I haven't written anything here for a long time, because I haven't been singing. Tuesday week I lost my voice to laryngitis, which, I was told by my ENT, whom I saw a few days later, was caused by a virus. My vocal cords were in perfect shape apparently. So I spent a week coughing and spitting and blowing my nose. I sang for the first time this past Wednesday (just a few exercises; I didn't go to choir practice) and had a lesson yesterday. The concert is now only two weeks away. My voice is mostly back (except that I am still coughing and blowing my nose, somewhat) but I need to get my stamina back. Wish me luck please!!
As for the title of this post, as I have not been singing, I have been revisiting my other persona, the writer. Monday I went to look at the performance space, and one of my colleagues from the choir (who lives in the building where the performance space is) agreed to swap plays to read. I gave her Duet, the light and frothy fictionalized version of my experiences with the Mentor, including his $64,000 question, asked with a smirk, after I translated Dalila's aria "My heart opens at your voice like a flower" "So what kind of a flower do you think she's talking about?" It will be interesting to see what she makes of it. Maybe she will have an idea for someplace that wants to produce it. Rather ironically, her play was produced in a church where a friend of the Mentor is the music director. Wouldn't it be rich if it were produced there??
Her play was about a Lesbian minister. I don't want to say more than that because there are things that are confidential. In any event, if nothing else, it brought back lots of memories. Back in my activist days, this was exactly the sort of bandwagon I would have loved to jump on with a group of women. I was not raised to be religious, and would not have chosen this as my battleground, but anything high profile where there might be reporters was right up my alley. And in fact we had already been there before. This play was set in the 90s but in the 70s there had already been an ordination of a Lesbian minister (I don't remember with what outcome) and a song was dedicated to the whole thing called "You can't be in the closet with God". It has so fallen off the map that it took me a while to find it online, but I did, and I will give a copy of it to my friend.
Now here's where things get weird. Am I the only person who thinks half the fun of being gay was being an outsider? I don't mean an outsider who will get run out of town on a rail or have my house burned down, but the kind of outsider who is, well, not welcome at family or other "respectable" gatherings. If I had yearned to be part of that world (something I am ambivalent about) I would have married a rich man who would have bought me a brownstone to live in and let me pursue a career in the arts for no money in exchange for supervising the housekeeper and entertaining his business associates. The whole gestalt of being with a woman was that I chose love and romance over respectability and practicality. (I could easily see myself marrying a man I was not in love with for practical reasons, but a woman never!) We didn't want to be invited to the family Thanksgiving. It was much more fun to make our own community get togethers. Like being part of a sect or a cult (which had its downside, I later discovered) or a family of outlaws.
I grew up with Romeo and Juliet, Madama Butterfly and La Traviata. Even though I was never a lyric soprano, there was a period when I played my recording of Butterfly over and over again because almost every word she sings could have been sung by a Lesbian in love. All of it. Being rejected by her family, being told her marriage is not "real". Of course it simplifies things that she kills herself because then she doesn't have to wonder what to do later.
But the point I'm making is that the more "society" didn't want us, the closer we became, either as individual couples or as a community. Being outsiders didn't make it harder to bond as couples, it made it easier because we could set our own terms. (Actually many straight feminists envied us our freedom and open ended approach to relationships and were looking to us for leadership on how to create alternatives to marriage. How ironic!) Now there's nothing. You have women pairing off, getting a marriage license, making nuclear families. The whole thing leaves me totally cold.
But as I said in an earlier post, maybe it's just as well. Thirty-five years ago I gave up singing for my community and it norms. Now I can just sing.
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