didn't sound good (I also hadn't used my Neti pot that morning and it seems that using it is essential to my vocal well being).  As there is no specific piece of music with a date attached to it on my calendar, and as my teacher (who has permanently switched to singing baritone) is singing the High Priest in a concert version of Samson et Dalila, I went over "Amour Viens Aider".  Of course I choked on that high B flat (despite now regularly singing arpeggios up to a high C) so he said why not just sing the G, which is what is written?  So I did that a few times and then he said maybe try singing the E flat, then the G, then the B flat, which I might find easier than stretching from the E flat to the B flat.  And it sounded great!  I also fooled around with that dialogue at the end of the act with the dreaded high B flat on "Lache".  I still wouldn't dare to try to sing it off the cuff, so I sang the E that Samson sings on the word "Dieu" and then slid up.  The actual note (the B flat) sounded really good.  If only I could have amnesia, sing as well as I do now, and pick up some of these things as if I'd never seen them before!

Also, I was interested to read this:

First, the larynx - the source of all vocal sound - is the last aspect of our human anatomy to fully mature. Until the late 20s or early 30s, its various components remain flexible and easy to manipulate. Later many of these components will harden into bone, and when that happens the voice becomes much less pliable and forgiving. 


from a blog piece by Claudia Friedlander.

I wonder if this is why some of the kinetic aspects of singing are so hard, despite my having now studied for 9 years?  Even when I started the first time, at 26 after 13 years of smoking, no doubt a lot of damage had been done.  My teacher had mentioned that it's much harder for older people to make the proper pharyngeal space to sing.  For example, I now do know what that feels like, but if I am singing, say, above a G, I have to think about it all the time. I can't seem to graduate, like the 20somethings I see in online master classes, from thinking about technique to thinking about presentation, unless I am singing in my core range from middle C up to that G sitting on the top of the staff.  

Well, I will do a few more runthroughs of "Amour" and then it will be time for something else.  I am waiting to hear back from the Spanish woman about what Spanish songs she thinks might be good for me to sing (all the ones I have music for are meant for Christmas or Epiphany), and then look at "Nun Wandre Maria" to see if I can sing it for Advent as a church solo.

Something to Sing, or Something to Say? (Duelling Blogs)

First of all, even though I only have 14 official followers (and two unofficial ones that I know of), I just know that there are people out there, people whose every sentence makes me feel about the size of a gnat, who read this, but won't 'fess up.

No, I do not consider myself the "equivalent" of someone who has made singing a profession.  What does "equivalent" mean here anyhow?  Do I think I sing as well as someone who has made singing a profession? No.  Do I think I have as much to say (about human nature, social trends, people's spiritual shortcomings that they think don't show) as someone who has made singing a profession?  Do I think I write as well about my life as an avocational singer as some of these people write about their lives as professionals?  As Sarah Palin would say " you betcha".

What makes me so heartsick isn't that people notice my vocal shortcomings (believe me, I notice them more than anyone).  It's that people think I have nothing to offer and nothing to say.  That was my beef with the Forum (which I will not link to).

Just because I don't sing professionally doesn't mean that my life is meaningless and that there is nothing there that people could draw inspiration from.  How many 50somethings start studying voice after a long hiatus because of a chance encounter and spend the next 9 years (going on 10) giving their all (or as much as is possible) to it, sacrificing time and money?  And just because I haven't lived the life of a professional singer doesn't mean I don't know things about other things that these people write and opine about: politics, health, human behavior, and so forth.  But these people ignore me as much when I write or comment about those things as when I write and comment about singing.

And no, I don't expect to be "cut special breaks because of my shortcomings".  I know what these are.  I have lousy high notes, whether because I'm a former smoker, or because I have had five decades of sinus drainage, or because I'm a New Yorker who never learned to speak in head voice until it was too late.  And I probably would not have the stamina, even if I had the range, to sing through the entire role of Amneris (I used to think that might be in my future, but probably not).  But if there's anything that I can sing the living daylights out of, it's the Habanera.  I sang it for the first time almost 50 years ago, it is in a comfortable range, and I know how to shake my booty just the right amount - and my French is flawless.  I mean, of course, if it's up on Youtube people are free to "dislike" it or even to make nasty comments (the latter, no one has done).

I don't know why, but all this brouhaha about Miss Kansas has left me very depressed. A friend of mine who reads this blog said I should not identify.  That my video of the Habanera has nothing to do with this.  It was a fach-appropriate piece, and I have studied voice, this go-around, for almost 10 years now.

But I just want to put my head down and cry.

I need to go somewhere where I feel wanted, and I don't know where that is.  If there were a "community" of amateur singers, particularly ones my age, maybe they would respect me.  For all the work I've done, the artistry I'm capable of, my determination.

