A Week in Paradise

I haven't written in a long time, mostly because not much is happening on the singing front.  The choir is on hiatus.  We have three dates to sing in the summer, but we don't have weeknight rehearsals; we just show up at 10:15 the morning of the service.

I will be singing the bravura alto cantata solo "Erfreute Zeit", which I have mentioned often, on August 31.

I am still looking for things to sing on September 11.  We were given some instructions regarding what to sing, one of which was that the accompaniment couldn't be too difficult to play.  The producer nixed my original suggestions, so I am going to ask her about doing Haydn's "When I Think Upon Thy Goodness" (the music is upbeat and the text is perfect) and Schumann's "Requiem".  This latter is something I have wanted to learn for a while.  It is not a dreary Requiem.  It mentions Heaven and angels, and is similar in vocal style and message to the Wagner "Angel" that I have sung frequently.  I hope she likes these.  Together, they come to 6 minutes.  I have sung the Haydn in church, but not recently.

As for the title of this post, I took a week's vacation, in honor of my partner's 80th birthday.  I can't afford it as I don't even earn enough to pay my bills (I have been taking money out of my mother's savings account, just to squeak by until I can collect Social Security, which will be now in exactly two years as I will be 64 next week.)  But not everyone gets to have an 80th birthday, and I have not been away from New York for 5 years.  I have no excuse to travel as I don't have work that requires it and I don't have relatives.  If my friends want to see me they can come here, and most of them do.  (Most of them have a lot more money than I do.)

We went to Ogunquit, Maine, where we went every summer in the 90s.  We then went again in 2009.  We stay at The Beachmere inn (http://www.beachmereinn.com/) in a room called "The Mayfair Studio", which overlooks a Japanese garden that is not like anything else I have ever seen.

I think this will be our last time there, because the room is at the top of a flight of stairs at the top of a hill, and it was too much for my partner to manage.  We had to hire a private "beach caddy" to take us to our door because the trolley stop was at the bottom of the hill.  This is where we want our ashes scattered, and it is what, to us, Heaven looks like.  I didn't sing for a week, and I didn't work.  It was a necessary change of scene.  I guess our next trip will be in August of 2016, after I am collecting Social Security.  We will probably take a guided tour up into various parts of New England, because we cannot handle baggage.  She is too frail to carry even one suitcase, and I can barely manage one, let alone two, and I can't handle any baggage on stairs or an escalator.

I am now back to singing and working.

A Stunning Blog Post, about a Lot More than Sex!

I "liked" a page on Facebook called The Gypsy Priestess . Today, they posted this, which just blew me away. It is about a lot more than just sex, and pretty much catalogs everything I want, need, and yearn for in my life as an antidote to all those hours I spend in an airless apartment moving punctuation around and fixing type fonts.  It is really a credo to live by.

In other news, yesterday at my lesson my teacher and I tried to brainstorm about what to do next.  Maybe take Carmen into a nursing home?  Those venues are always free.  Or maybe do something with Gioconda.  My Don Jose is singing Enzo now, and we would sound great together.  I probably wouldn't do anything until the Spring - once a year for a self-produced concert is about all I can manage (I would do more if I didn't have choir and these little ad hoc concerts like the one on September 11.)

My teacher also said that he thought the Carmen was the best thing I had done and that I had made a big breakthrough.  The problem is I cannot immerse myself in this totally.

I am very happy with it overall; on the other hand the fact that it was so poorly attended and that it didn't even warrant being what my mother used to call "a conversation piece" in my broader social circle (who can go to free concerts at Juilliard, etc. whenever they feel like and therefore don't consider something like this "real" music) is very disheartening.