2017 Wrap Up

Right now I couldn't even begin to think about making New Year's resolutions.  I can't think of anything I need to be doing (that's realistic) that I'm not already doing.  And I hope it's not a cop-out to say that so much of what is lacking in my life is about the lack of opportunities for someone with my level of talent in the environment I'm in.

As for how the outgoing year was, here's a wrap up.  (And please note, this is only about me and the people in my life. It is not about the year as a political saga.)

The Good

• My partner is finally settled on Medicaid with a package of services and a support team.  Barring her coming into money (unlikely), this can roll over from year to year.
• She is much healthier.  I am no longer worried that she is going to die within weeks or months.
• Through managing all of her care providers and coordinating services, I have acquired skills that, most importantly, give me a feeling of competence, and secondly, keep fresh the management skills I once used at jobs for pay, if I ever want to look for another one.
• I keep singing better and better.
• Through my involvement with her home care team, I have learned about many different ways to make a life, even here in New York.  There are people of different ethnicities, living in outerborough neighborhoods, with skills, talents, and beautiful souls, that have nothing to do with the world of Upper West Side successful professionals with performing arts degrees, around whom I feel like I'm the size of a mosquito.  I thank these women not just for the loving care they provide my partner, but for sharing their hearts and their lives with me.

The Disappointing

• Despite singing better and better, it seems harder and harder to find a place to sing.  Outreach venues don't call me back.  If I were to pay a modest fee to rent a studio, I would have to fill it with an audience, and with all the high-level performances here (many of them free), there won't be one.  Some people will no doubt come to be polite, but they really are not all that interested.  
• Despite repeated efforts, I have not been able to create a network of similarly situated aspiring performers (older adults with a certain level of talent and skill who are eager to perform and willing to invest a certain amount of work in throwing something together). The people I meet are either younger or more experienced and are plugged into networks of their own that would not be open to me or it they're my age, they're pretty much done unless something falls into their lap.
• I realize more and more that most of the people who have the life I want began on a path when they were in their teens or shortly thereafter.  At least among people I meet regularly, I seem not only to be one of the few without an advanced degree or some degree in a performing arts related field, but also one of the few who was never in a school show or an extracurricular performing arts group. This is time and experience I can never get back.
• Despite spiritually knowing better, I still yearn for a life I can't have: a life primarily defined by the arts.  To the world I am a freelance copyeditor who is a caregiver - oh, and I have a lovely voice, sort of as an aside.
• I can no longer even envision doing anything for a living, even part-time, that does not involve some iteration of "paper pushing" sitting at a desk.

Lesson of the Year

Since I apparently will never do well, maybe I have to settle for doing good.

My Years with the Lost Girls

Years go by and you never know who from the past is going to turn up.  A few weeks ago, two old friends of my partner's (one a former lover) who had been involved in a video group wth her, a few years before she and I met, asked me if they could come visit her and interview her on tape.  Of course I said yes.  The more lasting memories I have of her the better (a social service agency recently made a video of her talking about memories, which included some video clips of me singing). 

One thing led to another and I found out that these women, who had been sitting on boxes and boxes of reel-to-reel tape made by what was - I think - the only Lesbian video group in the 1970s, had converted most of it to digital format.  They now have a Facebook page and a vimeo link.  Viewing the videos brought me an enormous wave of nostalgia.  I was not in any of them; I got involved with this movement a few years later, but it was all familiar territory.

Looking at the videos, I was struck by the youth and innocence of it all.  There was a fairy tale quality to it, which I think is what drew me in all those decades ago.  Yes, I was a Lesbian, but no, I was not eager to don unisex clothing and throw away all my bottles and jars of makeup, high platform shoes, and dresses.  l was not angry at men, particularly, I just found them (for the most part) to be totally clueless about women's bodies, and rather dull at making conversation.  Most of the ideology espoused by the women I suddenly found myself involved with morning noon and night left me cold (I had heard most of it before from my Marxist, albeit heterosexual, mother, particularly the tut-tutting over the wastefulness of buying cosmetics).

And yet I was intrigued.  I saw that a group of women, mostly white and middle-class born, and mostly under 45 (my partner was one of the oldest) had found a way to live, like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, in a never-never land where there was almost no contact with the "ordinary" world.  I don't think I had ever quite imagined anything of this kind. (Growing up, my Lesbian hero[ine] had been Elinor Eastlake from The Group: too smart and glamorous to bother with men, and snapped up like arm candy by a rich cross-dressing baroness.)  Recently I have been writing a memoir (totally unlike this blog) which is mostly about literature and religion, with only a nod to singing, and in one chapter I mention my lifelong love of the novels of Dickens, which began in adolescence with my fascination with the endless roll call of orphan children.  Well, these Lesbian-Feminist-Separatists were very much that.  They were girl-boy children who seemed not to have grown up and who had managed to live a life quite apart from "adults".  Most of them were on strained terms with their own parents if they communicated with their parents at all, which many did not. We had our own choruses, printing presses, art schools, coffee houses, food coops, movers, painters, exterminators, and others.  We had our own holiday celebrations (including a "solstice party" in late December, to avoid mention of "patriarchal" holidays). We had our own doctors and lawyers, too, but these were the "bridge" figures: they were of us but also of the world, and now, years later, most of them are settled, successful professionals, married (to other professional women) and moving quite comfortably in the "real world", but never compromising who they are. 

And there was our "Wendy".  Not me.  I was  a token "pretty girl" but most of my clothes still came from thrift shops and I was not a successful professional nor did I have a middle class home.  "Wendy" was a pretty, blonde schoolteacher, a "bar femme" from the era when Lesbians were sexy, not political.  (She had once been hauled off to jail with her butch lover, wearing a red baby doll nightie). Wendy was a trained singer, and she was the anchor in our chorus.  She was the professional people turned to, and the "mommy".  People came to visit her at Christmas and she led caroling.  She was one of the few people who encouraged me to sing, and I did land a solo spot in the feminist oratorio our chorus did (it was - is - a magnificent piece of music but has gone out of circulation as a result of a conflict between the composer and lyricist).

Of course it was not all a sweet fairy tale to remember with fondness.  As I have written of numerous times in these "pages", it was these very women who discouraged me from trying to seriously pursue an opera career (if I would even have been able to at the late age of 26 with no music degree and poor health habits, but who knows; with different influences and a true "champion", maybe I could have).  They told me not to "invest myself in a patriarchal art form like opera."  They made me so phobic about straight men that I was unable to act the roles I should have been singing.  (Actually I was not afraid of straight men; I was afraid of their disapproval.)

How different things are now.  Upwardly mobile professional Lesbians of subsequent generations are all marrying, finding high tech ways to procreate (don't ask!), and being house proud.  They are nicer, and much mentally healthier that the "lost girls" (there have been several Lesbian couples at the church where I sing and they are lovely, totally un-angry, "well adjusted", and comfortable with themselves), but I miss never-never land.  Eventually it vanished, and I was left as a middle aged woman who had never really grown up, scrambling to make something of myself in the real world.  I don't know what turn things will take now that I've come face to face with my 20s, certainly not something I was expecting!

The Mentor and the "Shower Trick" #Metoo?

For those of you who are have followed my story for years, you know what a role the man I refer to as The Mentor played in it all.  He got me to sing, he awakened my feelings of desire, and through his influence, I retooled my personal image which, over the previous decade, had morphed from glamorous to sexless (albeit dressed for success), and redecorated my apartment, replacing a lot of the pastels with brilliant reds.  I lusted after him, to no avail, I envied him his freedom from both monogamy and office jobs, I wanted to please him, I cowered when he turned on a dime from being seductively admiring to being gratuitously cruel.  It was through having him as a muse that I wrote a play, with him as anti-hero, which was actually quite good, although too rom-com-ish for today's playgoers, certainly in major metropolitan areas (it was produced by a community theater in Texas). 

Over the years, when I would descibe some of his behavior, the words "sexual harrassment" would creep into the conversation (never used by me).  And I would wonder.  How could this be "sexual harrassment" if he was gay and was not interested in me?  Is teasing someone into lusting after you, then dancing away and laughing, particularly if you're in a position of power "sexual harrassment"? 

Here is one of his archetypal choice quotes that I have shared with people in speech and in writing (it even ended up as a "laugh line" in my play).

ME: (singing "Mon Coeur S'Ouvre a ta Voix")

HIM: What do the words mean?

ME: "My heart opens at your voice like a flower"

HIM: (leering) Weeeelll, so what kind of a flower do you think she's talking about"

And there was the time he told me to sing something like an orgasm, and the time he told me to put my hand on my "heart" or rather my "tits" (his word).

But now here's something I never told anyone, not because I was afraid or ashamed, but simply because I didn't attach any importance to it, until I heard about Charlie Rose and "the shower trick".