I mean I know stuff.  And a lot of it is the stuff that some of these heavy hitters from the Forum should allegedly be interested in.  I have conducted over 100 job interviews with potential applicants and almost as many performance evaluations.  I was out as a Lesbian when no one was, wearing the "equality" sign when it really meant something; when it was an act of daring.  And I am - almost - a Stonewall veteran.  I was in the bar a few days before the famous riot.  I have helped people get sober and helped people come out.  I have lived in New York City all my life and been an officer of a tenants association.  The political rhetoric that newly blue people from red states think they just discovered was, literally, mother's milk to me.  My mother stood on a soapbox in Union Square screaming about the coming of the great communist paradise.

I just can't let all this plunge me into a depression.  I was feeling happier thanks to going to that AA meeting, having sung well at the concert last week, and planning to do something innovative with Carmen.

Maybe I will take the Big Book to bed with me tonight. (And now, if I want to pay next month's rent, it's time to get back to work.)

This is Exactly What I Have Been Talking About

I haven't posted anything for a while, because I haven't been doing much singing since the concert (it went well, but was not well attended because of the rain).

Now I have nothing definite on my calendar.  Judas Maccabeus does not have a mezzo aria other than the one pertaining to Chanukah, and there is nothing else on my calendar other than tentative plans to do the sung and read excerpts from Carmen, and possibly singing "Nun Wandre Maria" during Advent (I need to look at it).

But once again, I was really shocked by all the snark on Facebook (from the same cast of characters) about this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GojUwW6voyA

So OK, this woman chose the wrong aria, and needs a bit of polish.  But one of these snark queens referred to being "personally insulted".  That's arrogance, as much as this woman singing less than perfectly.

What I don't get, is on the one hand they laugh at this woman in high dudgeon, and on the other hand, they recycle this video and laugh at it.  I, for one, would never have even known about it, otherwise, as I didn't watch the Miss America pageant and am not interested.  I don't find this that different from people circulating insulting pictures of fat people or old people, or anything else, to generate shared ridicule at someone else's expense.

First of all, however many imperfections this performance has, to say this woman has never studied or practiced is outrageous!   I mean if she had had a good teacher or coach, the person probably would have suggested that she sing something else, but when the day is done is this really worth all that hatred and venom?

The people reposting this and laughing at it are saying as much (that's questionable) about themselves and their dissatisfaction with their lives as they are about her.

Really happy successful people don't circulate things to ridicule.

Home Safe?

This post is not about singing.  Not really.

On Saturday I celebrated 38 years of sobriety.  A few weeks ago, my partner and I started going to a meeting in her neighborhood.  I hadn't been to a meeting since 2005 or thereabouts.  Even as this program had saved my life, after a while I got turned off.  2004-2005 were pivotal years for me.  If you read this post (if you haven't already) you will see why.

I tried going back to meetings then (where I always grabbed for help) but the one available at lunch hour was packed with unemployed young people, I always came late (lunch hour? work? duh?) and so never got called on.  The conversation was mostly about drugs, there was lots of slang and profanity, and as a 50something wearing a suit with long term sobriety I was not perceived as needing help.  So I got help from the Well Spouse instead.  And from blogging communities, and later, an in-person caregiver support group.

When my partner and I went to the Unitarian Church in 2003, we had hoped that that would be an extension of our spiritual life in 12 step programs and that it would be something that would bring us together during a difficult time.  I was burnt out from working in a stressful high level management job, she had just sort of opted out and spent the day in bed, waiting for me to come home (often at 8 pm) and make dinner.  Instead our experience with that church tore us further apart.  I was swept off my feet by someone who got me to sing (the sexual aspect of all this was really the messenger, not, as I had thought at the time, the message), a dream I had deferred but never forgotten, and I became someone else.

From time to time, I hope that the spiritual messages I get from the Lutheran church will spark something beyond my love of the music there (and opportunities to sing my oratorio repertoire) but these sparks come quickly, and fizzle out quickly.  Recently my main feeling at that church is one of being subsumed beneath all the superachievers.  Everyone either has a music degree, a theater degree, or the means to travel all over the world.  At the panel discussion a few months ago that sparked so much envy and self-dissatisfaction, they were able to assemble a Broadway producer, a Broadway company manager, a high profile Broadway actress, and several recent conservatory graduates.  A 60something with a nice voice who sings an occasional solo and produces a concert once a year just didn't make the cut.

The meeting I started going to is not on the Upper West Side, where, no doubt, I would encounter the same demographic that I see at the church.  It was in South Murray Hill, where my partner lives, which is a lot more low key.  True, market rent apartments are as expensive there as anywhere else in Manhattan, but the population is a lot less flashy. And among people my age, there are many in lower middle income, uninteresting professions (or retired from them), who moved there in the 1960s or 70s and stayed.

Interestingly, I felt a lot more "spiritual" there than at church.  I shared my experiences of being 38 years sober, and listened to other people share about their lives.  Not once did I hear about where anyone went to school, or even what they did for a living.  For the first time in a long while I didn't feel "Well, I'm only a copyeditor", "I only have a BA from  Hunter College", "I'm only an unpaid church soloist".

If I am looking for a spiritual home, maybe that is it, regardless of where I choose to make music.

I can hardly wait to go back there, holding my partner's tiny frail arm, to do God's work.

New Year's Resolutions

This is the beginning of the Jewish New Year.  I don't really think of myself as Jewish; my mother was an atheistic secular Jew and my father was Scots Irish, I have a Scots Irish last name, look like my father's side of the family, never stayed home from school on the Jewish holidays when I went to a prep school in the 1950s and early 60s (schools didn't used to be closed on Jewish holidays), and there was always a Christmas tree in the house (which my mother swore was a Pagan custom).

I often laughingly say that if I'm in a situation where the opposite of "Jewish" is "Christian" (or today I suppose you could say "Muslim") I identify with "Jewish" but if the opposite of "Jewish" is "WASP-y" then I identify with "WASP-y" or I suppose I should say "WASU-y" as in "White Anglo Saxon Unitarian".  I have certainly been teased more about being "WASP-y" (as in WASP-y and uptight) than about being Jewish, over the years.

With that rambling preamble, I will say, though, that I think September is a much better time to start a New Year, than January.  (I also could never understand why New Year's had to be celebrated at midnight, when I am often asleep, when anyone knows that a "day" really starts at dawn.)

New Year's is a good time to make resolutions, and here are some of mine:

1. To stop looking at the Forum (I am not even providing a hyperlink this time, as I really don't want to have an excuse for sneaking a look at it.)  Other than that bookstore gig and a few pieces of advice which I probably could have gotten from someone else, all my involvement with it has done has been to make me unhappy.  Either I feel ignored, or someone says what I feel isn't true (how can what someone feels not be true?) or what I experienced really didn't happen.  I remember being told that it couldn't have been possible for example, that I was told by my Lesbian community that I should not sing opera because it was a patriarchal art form, that I should not play love scenes with men, and that any Lesbian worth her salt should be uncomfortable in a dress.  The person who said that (a gay man) was probably 12 at the time.  Or that I really don't feel that people who went to conservatories often behave like they are in a little exclusive club to which I do not belong, because of course they don't behave that way?  If that is how I feel, how dare anyone try to tell me that that is "silly"?  I rarely get on the feminist bandwagon, but women have been told that our feelings aren't true, that our narratives do not count, for far too long.  My narrative counts, it's mine, and no one can trample on it.  To conclude, there is nothing I can get from looking at the Forum, other than reading about things that people 30 years younger than I am are doing that I wish I could do but never will.  If I want advice I have a voice teacher, several coaches, a choir director, and friends who teach voice and who sing.
2. Ditto to stop looking at certain people's web sites.  How could it possibly matter to me what roles Jennie Jones or Sally Smith is singing and where?  These women can't be role models for me because I am older than they are and those opportunities are over if I even could have had them 30 years ago.  It doesn't mean that singing opportunities are over, simply that I have to be creative about looking for/designing them.  I would get more help from re-reading The Artist's Way
3. Spend more time with people who think I have something to offer.  I have been on this planet for over 60 years.  I know things.  Maybe the things I know don't matter to the Forum crowd (I was really only accepted there as a supplicant asking for advice, never as a participant) but they will matter to someone.  A 50 year old who wants to take voice lessons for the first time, maybe?  Another woman my age who is picking up a paint brush she hasn't used in three decades?  So many of my problems had to do with begging a peer group who didn't accept me to let me in instead of finding someplace I felt welcome.  This is not high school.  (As a sidebar, there are many singers and voice teachers, some having careers, who have been helpful and supportive, and who do think I have something to offer.  And there are enough of them that I can ask for advice if I need it.)
4. Reaffirm that this blog is about me and my narrative. It's  not about how I might have hurt your feelings, misunderstood you, or someone you love.  You can tell me once, point taken.  Basta.  I'll bet you are "heard" in a lot more places than I am.  This story is about me. (And just to save myself aggro, I have disabled comments for this post.)