The very first time I showed up at the Mentor's apartment for a lesson, he took a while to answer the bell.  When he finally came to the door, he was wearing nothing but a towel.  He said he had just come out of the shower.  True, nothing "private" was visible, but what voice teacher takes a shower right before a student arrives?  What was the hidden agenda here, and believe me, there was one!  He didn't want to have sex with me, obviously.  But he did want to have power over me and what better way to do that than to sexualize our first encounter in his apartment.

So maybe that was a #metoo moment after all.  Because sexual harrassment is not about sex, but about power.

Who Ever Thought it Would Be So Hard to Give Away Something for Free

As one of my soapbox issues is how much I resent people who belittle those who sing or perform for free, I now have yet another argument.  Unless you have a large living room with a piano, it is really not all that easy to find places to do solo singing for free. 

First, the opera and other groups that don't pay people.  Those are so overrun with semi-pros, emerging pros, and pros who can't get work (or aren't paid to sing roles that they want to sing) that they are off the table for someone like me.  I do sing in a church choir that performs high level music (and I insist on staying in the soprano section to keep my upper register in shape) but choral music just doesn't "do it" for me.  Yes, I love being in that choir and aren't giving it up any time soon, but I would like to be doing more.  I also occasionally get to sing a solo, but solos at this church are not a big priority, so we're talking about maybe four times a year.  The church hosts other events, but needless to say because it's on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the people who perform there are "up and coming" chamber music groups.  They even hosted some of Marilyn Horne's foundation receipients' recitals in the past.  A secular-themed talent show for the choir people? Not happening.  They have poetry slams and "coffee houses" for people who sing and play the guitar, but nothing that I would be interested in doing. 

So here's what I've done so far, since I started singing in 2004.

1. Two talent shows at the Unitarian Church, before they dumped all the classical music.
2. One concert at a cash-strapped church that wanted to raise money.
3. One concert version of Samson et Dalila at the church where I sing now, as part of a series to raise money for the Tiffany windows.
4. A concert at a studio that I had to pay to rent, where the air was so foul (they had an air conditioner that they had not cleaned) that I choked my way through it.
5. A concert version of the Verdi Requiem at the church where I sing. I billed it as a fundraiser for their food pantry.
6. A concert version of Carmen sponsored by a woman who runs a group that puts on various sorts of performances.  I also sang in concerts on September 11 and in her living room, but at some point she either "went off" classical music, or "went off" me, or both.
7. Two abridged concert operas at an LGBT senior center (I might call them again; the only problem is that I had a quarrel with a case worker there; on the other hand, she has nothing to do with the special events staff).
8. Two concerts at a nursing home.

If readers are asking "why now"? The reason is that I have come to two dead ends trying to find a concert venue.  The nursing home where my partner was last year, which has a beautiful room with a piano, had originally said that I could get in contact with the event coordinator, but I left him two voice mail messages and left one message with his assistant (live) but they never called back.  Today I got in touch with a library where my voice teacher will be performing with the pay to sing group he sings with (he doesn't pay anything, as they always need men) and they said they didn't need any more musical events right now and that I would be subject to "extreme vetting" (fine, but I think Hell will freeze over before they get in touch with me).

So I just want to put my head down and sob.  I feel that I have all this huge solo voice that's bursting out of me and nobody is interested.  So OK, I'm not a finished product, I'm not young, and I have no resume other than the above.  But to anyone, even a music lover with an ear, who's not an obsessive opera afficianado or a high level trained classical singer, I have something to offer.  And I'm not ready to throw in the towel.

Videos! A Dream Come True

I got the videos back from my recital.  First of all, if anyone reads this, and you are someone I know and trust, just leave a comment with your email address (I screen comments, so it won't be published) and I will send you some links.

And, before I comment on my feelings about the videos, I want to say that for the past, let's say 5 years, certainly as long as everyone and their dachshund has had a smart phone, I have yearned for videos of me singing.  These were not easy to come by, let me tell you.  My friends with smart phones were not that skilled at using them (they would make a video, it would be too big to upload, they would give up, and I would get tired of nagging them), or they didn't even own one (e.g. my voice teacher), so I was left empty handed.  And this stung particularly because the younger singers I was/am so envious of, seem to have a gaggle of family, friends, teachers, and coaches, always at hand to document their every song.

Recently, I will say, I have found someone at church who is IT-savvy, and he made two videos of me which I am glad to have.  I sounded good in both, but did not like how I looked in one, which was good for me to see, because I can use it as a teaching tool.

The fact that a videographer documented this recital really was just something that fell into my lap.  She has been making a legacy project for my partner, videoing her telling stories, so I asked her how much she would charge to video my recital and she told me she would do it for free, because she planned to use part of it as part of my partner's legacy project.

She is a professional who makes videos as part of her day job, and she knows how to do good camera work, and how to create files that I can store on my hard drive and upload to Youtube.  Did I tell you I have a Youtube channel?  It never had much on it, but now it is filled out with most of the clips from the recital.

All in all, I was happy with them.  Here's a recap.

• O Had I Jubals' Lyre. I was very pleased with that.  Actually I was surprised, because it was the first thing I sang, I wasn't feeling well, and I was a little nervous.  I took a couple of catch breaths in the runs but you can't hear them.
• The Drinking Song.   I was also pleased with that, at least with how I sounded.  The high A was good.  I was not so happy with how I looked.  I was doing something fidgety with my hands that looked a little like I was doing something risque.  Actually I was probably tugging at my skirt.  Next time I will tell whoever is videoing to cut the frame off at my waist.
• Cruda Sorte. Overall the coloratura was good, but I wish I had a plummier sounding lower middle register.  But I looked like I was having fun!
• Moonfall. Really good.
• Mon Coeur.  Probably the best I've ever sung it.
• Habanera. Meh  Not my best rendition of it.  I just wasn't all that engaged with it
• In Betty's/Buddy's Eyes  Not good.  That's too bad because I had hoped to use it as part of the legacy project.  I didn't know it well enough, so at one point I sang a wrong note that was out of tune.  It's such a great song, so I may revisit it at some point.  I never sang it at a lesson, which was probably a mistake.
• Vanilla Ice Cream.  That went really well.  I had fun!  Including with the ad libbing.
• Waltz Me Around Again Willie.  Again, fun!
• Let Me Call You Sweetheart.  Heartwarming.  I invited the audience to sing along, which I had also done last time.  I am going to use this for the legacy project.
• I Dreamt I Dwelt.  Good until the very end, when my throat got tight.  I was aware of that while I was singing.  I didn't post it anywhere, but probably no one except another singer or a voice teacher would have noticed that.
• Home Sweet Home.  Made me cry.  I just love love love that song.  I will use that for the legacy project.

My only disappointment now is how few "likes" these got on Facebook, compared with how many likes I get when I post something about my partner, or even when I post a status update saying I was happy with how something went.  I wonder if people just don't see these videos in their feed?  (I'm still not quite sure what the difference is between a "feed" and one's Facebook Home page; when I want to see other people's posts I go to my home page.)  As I've probably said in some of my less than happy posts from 4 or 5 years ago, the young singers I was mentioning get oodles of likes and shares for all their videos. 

Anyhow, what I should say is having these is priceless because most of them are to cherish, and the ones that are not are to critique, which is what I wish I had had access to all along.

Oh, and in other news, I heard back from the managed care company that is handling my partner's Medicaid recertification, and they said that all the paperwork and financials looked in order, so they are submitting it to the city.  So now I just have to wait.

So Why Are So Many of My Former Friends Famous?

Yes, this is just a typical Thursday morning whine, triggered by the random googlings of a bored copyeditor.

In what appears to be my most-read post, I discovered several years ago that a drugged out anorexic bar hopping roommate that I had in 1969 became someone famous (although still drugged out and anorexic).  Who knew? By the time she became famous I was sober and long gone from that scene.

Well!  The other day, I googled two different roommates from the same era (c. 1970), and found that both of them are or were famous enough to have their own Wikipedia pages, one (who died several years ago) for things that were unsurprising (although the level of her fame was quite surprising), the other for holding public office.

And it was only a month or so ago that I saw that a woman with whom I used to socialize as part of a group on holidays (before my friends' great migration to either the afterlife or warmer climes), had not just an editorial obituary in the TIMES, but a front page obituary.

For a long time, I blew off the fame and fortune of young women I grew up with, from the family physician who became a regular TIMES columnist to the female choral conductor who became one of the first female symphony orchestra conductors in the country, to a famous essayist and a famous novelist. I don't recall being particularly envious, mostly because these women were not happy.  (I don't know about the novelist; I didn't know her very well when I was growing up, but neither the physician nor the conductor ever found a life partner despite numerous failed efforts, and both they and their mothers did a lot of complaining about this. And the essayist's writing style is a melange of sarcasm, bitterness, and wit, although I have no idea if this reflects her actual feelings, or is simply her writer's "voice".)