Tonight is the first choir practice after the summer.  The choir director wants me to sing alto.  Hmmm.  I am happy to sing alto in the big pieces (like Bach cantatas) because those parts are written for people to sing in a nice line with breath control throughout their range, but in many of the other pieces that means never singing above an A in the middle of the staff, which I don't think will give my voice any kind of a workout or show it to its best advantage.  If the piece only has two women's parts it really is fine to sing alto, especially as the soprano section seems to be filling up with trained voices (and among trained voices I am not a soprano, duh!) On the other hand if the piece has more than two women's parts, I prefer second soprano.  Particularly with the spirituals in multiple parts, where even the second sopranos pretty much do nothing but sing the same couple of notes over and over.  At least the saving grace was I could end a piece like that on an F, while the top sopranos were singing an A, just like in opera.  I could let my voice soar.  If I'm stuck somewhere in the middle of the staff, I won't be a happy little diva.

Well, maybe the September group will be doing more and I can let some priorities shift a bit.

And I see that the choir is singing something from Judas Maccabeus on Reformation Sunday.  I will look for a mezzo solo to see if I can lobby to sing for communion.  When the star coloratura was still singing with us, she got to do a soprano solo during communion from the Bach cantata the choir was singing.  So far the only solo I found seems to pertain to Hanukkah, but I ordered the CD (it will be nice to have anyhow) and will look for something else.  Otherwise I will focus on "Nun Wandre Maria" for Advent.

ETA: It seems that the issue of what part I should be singing most of the time was a false alarm.  I think the choir director was expecting several trained singers to show up for the soprano section and they did not.  As far as numbers go, the parts are fairly equal: there are always 3 first sopranos, 3 seconds, including me, 2 first altos, and a gaggle of second altos, some of whom wander in and out for various reasons.  I suppose a case could be made that they would need me on first alto.  If the piece only has two parts and the soprano part is very high, I would switch anyhow.  I mean there is no reason for me to sing high in a choir: if anything, it could cause me to try to make my voice sound smaller, which is not a good thing.  But at the very least I need to sing up to an E regularly.

How Can One Compete with "Total Immersion"?

Yesterday I sang Bach's "Laudamus te" in two church services, which necessitated waking up at 6 am (so there all you people who think "amateurs" are irresponsible and dilettantish!).I had to be there at 8:30 sharp because I was singing with a violinist (as well as with the choir director on the organ) and I had never sung that piece with that particular violinist.

I actually got to the church at 8:15 and got an earful from the violinist's mother (he's 20!) about his prodigious accomplishments since the age of two, and all the things she (a former professional singer) had exposed him to.  I managed at some point to squeeze in that I  had begun studying voice seriously when I was in my 50s (not 100% true in that I had studied and sung in my mid-20s - still way too late for "total immersion") but "squeeze in" is the operative word, in that she did not ask me one single thing about myself (this is the sort of thing I have been encountering often over recent years, that I don't think is my imagination); I just felt like an "audience".

Well, needless to say, when we got up to rehearse, with this woman as the "audience" I was just terrified, and ran out of breath on several of the long runs; something I never do.

It all worked out in the wash, and we did a good job in the performance and got a lot of compliments.  And the violinist said he would like to do something again.  Maybe we can do the Vivaldi "Domine Deus" over the Easter season (I usually sing one solo every season and believe me, my wheels are spinning a propos of the upcoming one).

Speaking of "total immersion", I have been reading a novel called The Time of Our Singing about two musical prodigies.  They had total immersion, too.  I am only halfway through the book but can see that this total immersion protected them against the ravages of the "Sixties"; despite being of a mixed race background they had no idea what was going on politically, did not use drugs, and kept to their strict midnight curfew.  I did a bit of online research to see if they were based on real people (the novel mentions their going to Juilliard, for example) but apparently not.

I grew up taking piano and ballet lessons, because all the nice Jewish (and other) mothers wanted their children, particularly the girls, to, a la Jane Austen, play the piano a little, draw a little, dance a little, and sing a little (I took some casual voice lessons in high school from a retired Metropolitan Opera soprano who wasn't even ethical enough to tell me to stop smoking or I was throwing my mother's money away).  But "a little" here was key.  It was for enrichment, not stardom.  Of course compared to "blue collar" girls who were not exposed to these things at all (and their adult counterparts, many first generation college graduates) having done these things made me a "rara avis", but in musical circles I will always be perceived as a dilettante.

Well, today I will run through all the things I am singing on September 12.  After that I'll revisit the Bach aria I'm supposed to learn for the filmmaker (she has started work on the film already), immerse myself once more in Carmen, reserve a concert date in the free venue, and look around for a solo to sing on "Magnificat Sunday".  I may try Wolf's "Nun wandre Maria".