In any event, whether I sometimes fleetingly envied these women or not, I could rationalize that they became famous because they had worked hard: going to medical school, graduate schools, yes, studying and focusing on personal development instead of on dating and romance.  So I had made a different choice.

But the three women I began this post by referencing were not that different from me.  They had all dropped out (although the politician obviously at some point "dropped back in" with a vengeance; she has both an MD and a JD degree).  So how did their involvement in various subcultures and counter-cultures lead to their making a "name" for themselves and mine did not?

And I did an informal study once (why not? I edit manuscripts full of data) and found that approximately 50% of the people I have met in the years since I stopped working full time (at church, in my Pilates class, at women's circles) either went to prestigious colleges, have graduate degrees, or have degrees (or careers) directly or indirectly connected to the performing arts.

So where are the rest of us?

One tiny ray of hope is that I will have a "legacy project".  Right now the project is for my partner.  The senior agency we got involved with offers this option to their clients.  So I will have videos of her talking.  I desperately wanted those because I had photographs, but no audios, other than voicemail messages, which are quite ephemeral.  And bits and pieces from my recital will be interspersed.  And it will all be on the organization's web site.  And if she dies, I can become a client of that organization too.  I don't need "services" but I would sure love to participate in some group activities and have a legacy project of my own.  And if I participate in group activities there, who knows? I might actually meet some retired paper pushers who went to a city or a community college!

Recital Recap

First, I suppose I should apologize for not having something to say about the horrendous events yesterday in Las Vegas.  I guess I should say here that everyone else has no doubt said whatever there is to be said.  I don't generally talk about mass tragedies, the way some people don't talk about politics  I usually feel that I don't have anything meaningful to add. 

As for my recital, overall I felt that t went well, although I won't have a definite sense of it until I see the videos.  The woman who is making my partner's legacy videos came and video'd the whole recital without charging me, which was above and beyond.  She is going to use some of the songs I dedicated to my partner as part of the legacy videos which will be on the nonprofit's web site.

For some inexplicable reason, I started getting a migraine when I got to the venue, which is very unusual.  Since going through menopause 17 years ago I hardly ever get migraines any more unless I go too long without eating or drinking coffee, which was not the case.  My sleeping habits have become erratic, maybe that is it.  I always get enough sleep, but it is often in two segments (Friday night I fell asleep at 10:30, woke up at 3:30, went back to sleep at 5:30 and woke up at 8:30) or I will go to sleep and wake up very early (Saturday night before the recital I fell asleep at 9:30 and woke up the next morning at 5:30.) Which is why, now that I only sing things that I plan, I never book a concert in the evening.

There were a few rough spots, which I noticed, but I doubt most other people did.  My voice teacher may mention them at my next lesson.  Although I could tell that he was mostly pleased.

Two friends who live in Florida came because they happened to be in New York for a few weeks.  They used to live here and we used to go to the opera with them.  At that time I wasn't singing.  I was a little hurt because one of the women said, first, "Wow! You really are a real opera singer" but then added "even if you're no longer at your peak".  This hurt me, on the other hand, it is so off base, that how could I be hurt by it? I know that whatever imperfections I still have, I sing so much better than I used to.

One thing that hurts (and in a way this goes back to my musings on amateur versus professional singers) is that no matter how hard I work, I will never attain the "polish" of someone who went through a Masters of Music program at a conservatory (although I know that I have a better natural instrument than some; some graduates just market their small, musicianly voices to be paid choristers in churches or with symphonies). The problem is that as a woman first in her 50s, then in her 60s, with a variety of responsibilities, there simply was no way that I could become proficient in several languages, and get the kind of currying and combing that people get if they sing in performance classes and in front of juries all the time, while also working on vocal technique.  Practicing an hour a day, learning repertoire (including choir music), and at least understanding what I was singing, has been about all I have been able to manage.  The most I can afford financially is two voice lessons a month (which is fine; when I started I had enough basic technique to be able to work on my own and progress from lesson to lesson) and two sessions with an accompanist if I am going to be performing.  I have improved my musicianship by singing with the choir, and if I haven't taught myself to sightread, I know it is out of laziness and lack of interest.  But my lack of "polish" is something I am keenly aware of.  One way, at least, that I am making progress with this is by asking someone to make a video every time I sing a church solo.  That is not a big deal; I just had to bite the bullet and ask.  So I can see myself and see what needs fixing.

In other news, it turns out I will not be singing at the funeral.  Apparently the woman who died left instructions for what she wanted (why not??) and a soloist singing the piece I had chosen was not a "fit".  (Apparently neither was a choir anthem.)  So it will be interesting to see what the funeral is like.  I plan to go in any event, to pay my respects.

In other parts of my life, I am working on a memoir, about religion, British literature, and church music.  A woman I know who is a retired literature professor said she would read the chapter I wrote about reading Dickens.

And (in the not so good news) I now have to get my partner recertified for Medicaid.  I'm terrified that if the paperwork isn't in order she'll be struck off.  I just have to have faith, I guess, that all the knowledgeable people I have working with me will see that everything is as it should be.

Has Feminism Changed What it Means to be a Smart Woman?

This post has been brewing for a while, so no, it was not really triggered by anything specific.

I have written several iconoclastic posts about feminism; mostly with the thrust that "society" thrived more when there were a certain number of (middle class) women at home.  I never thought that a woman's place was in the home, simply that if no one is at home for most of the day, there is no sense of community. The elderly are neglected, no one knows that a neighbor has recently suffered a loss and would like some company, and if you're home sick you're on your own (literally; you're probably the only human being in your building except the super from 7 am to 7 pm).

Now my point is something else entirely.  That women who used to be considered "smart" (ahem, like Yours Truly) no longer are.

I suppose I was raised like a "Jane Austen girl" (as were most of my peers), except without the exhortation to marry a man with money.  I guess that was just assumed.  We were supposed to get a liberal arts bachelors degree (period) from a good college with the unspoken assumption that we would marry a decently paid professional.  Unlike girls slightly down the social scale, the goal was not to be sexy or adept at baking or sewing, but to be interesting to such a professional.

Of course, ironically, I never married a man at all, the woman I became involved with had an "allergy" to work, and I didn't even go to college until I was in my 30s.

But the training stuck.  By "training" I mean the following.  I took ballet lessons. I took piano lessons.  I sang a little.  I drew a little.  By the time I was 16 I had read all of Shakespeare and most of the classics.  I knew a little French. I had been to countless museums and could tell a Monet from a Manet.  I even knew a little about the latest developments in medicine and what was going on in the news.  I  had a large vocabulary and could engage in witty banter.  But that was it.

As the years went by, people thought I was "smart" because I peppered my conversation with quotes from Shakespeare and went to museums in my spare time instead of to sporting events. I knew it was wrong to say "between you and I".  I could describe almost any experience I  or a friend had had in a way that sounded intelligent, particularly when I waxed analytical about it and made connections from it to the larger world.  I could hold my own in a discussion that skirted the edge of disagreement.

One day (I don't know when this happened; maybe when I stopped working and got active on the Internet) I suddenly realized that to be "smart" now meant that to disagree with someone you had to cite sources and provide data models.  That conversation was less a meeting of two anecdotal yet astutely crafted memoirs and more like duelling textbooks.  That you had to know as much about Senate rules as a senator, as much about climate change as a scientist, as much about the physiology of singing as an anatomist.  I am totally at sea in this world, let me tell you.  I am not "competitive".  And I am certainly no one's idea of "smart", no matter how many "Great Books" I've read.

I'm wondering.  Is this a female thing?  Did feminism make women smart in ways that men were always smart? Or did social norms change?  Or is it all the sources one can link to on the Internet?  (I heard lots of erudite talk at my dinner table and I never remember anyone pulling out a reference book.)

Anyhow, I'm bowing out.  I'm not smart.  Just cultured.

Let me read, sing, and look at art, and leave the data slugfest to other people.

First Rehearsal for October 1 Recital, and...

Yesterday I had the first rehearsal for my October 1 recital. It went much better than I had expected.  I was a little worried because 1. I had never tried to sing the entire program through to pace myself and 2. I had been a little under the weather.  At my lesson the day before my throat felt a little "raw", like my vocal cords were irritated.  It might be that I had spent the day before with my partner and when I am there I don't use my Neti pot in the morning.  Also the aides clean everything to a faretheewell with bleach.

The three difficult arias went well.  When I say "difficult" I don't mean in a league with Verdi; simply that they require me to be technically spot on.  The highest note in anything is an A.  I did better than I had expected to with "In Buddy's Eyes".  Sondheim rhythms are very tricky.  After singing it the first time I realized that I can sorta kinda listen to the accompanist and I will then know when to come in and on what note.  "Vanilla Ice Cream" was no problem at all.  I decided to pass on singing "Mon Coeur" and the "Habanera" because I could sing them in my sleep.  Next week (my second and final rehearsal) I told the accompanist that I wanted to do a runthrough, including my little spoken bits, and his piano solos, so that I can get a sense of the pace.

Other things on the horizon are a difficult soprano part in Ralph Vaughan Williams' "A Choral Flourish", which I have not had enough time to work into my voice, unfortunately.  I have been listening to it, and will hope for the best.  It sits in a high-ish tessitura although the highest note is a G.  That is the sort of tessitura that is comfortable for me if I'm singing a solo; less so if I'm singing a choral piece with noplace to take a breath.  I may have to skip a few measures. We are singing it at 9 am this Sunday. (Oy).

Then I put out a bid to sing at someone's funeral.  This is a woman who had been a member of the church for decades.  Someone asked the choir director if the choir was going to sing and he said he didn't think so, because a lot of the newer choir members wouldn't have really known this woman (she went into a nursing home 3 or 4 years ago).  I offered to sing Dvorak's "God is My Shepherd" because it was a piece she liked (I sang it once or twice on Good Shepherd Sunday and she came up to me and told me she liked it.) The choir director said that might be nice, and said he would ask the Minister of Music.  If I don't hear anything about it, I will write to the Minister of Music after my recital.  The funeral is scheduled for two weeks after that.

As for the "and".  I never know what is going to unleash a floodgate of regret about the past. When I say "the past" I mean those crucial years when I was between the ages of 13 and 30 (which includes years when I was sober and no longer smoking).  There were so many missed connections, bad choices, wrong priorities.  Sadly, the more people damn me for feeling regretful the more painful it is because I don't just feel regretful, I feel that my feeling regretful is a character flaw.  What happened was that I was listening to a radio program about a man who had been a major figure in SNCC.  He used to sing with our choir (until he died) and his wife still does.  It reminded me of that period when I was in high school when I was a little burgeoning hippie.  That was when a music teacher friend of my mother's told me how impressed she was with my singing voice.  I had spent my childhood imitating Julie Andrews.  I sang in the school glee club.  At the risk of sounding Trumpian, I do think the fact that I was not a minority with that particular vocal color made me not of interest to the school glee club director (who was white). It was the era of glorious African American pop singers, and less than glorious white protest music.  A lot of the white protest singers (Joan Baez excepted) used drugs.  I listened to lots of folk, rock, and other protest music during those years.  If only I had not started smoking, which I did because I wanted to be stylishly thin and I thought smoking would curb my appetite. I was never clinically obese, but I was built like Kim Novak in an era when the idol was Twiggy.  Really all I would have had to do not to throw my talent in the garbage (yes, I resurrected it, in part at 26, and then seriously at 54, but the big chance was gone forever) would have been to not smoke (or abuse alcohol and drugs, which I did later.)  Basically I could have done anything else.  Sing folk music, go to protest rallies, play hookie, neck promiscuously...

I realized recently that the reason I so loathe Bob Dylan is not only that his songs were part of the whole zeitgeist that destroyed me, but also that his voice so reflects what can happen to a voice if a person abuses their instrument.  He was known to abuse drugs.  I always said I hated the sound of his voice because it was too evocative of the wrong things, but now I think it's because it's a reminder of how I destroyed my own voice.  I realized this the other day when I saw the text of some of his songs written down in an article I was editing, and realized that they are quite interesting, and yes, that he is a poet, but I can never bear to listen to that voice.

Then I snap out of it and realize that so many people have so much to grieve for, so many different types of loss, and I just despise myself.

An Old Hurt

First I want to say that my singing has been going so well lately (with a few setbacks) that there hasn't been much to complain about in that area.  I have also accepted that my primary mission in life right now is to provide love and care to another human being at the end of her life.  I don't have the time or energy to battle the NYC unpaid opera scene, which seems to mostly be a training ground for emerging professionals under 35, or a place for quasi-professionals in their 30s and 40s, or even in some cases 50s to sing roles they aren't getting paid to sing.  I have basically cut it off, the way someone who is made unhappy by a trigger tries to avoid it.  I never go to any of their performances.  I don't even go to the Met.  Tonight I am using some money I was given for my birthday to "treat myself" to something and going to the ballet.

I also had a (mutual) "unfriending frenzy" several years ago with most of the quasi-professional singers (some of whom are professional voice teachers) on Facebook.  I envied them, they had contempt for me (or for people that I perceived as being like me) and there were just too many negative emotions in the mix.  To me a "friend" on Facebook is someone who cares about me and my well-being and these people didn't.  I now only have a small number of professional or quasi-professional singers on my friends list.

Yesterday, I was heartsick to see a post by a woman I genuinely care about, someone who has been to Hell and back and come through it a heroine in blazing armor, containing some musings about the differences between "amateur" and "professional" singers (or musicians in general).  Of course I had a knee-jerk negative reaction to the whole thing, but after cooling off, my point is "Why Dichotomize"?  If a teacher wants to steer a student toward professional behavior, really, all she needs to do is list desirable behaviors.  Why bring in an adversary, the much caricatured amateur (who in people's minds mostly seems to be a lazy version of Hyacinth Bucket) at all. To make generalizations about amateur singers is no different than making generalizations about ethnic groups, blondes, or overweight people.  Some amateur singers are just that.  They sing choral music for fun.  They will absorb a certain amount of knowledge if it's presented to them but that's the extent of their interest.  They probably don't practice between rehearsals other than to plunk out the music if they're unsure of it.

In my choir there are no "professionals".  There are trained and untrained singers.  The untrained singers, yes, are more likely to not make choir rehearsal a priority, so they may be late or have a "conflict" that could have been avoided (like theater tickets - I wouldn't buy a theater ticket for a Thursday, for example). They most likely don't warm up at home; they wouldn't know how.  So they rely on the group warmup.  I doubt they complain about the group warmup, they are not knowledgeable enough.  I have complained about some of the group warmups (and I always warm up at home) obviously not to the choir director but occasionally to my voice teacher, if I find them vocally un-helpful (like singing a-le-lu-ya by attacking the same note four times all the way up to a high B flat and using that as a "test" of how high someone can sing). As for asking to switch parts if a part is uncomfortable (something else this woman mentioned - I am weaving a lot of her comments in and out of this post) again, that is something that a trained singer who understands her instrument might do (I certainly do, since as a mezzo I'm between a rock and a hard place a lot of the time), but an untrained singer probably wouldn't again, because she doesn't understand how her instrument works.  But why is that a "bad" thing? Not everyone has the same level of commitment or interest and if the group is an eclectic one, there are ways to make room for a variety of skill levels.

A number of other things that this woman mentions really have more to do with having a bad attitude or being a narcissist than being an amateur.  Most amateurs I know wouldn't presume to think they know more than the director.  They mostly just follow along - or leave, if they're uncomfortable, which is the prerogative of an amateur.  I know one rule I follow is that as I am not getting paid to sing, if I find myself in a situation that makes me uncomfortable (this only happened once) I will simply leave.  Which is one reason I now exclusively "make my own opportunities".  If I am producing a concert or an opera in a nursing home, I know that I will not be treated disrepectfully by a person in authority.

And I certainly don't think "amateurs think they're already great"!  Most are quite humble and know what they don't know.  If they aren't striving to improve as much as professionals or serious avocationals, it's because the art form for them is a hobby, not a passion, and they aren't willing to put in the extra work, and they know this.

As for "everything is beneath an amateur unless they're starring".  Well, I can only speak for myself.  That is somewhat true for the following reason.  My "biological clock" for doing anything with singing has ticked past the 11th hour.  I am living on borrowed time.  Singing Azucena, for example, in even the humblest of venues, is on my bucket list.  Singing in the chorus of Il Trovatore if I am not getting paid, is not. ETA: I must add here that I would never think of something as being "beneath me", only that it is not something I can afford to spend time on now, since I have so little of it, singing is not my livelihood, and there are roles, scenes, arias, and songs, that I yearn to sing before I physically can't any more.

And ah, if only professionals did not pay to partake!!  If only those people who rant and rave all over the Internet about how demeaning it is to be asked to sing for free would stay away from the opera companies that do not pay not to mention the pay to sings.  But these very people, these people who thought it was shocking that I sang the Habanera in a bookstore for free as a form of fun for me and the onlookers, insinuate themselves into every nook and cranny of the unpaid opera world, pushing the amateurs out.

The last audition I went to involved an opportunity to sing a role in a Handel opera from a book in someone's living room.  This was for a group that has "singthroughs" of operas in a woman's living room.  People pay her for the privilege.  I was apparently turned down because she wanted the opportunity to go to someone who was going to sing that role professionally and wanted a rehearsal.  I personally think that a group like that should be for people, yes, who have to audition to prove that they can sing the role, but whose only opportunity to sing that role or one like it will be in someone's living room.

Lastly, to think that only professionals recognize that a group of any kind is a number of people with different ideas and a person/team to pull it all together is absurd.  Anyone who has ever worked in an office, played a sport, or sung in an amateur glee club should know this. If you want to discourage negative behaviors, think of another word.

On Friendship

This blog is mostly about singing,  but I have written posts about ageism, sexism, gay marriage, Trump voters, and most likely a few other topics for discussion.

I want to write about friendship because it seems to be something I am not good at (or maybe I am choosing the wrong people).

For most of my life with my partner as a couple, even though I was the "femme" from a sexual and sartorial standpoint, I suppose I was the "man" in that for most of our life together, I had the job and she had the friends.  Her friends became my friends.  This is not to say that I had no social life apart from her.  I seemed to have a talent for finding companies where there was a large social and collegial component, so I had lots of "buddies".  And up until I took my last, gruelling management job, I always was involved with some evening group activity where I met people.

But nothing ever really stuck.  Once I left a setting, I only saw the people intermittently, at the odd annual group get together (or - recently - at a funeral).

I have said numerous times that since about 2007, most of my and my partner's mutual friends, people who became my friends as well as hers, have all either died, moved, or are always traveling.  I have found it very hard to make new friends although it has been at the top of my list of "projects" after earning a living, taking care of my partner, and singing.

I believe I have mentioned a friend whom I have described as "rich and stingy".  Well, sadly, I now have to add "querulous and disagreeable".  The only reason I still see her is that she feels some responsibility toward my partner and sometimes brings her supplies from a big box store (which, needless to say, I pay her for out of my partner's bank account).  She has complained about how "depressing" it is to see my partner and how sad it makes her  and is unable to see that this situation is not about her, it's about my partner.  Yesterday she came for a visit (I thought we would be watching tennis) and went into a rant about how although she attends a synagogue she doesn't "believe all that" and just goes for the social interaction.  I suppose many people do that, although they would not word it so harshly.  I am not Christian, but I continue to attend Lutheran services, not just to sing, but also to be in an environment where people are invested in being kind and supportive of each other (and toward the world at large).  To me that is different from "social".  What keeps me there isn't that I might be able to have dinner with people (I don't - I occasionally have lunch with people usually on the premises), but that people genuinely seem to care about each other and some even offer to help their fellow parishioners in their hour of need.

This friend and I were talking about fasting on Yom Kippur (which we both agreed is physically unhealthy) so I asked her if she did anything "symbolic" (if it were me I would probably spend the day drinking water, tea, and the odd bottle of Ensure) and she said no.  What struck me wasn't so much that she said no, but how hard and cynical she sounded.  Then we went on to other topics, including my distress at the lack of "community" in apartment buildings and neighborhoods, particularly where my partner is living.  It has now become a moot point as far as she is concerned, because she has 24/7 home care, but it offends me in principle.  I mean when there's a snowstorm, for example, anyone with a tv can hear whoever the current mayor is telling people to "check in on their elderly neighbors".  You don't even have to think to do it on your own.  So when I mentioned this she launched into a vitriolic rant about how the building isn't a senior residence, etc. and basically said that if I'm bothered by these things it's my problem.  Hello??? If I am offended by a general societal lack of character that's my problem??

It is really coming to dawn on me that this is someone not only who is stingy with money (she spends thousands upon thousands on luxury cruises but thinks she's being generous if she buys someone a danish), but is stingy in her soul.  I don't know if she has ever read Ayn Rand, but she seems to think everyone should just look out for themselves, and that this is OK, and that that's what she is going to do.  I was truly appalled.  When I got home I felt like I had been in some alternative universe with values that were so alien to me I didn't even know where I was.

What's ironic is that this woman in some ways has had many of the same losses that I have had; it's just that she can distract herself with pots of money (which come from her family; there isn't even the saving grace that she worked hard to earn it).  Most of her friends have either died or moved as well, including someone who just died recently.  Maybe I should have offered her condolences?

Jesus is a Rock

This morning I sang "Jesus is a Rock in a Weary Land" for the offeratory.  The Director of Music Ministries picked it out for me. It was just something in the hymnal but after years of singing spirituals with the choir, I figured out a way to interpolate notes into the second and third verses including a high A flat and a chesty middle C, so I was able to showcase my big dramatic voice. And it got applause.  After sitting through the beginning of the service, I can see why the Director picked that piece: the subject of God (or Jesus) as a Rock was the theme of the morning.

Now I will go back to working on my recital music.  I am continuing to sing better and better (my voice is getting bigger, the top is easier, I have more stamina) but I probably don't practice as often.  I am consumed with issues to do with my partner.  Her dementia is getting worse. She got into a fight with the aide last night thinking the aide was trying to poison her, so she refused to take her pills.  I had to stay on the phone with them for a half hour to get her to take her pills.  I am still really living one day at a time.  I have no idea what the future holds.

But there will be singing in it.

Back to My Fach

Yesterday, I was engaging with someone on Facebook about my blog, after previously, a few days earlier, having read this article about one of my lifelong singing idols, whom if things were different I would move Heaven and earth to study with, and I realized that a post is long overdue.

Things with my partner have stabilized.  I think she will make it to another Thanksgiving and probably Christmas and New Year's as well. She has a hospital bed. She is going to have Moh's surgery next week, and we have an ambulance reserved (it is the only way she can travel).  We continue to enjoy snuggles and tv watching.  Her dementia waxes and wanes.

My 67th birthday passed with pretty much nothing other than my partner "buying" me a Wimbledon towel.  (This means she said I could use her credit card to buy it from their web site.)  It was a lovely present.  To me a "present" should be something you wouldn't buy for yourself.  It doesn't need to be expensive, but it needs to feel like a luxury.  Not business as usual.  A friend sent me a check so I bought two ballet tickets.  If I want entertainment, I go to the ballet.  Going to the opera stirs up too much "compare and despair".

My recital program is set.  I am not singing the Vivaldi aria that I mentioned in an earlier post; it would take too long to learn.  But now that I know I love it, I plan to revisit it.  I am going to sing "In Buddy's Eyes" from Follies.  I will substitute my partner's name (which scans perfectly) for "Buddy".  It is a song that has meaning for me.  I may dedicate it (and "Vanilla Ice Cream") to Barbara Cook, who died this week.

My church solo (suggested by the Minister of Music) is taken from the hymnal: "Jesus is a Rock in a Weary Land".  It looks quite simple, but if I interpolate some high notes and some low notes into the second and third verses (stylistically acceptable) I can sing it with my big dramatic voice.

Because I had been working on this spiritual, I was in a "dramatic mezzo" mode (which I can't be when I sing my recital music which is mostly light) so at my last lesson I took a crack at the dreaded page in Aida: "Chi ti salva sciagurato, etc."  I aced the high B flat.  I aced it at home the next day; with my tendancy to sing sharp when I sing a capella, the note was a B natural. I am singing up to a full voiced C every day.  Maybe I can revisit some of that music, or maybe next year I will look at the French grand opera material I had been thinking of doing.  Whatever is going on in my life, I'm a dramatic mezzo and this material is what I am meant to sing.

On Ageism (2)

Almost exactly two years ago I wrote this article and thought that this would be a good time for a second pass.

The "triggering event" was the posting, by an incredibly troubled gay trans man, of a picture of Heidi Klum in a costume, which, silly out of touch me (!), I thought was a real picture of a woman in her late 70s or 80s.  I do not attribute his being "troubled" to his being trans or gay; I only mention these things because here is someone super-sensitive to his own issues, yet totally clueless about the sting of ageism.  (He posted the picture with a comment saying "this is how I feel if people ask me out after 9 pm.)  Quite frankly, it doesn't matter if this was a real picture of an elderly  woman, or not.  I skimmed the Heidi Klum article to see what her rationale was for choosing this costume for Hallowe'en but couldn't find anything other than that she liked to work hard to make costumes realistic (someone is shown painting varicose veins on her legs).  If she had done this as a teachable moment, to teach people about ageism (similarly to slim women who have put on a "fat suit" to highlight that fat people are treated with less respect than slim people) that would have been fine, and I am not judging her, only questioning the taste and sensitivity shown by the person who posted the picture. (I mean long ago people decided it was offensive for white people to dress up in blackface whether those people themselves were actually racist or not.  Ditto posting photographs of white people dressed up in blackface.) I quite frankly don't see any difference here.) I unfriended him.  I am sick of him anyhow.  He is one of the most self-absorbed, narcissistic people I have ever met.  I gave him a pass on all that because of his own struggles, including that his mother died recently (she was younger than I am), but enough is enough.  Grow up!  Despite having unfriended him, I got a comment to my comment by one of his (female) friends that was insulting, childish, full of coarse language, and basically beside the point.  I should pity these children.  God help them if they ever decide to grow up.

I mean I have spent the past nine months caring for a woman in her 80s who may be near death, fighting bureaucracies that would be just as happy if she died, especially now.  I have become knowledgeable about services that are available to seniors (which I may need to avail myself of as well at some point - I am going to be 67).  I have had serious, real, conversations with people about aging.  These are real problems.

After reading the inane offensive commentary of this young man and his friends I feel that I need a bath.  

With that, I will end with paraphrasing a quote from Law and Order's Jack McCoy (in a far darker, uglier context): "I guess there are some people who don't deserve to grow old."  Growing old is a privilege, young pup, not a joke.

Plus ça Change, Plus C'est la Même Chose

This week I had another disappointment.  My voice teacher bailed from our joint concert.  It's not the end of the world: I can do a solo recital.  Unfortunately it won't be all that different from my birthday concert, but I will be removing four numbers and replacing them with others that I like better.  I am going to drop the Jake Heggie/Sister Helen songs because they don't sound good with just a pianist and a singer (there is a major part written for a flute) and are not "enjoyable" to listen to.  I am also dropping the Barbra Streisand song "Evergreen" because I sang it as a nod to "LC" the hateful woman who dumped me cruelly as a friend.  And I am dropping "Et Exsultavit".  I love singing it, but it's better as a church piece.  Instead, I will be singing the "Drinking Song" from Lucrezia Borgia, and will (as of now) be adding "Cruda Sorte" from L'Italiana in Algeri and an aria from Orlando Furioso about love and courage, which I have heard Marilyn Horne sing.  It is a bravura aria with a lot of ornamentation and I have fallen in love with it.  And I will add the song "Ice Cream" from She Loves Me to the section for my partner (although she can't be there), because at this end stage of her life, what she loves most is eating ice cream.  And I will ask the accompanist to play solos in between the sets so I can have a break.  The sets will be pretty much the same as they were last time: Joy, Love, for [my partner's name], and Home.

The disappointment isn't about having to sing a solo recital, it's about what I see as my teacher's priorities.  He said he doesn't want to sing this concert because 1. he has to go out of the country to see family (I am not totally clear about this because by the time he got to talking about this I had stopped listening but I think the reason there is a date conflict  is because his wife's new job won't allow her to take a vacation sooner than that), 2. he is stressed out because his wife is not happy at her job and 3. he is stressed out because of problems in his building.  What made me mad (to revisit old wounds) is that every year he sings at least one, if not two, concerts with his wife and various other singers.  He has never invited me to sing with them and this now has been 8 years during which I have made enormous technical progress, particularly in the past three or so.  Yes, most of the singers sound better than I do, but there is one mezzo who doesn't and last time when they sang as a quartet this was obvious.  She has a pretty voice and has sung a lot of bel canto roles with the pay to sing outfit that my teacher sometimes sings with (he never pays them anything because they always need men) but her voice is very small and certainly I sound as good as she does singing in the sort of range that we would be singing in in this type of recital.  So the excuses are a moving target.  I don't sound good enough, these people all know each other, this particular mezzo is a close friend of his wife's, the decisions are not totally up to him, blah, blah, blah.  Anyhow at my last lesson when he told me he was bailing from the concert, I really just lost it and yelled at him, which I have never done before.  I don't think it did any permanent damage.  The point is that I think it's a teacher's responsibility to try to provide opportunities for his or her students. A number of teachers have studio recitals.  He has never been that sort of teacher.  He's not what they call these days "a pedagogue".  He's a singer who has a gift for explaining vocal technique to people who need to improve theirs.  Most of his students are already singing somewhere (in the past they mostly came from that pay to sing or someplace similar). So I don't plan to go looking for another teacher.  I suppose what I need to do is simply drop the subject unless he starts flogging one of these concerts and trying to invite me.  I have been to a few of them but have never made getting there a priority.  I think I will just pass on them from now on, similarly to how I don't go to any of these small opera company performances either.  I will just mind my own business.  If he starts flogging one of these concerts (I don't think there's one on the  horizon) I will curtly say "Let's talk about something else" or find another "conversation stopper".

I think I'm also feeling cranky because I haven't had a chance to dig into the two new arias or do any of the administrative work I need to do because I have been busy with caregiving tasks, most notably trying to get my partner a hospital bed.  It is supposed to arrive tomorrow and the delivery people won't move her other bed out, so I have to get the super to do it.  I am hoping to get back to my regular practice schedule next week.

I also have to pick a summer solo.  I gave the music director my preferred dates.  He has two books of church solos in his mail box, so I had the admin photocopy the tables of contents.  So when I get a chance I will listen to the pieces on Youtube and try to match them up with the readings for those Sundays.  I am not that theologically literate, but I will give it my best shot.  Otherwise I can let the music director pick something, which he offered to do.

A Blessed Time and Some Thoughts on Pride

My partner is still alive, and is feeling better.  She still eats very little, but seems to enjoy food more than she had been.  She is more alert.  I can have conversations with her.  There was a low point when she refused to eat for almost 24 hours and then slept through the Tonys (something we always loved to watch together), but she is better now.

She had a wonderful 83rd birthday.  In total, 5 people showed up on different days, one with decorations.  She is smiling in all the pictures (I am not comfortable posting one here, although I did post some on Facebook, because the person who took them posted them on her Facebook page).

In a funny way I think I may be happier than I have been in almost a decade.  First, knowing, unambivalently, that my main purpose now is to make the end of a loved one's life happy, I no longer excoriate myself for not having a career or looking for a more interesting and stimulating livelihood.  Qualifying for Social Security helped also.  If I am "retired" the focus is less on what I do or did for a living.  And I don't have to feel resentful that I don't travel.  I just can't do that right now.  I don't have to apologize to the universe for it.

I am still singing, and am singing well.  Sometimes sounds come out that leave me stupefied as in "is that really me??" Of course what I always wished for most of all wasn't just to sing well, but to have the sort of diversified existence that one has when one excels at something, particularly in the arts or academia, which leads to travel, public engagements (performing or speaking), meeting new people, costumes, and the unexpected.

I still regret the past.  Saying I "shouldn't" is really not helpful.  When I say regret what I mean is that almost anything I don't like about my life (that I might have had control over at some point) can be tracked back to bad choices I made beginning in high school.  I am learning that there really were people, even people who were adolescents during that train wreck of an era 1964-1972 who did the right things.  I met a woman recently who mentioned how much she enjoyed going to the World's Fair in 1964.  She was there with a school choir.  I remember my mother dragging me there and my being bored witless and cranky about all the mountains of food everywhere when I was trying to diet.  That was the state I was in 99% of the time  during adolescence, wherever I was, so I generally preferred staying home.  Now I am, I guess, "serving a sentence" at home as a freelance copyeditor.  I didn't appreciate chances to have a wider life when they were offered and available for the taking, so I didn't get to have one.

Yesterday was Pride Day.  How different things are now.  We are less of a subculture (life is less titillating and hush hush) but we are also less angry, even with all the collective societal anger at Trump and what the Republican Party is doing to this country.  I meet lots of Lesbians now who are what I would call "wholesome".  They are not in the closet but they look nice and are comfortable around men.  If I were 25 now I doubt anyone would be telling me that I shouldn't "invest my energy in a patriarchal art form like opera".  Through chance Googling I found out that one of the young singers who sang with the choir, whom I was envious of, is gay!  She just got married.  She is a pretty coloratura soprano.

My Heart is Full of Sadness But Yet My Heart is Full of Joy

My partner is home from the hospital, where she was rushed last week after becoming septic, most likely from a cat bite.  Our cat Darby, whom she adores, and who has slept on her bed throughout the latest phase of her decline, bit her when she kicked him in her sleep because he had been playing with her toes.  Twenty-four hours later she had a fever of 103 and was semi-conscious.  The aide called 911.  She was in the ER for almost 48 hours, then in a bed for the next three days.  They gave her about 10 bags of antibiotics plus some pills to take home.

Despite not having a diagnosis (her heart disease is controlled with medication), she is fading.  Basically, all the symptoms she has are those of someone dying of what used to be called "old age". This article, which I found by doing a Google search, bears this out.  I don't know how long she has left.  No doctor has said that she has six months or less, and that therefore she should be in hospice.  On other other hand, pain is not her problem.  Lack of a life force is.  Here is a list of what is happening now.

1. She never gets out of bed.  She refuses all attempts at physical therapy that involve trying to walk, even though she had been able to do this in March in the nursing home.
2. She eats very little.  Every passing week she eats less.  Now mostly she just drinks Ensure, eats ice cream, and drinks milk and water.  She refuses meals that she once liked. (I have told the aides that if she refuses food she has to have a bottle of Ensure.)
3. She sleeps most of the time.
4. She is confused about the time of day, what day it is, and when I am coming, although she knows me and all other people she has contact with.
5. She has lost interest in most things other than snuggling, her own body, ice cream, and cute programs about animals on tv.
6. Her hands are cold.

I can't be with her all the time but I want to be with her more than I used to.  I have to work 20 hours a week and want to sing (more on that later - that's the "optimism" part) but I don't want her to die without me there.  A friend who has watched several people die said that as the actual time approaches I will know.  Then I will take both cats (I couldn't bring Darby back to her house when she came back from the hospital) to her house along with all my blood pressure medicines and just stay there.  I stayed with my mother when I thought she was dying, which was 48 hours before she died.

I don't think she is suffering.

As for the optimism, it is ironic that I keep singing better and better (my voice keeps getting bigger and the high - and low - notes keep getting easier) but am no longer interested in all that heavy 19th Century Italian music.

My teacher and I are going to put on a concert on October 1.  As the piano where it will be is out of tune (or was last year) we are not doing a lot of opera anyhow.  We were going to do the duet from La Gioconda but he said he feels that it is too high for him now, so we will do the duet from Samson et Dalila that precedes "Mon Coeur" and then I will just sing "Mon Coeur".

We also talked about some mezzo and baritone duets from the French repertoire.  I might enjoy doing those so we might do a Shakespeare-themed concert next Spring.  I would love to do the duet with Gertrude and Hamlet from the Ambroise Thomas opera and then we might do the Henry VIII-Anne Boleyn duet from Saint Saens' Henry VIII, which is based on the Shakespeare play.  And we could end with something from West Side Story.

So life goes on.....

Obit

Sadly, I have to report that the man I referenced here has now died.

I have so many mixed feelings.

Why him and not me?  How did he live such that his life had so many blessings?  Talent well used, an ability to form healthy relationships, home-making skills.

I have none of those things and I am still here.  I didn't know whether to beam, cry, or rage with envy when I read his wife's FB tribute. I don't want to recap it all here, as it went into a great deal of detail and also I want to respect their privacy.  But this struck a note.

We encouraged each other and complimented each other. We had very different brains, talents and character defects, but we genuinely loved and respected each other.

A lot of this is relevant because I am shepherding someone through the end of life.  Of course much is different.  He was a man in his 50s who was dying of a terminal illness and was in hospice.  My partner is going to be 83 next month and is bedridden but not "ill".  Whatever else I complain about, I feel blessed to have this time with her.

Did we encourage each other?  Probably no.  We clung to each other and she, particularly, felt   threatened by any venturing forth on the part of the other.  I had to fight, literally, like a tiger, for any scrap of independence I had.  Now it's easier because she's too out of it to make demands.  She can't tell me "you can't go to the Met unless you go with me" because she doesn't go anywhere.  So yes, I will go out with friends.  She has accepted that I must sing, not just in church.

And yet we have always loved each other, passionately and desperately.  My greatest joy in life is to lie curled up by her side watching tv, or to hold her little hand.

I suppose the man who died, and his wife, were just enough younger than me (and the fact that this was his third marriage, and they both came to it as people, not children says something) that he was able to have a relationship with less teenage (or less 1950s/1960s) baggage. You know - stand by your man (or your butch beau) and the worse he treats you the more brownie points you get, because of course, life is supposed to be like a rock song - or an opera.  I partnered when I was an age that is now not even considered adult (25) during a decade when the most important thing for a woman was to "please" a partner, not to be a person. Now people develop selves first, partner later.

And of course I always envied how proud he was of his daughter, as I wrote several years ago. Another example of a healthy relationship. My mother was never proud of me that way: she alternated between mercilessly criticizing me and taking any of my accomplishments (certainly if they involved writing) to be her own.

I have spent the past, God knows, 8 years (since I left the full-time work force) trying to make a rich, vibrant, fulfilling life for myself and not much has come of it.  Something has come of it, yes.  I keep singing better and better.  I realize I will never do anything I even like for a living, but that I can do many things that I like. I can write. I have discovered that I enjoy helping children with language skills. I can live on very little money.  I don't have to travel.  I don't have the money or the energy to turn this overstuffed British spinster style studio apartment into a "middle class home" (read shovel everything out, even temporarily, and have the floors sanded and waxed and the walls painted, not to mention keeping the dining table looking like a dining table instead of a place to keep my electronic keyboard) but I try to say that this does not mean that I have "failed" at being an adult.

Love is love whether you share erudite conversation at a dinner table with a tablecloth or hunker down in front of the tv with sandwiches on paper plates.  I don't believe this man's widow loved him any more than I love my partner because they lived in nice surroundings and spoke to each other like adult friends instead of  like squabbling teenagers madly in love who don't get along.

Most precious of all was the fact that his last words to her were "I love you".  If I can have that too, that is really all I have a right to ask for.

Just an Update

I called Amsterdam House (the nursing home where my partner had been, which has a beautiful room with a piano) and they said they were totally booked for concerts in 2017.  I said I would like to book something for the Spring of 2018.  They said that they weren't taking bookings yet - to wait until the Fall, then call, although the man who coordinates all this took my phone number.

When I told my teacher, he said, no, I shouldn't wait that long, that I should call the nursing home where I put on my birthday concert.  I was hesitant to do that because the piano was out of tune, but my teacher said it didn't really matter.  He had been to that concert and hadn't been disturbed by the piano.  So I emailed them and now have a date to sing on October 1.  I will use my birthday concert as a template, but will remove some pieces so that my teacher and I can sing a duet and he can sing an aria and a few songs.

I can't believe I am saying this, but finally after 12 years, I am bored with both the "Habanera" and "Mon Coeur".  I am going to sing the "Drinking Song" from Lucrezia Borgia.  My teacher and I will sing the love duet from La Gioconda.  The last time I sang that was with The Mentor.  The point here is to focus on material that is upbeat.  I will of course sing "Let Me Call You Sweetheart", "I Dreamt I Dwelt" and "Home Sweet Home".  We will then decide the rest.

I can't believe I am saying this either, but I think I've reached the point where I'm bored by the heavy Verdi and verismo pieces.  I am just not in the mood for anything heavy right now.  My teacher said this is because my life has been sad and stressful.  This does not mean, however, that I am going into vocal retreat!!  My upper register continues to be easier and easier (although my teacher said I don't need to vocalize above a B most of the time) and I intend to tackle some new difficult pieces ("Tanti Affetti" from Donna del Lago comes to mind) just to see if I can do them.  That has numerous B flats but most of them are in elaborate coloratura passages which is something I am good at.

We are almost out of the woods with my partner and her health issues.  We are settled with the managed care company.  She will continue to have 24/7 home care, but not the split shifts.  It will be three different people sleeping in.  We will have two of the people we already have, and then will have to find someone new for Tuesday-Thursday because the woman who has been with my partner in the daytime on those days does not want to sleep in.  There are still problems with her landlord not accepting the checks I write on the Supplemental Needs Trust bank account but I think those may be on the way to being settled.

Now I am off to sing an 8 part "country" piece to welcome our new pastor.  I am a little nervous because it will be my first time singing the second soprano part with the first soprano part.

Holy Week Wrap Up

This year's Holy Week went pretty well for me.

I had a solo on Maundy Thursday, "Qui Sedes ad Dextram Patris" from the Bach B Minor Mass.  The church sexton made a cell phone video of it.  He does a terrific job with these.  A few weeks ago he made one of the choir singing a piece for Palm Sunday. This is probably the best video I have of myself singing because he shot me facing front instead of in profile.  I look much better head on than in profile. Also because the piece was in a lower register and I was not nervous about my support and did not have to constantly think about vocal technique, I looked more composed.

On Good Friday the choir sang a variety of different pieces using the text of Jesus's last words, by Bach, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Franck, Gounod, and others.  I sang the alto line in a solo quartet that was part of the Haydn piece.  I thought overall the service went well.  I always find it very moving to participate in this service even though I am not Christian.  It is a magical piece of sacred theater and you won't find anything that gripping in a UU church, I can tell you.

Easter Sunday we sang an anthem and the "Hallelujah Chorus".  I think the soprano part in the "Hallelujah Chorus" is absolutely the hardest thing I ever have to sing; much harder than "Rejoice Greatly".  Anyhow, this time I bailed and sang the alto part because we sang it at the end of the service rather than at the beginning and by then I was too tired to sing the soprano part.  It meant I would have had to sing it after being "shabbas goy" for all the communion hymns.  If I have to sing a difficult soprano part I usually don't sing the hymns but I have to sing the communion hymns (which usually come after the anthem) because the choir people don't sing if they're taking communion (or even afterwards).  I did find the alto part easier to sing than in the past because that lower middle part of my voice that goes through the passaggio is stronger than it used to be.  I just don't want to be stuck in the alto section permanently (that's why I'm happy we sing pieces with divisi so I can sing second soprano) not because I don't like singing low, but because alto parts have a much shorter range than soprano parts.  Some soprano parts go low, but alto parts never go high.  So it's like going to a gym and only exercising half my body.

In other news, today a nurse from a managed long-term care company came to interview me and my partner.  She is now approved for 24 hour care, but it will be sleep in care.  That is fine, the only problem is that it means we will lose the aides we have because they work split shifts and I don't think the day people (whom we really like) are available for sleep in.

I also am nervous because we were told originally that our arrangement with the city ends April 30, but now we are told that the arrangement with the managed care company won't start until June 1.  My partner can't be left in the lurch for a whole month and there is not money to pay anyone.

Pre-Obit

And I hope the real obit doesn't have to be written for a long time.

I just found out that someone I have known online for over a decade (and hence know quite a bit about) has inoperable cancer and is in a hospice setup in his home.

My relationship with this man has been unusual.  The most important thing in all this is that he was the person responsible for my deciding to look for a Lutheran church to sing in.  He has been a choir director (a rather snooty one - we have had our arguments over my being offended by some of his disparaging comments about amateur choirs, not to mention my sense that he would never have considered me good enough to sing in one of his paid choirs), and, therefore, over a decade ago now, I asked him where to find a choir that might be interested in me.

After I left the Unitarian church where I was "discovered" (I needed to get away from The Mentor and anyhow they had scrapped most of the classical music) I tried auditioning for the only Unitarian church that does have classical music, which rejected me because I did not know how to sing "straight tone".  I also do not sightread very well although I managed to pass their sight reading test.

My friend suggested that I might have better luck with Lutheran choirs.  That they preferred bigger voices, did not sing much of a repertoire requiring straight tone, and, as most of them were all volunteer, did not expect people to sightread perfectly.

Which is how I ended up where I am.

Over the past decade I have followed this man's life through Facebook posts and a blog community I used to belong to, and was aware that he was one of the myriad people I know (in real life or not) who had three things that I have always longed for and will probably never have: a successful career in music (I'd actually be happy to have had a successful career in anything), a spouse (he's had several) who was a partner and helpmeet rather than the high-maintenance "project" that my loved one has always been, and a nice "grownup" looking living space.

As I felt with the voice coach I referenced here http://babydramatic.blogspot.com/2014/08/in-memoriam.html ,  here is a person with everything to live for, so why is he leaving us (whenever that may be) and I am still here?  I suppose I am still here because my partner needs me.  I have no family, did nothing to "write home about" with any of my talents, and have few close friends.

I remember once this man wrote to me about how much he admired me for something (it was something private, so I don't want to write about it here) and I was absolutely nonplussed.  This is something that  I did over 40 years ago, that I basically take for granted.  I may have thought of it as something to admire in the early subsequent years, but certainly not now.  It didn't garner me much.  Whatever I did after that watershed was basically too little too late.

I doubt that man will read this, but if he does, I want him to know that he is in my prayers.

In other news, we are approaching the final (!) hurdle with my partner's care.  A nurse came from the city and certified her for 24/7 care (she was given a score of 23 out of 32, the higher the number, the more care you need).  Now we just have to wait for a nurse from a long-term managed care company (we have selected which one) to see her and complete the paperwork.  We are not out of the woods yet and I am still nervous because our current setup expires April 30.

And finally, a bit of naval gazing (if I now have time for that again, things must be better in an odd way).  I realized that the demographic I am most envious of are the Gen Xrs.  Not Millennials - I see a lot of them having a very hard time.  Of course I am speaking of white, middle class-born women.  These women married later, were choosier about partners, expected to have careers, and got along with their parents for the most part.  I had said in the past that I felt that these women were more apt to put education and careers before relationships and marry for money (or at least with the income of the partner being a factor), but really I think the two things these women always had that women of my generation didn't was being in an environment where being smart and doing well in school was "cool", and believing that adults (particularly their parents) were a support system that it was OK to use, not "the enemy".  Of course I (and many women I know who are my age) made a mess of things.  We alienated ourselves from adults and latched onto the first sexual partner we could find as a support system instead.

Thinking about the man who is dying, I of course contemplate my own mortality.  I hope I don't die before I do something big with one or more of my talents, which I certainly have not done up to this point.  Maybe my partner and I will die together holding hands and what I did or didn't achieve won't matter.  That would be nice.

I'm Still Here

I am not sure where things left off...

My partner is now home.  She has a rota of aides from an agency, paid for by Medicaid.  They are all experienced and take good care of her.

Somewhere during the time she was in the nursing home in Queens my laptop died.  I now have a new one but it took 10 days to get someone to come to the house to set it up.  I am still fumbling a bit with the new touch pad, and had a few glitches (I was told that they are common glitches in the new version of Windows 10), but now know (I think) how to handle them.

I need to make work a priority for the rest of March.

I still managed to practice every day.  I am singing "Qui Sedes ad Dextram Patris" from the Bach B Minor Mass on Maundy Thursday and will have the alto solo line in a piece by Haydn (which I have not seen) for Good Friday.

I have let my opera repertoire lapse, except for singing through the Enzo and Laura duet from Gioconda because if I do a concert with my teacher (it will be based on the material from my birthday concert with some additions and deletions) that would be a nice upbeat bit of opera to include.

I vocalize up to a high C several times a week and my technical progress has held.

Right now the most important thing is making the end of my partner's life as happy as possible.  Devoting oneself to a human life rather than a career or other personal goals does not make one a loser and it does not matter whether the person "deserves" this or not.  That is my bit of wisdom for 2017.  Why shouldn't I devote my time to caring for her?  As long as I can do some singing and enough editing to supplement my Social Security.  It is unlikely that I would devote myself to trying to have an "encore career" (in the sense of finding something to doooo for a living that I just loooove) whether I were taking care of her or not, so maybe it is time to stop beating myself with that.  There are many things I love to do, so I can just treat working for a living as a necessary evil (as generations did before me) and move on.

I probably won't write as much as I used to.  Regardless of how many hardships I have had lately, I am a lot less bored and hence have a lot less "existential distress".

Miles to Go Still: But Maybe Some Music in the Future

My partner now has Medicaid (it's what's called "Community Medicaid") however no nurse assessment has been forthcoming.

I used up almost all her discretionary income paying the private aide and then raised $2000 on GoFundMe which paid for the last 8 days (she is currently in a nursing home in Queens).  I was tearfully astounded at how many people contributed to the campaign.  This touches on my seemingly contradictory statements that I have no close friends but do have a social life (someone accused me of "arguing" when I said both those things at different times and I was quite surprised that she did not understand that "close friends" and "a social life" are not synonymous).

So many people (I know) do care about me and are able to provide sympathy, advice (if I want it), a hug, even money, but no one has time.  I am not a priority with anyone.  I have no "in case of emergency please notify".  Everyone is busy with their jobs, family, family-related travel, or travel for pleasure.  A point of comparison is that over 20 people gave money to the campaign, but only two people provided helping hands, and this over a period of now five months.

How things got to where they are now, is that my partner began acting oddly (the aide said she had Alzheimers) and was very listless, so we had a doctor come to the house and he said she needed to go to the ER.  She was discharged after 48 hours and not formally admitted, so she could not go back to the nursing home on the Upper West Side where she had been.  They wanted to send her home, despite her lack of money for home care, but I screamed and sobbed, so finally they found a spot for her in a nursing home in Queens.  Yesterday I heard from the home care agency.  I hope they come evaluate her and she can come home with help.  She can't stay in the nursing home in Queens (it takes me two hours to get there and two hours to get back, and there's noplace to buy anything decent for lunch) and anyhow, she can't transition onto "nursing home Medicaid" yet (I don't want to say too much about that in a public blog).  My long-term plan is for her to go home, and then if she has another medical crisis, for me to find a way to get her back into the nursing home on the Upper West Side.  I think she realizes that she won't be able to be home forever.

As for singing, well, I had to miss choir rehearsal last Thursday because that was when she was being transferred to Queens.  But I do practice every day, even if it's just for a half hour.  My upper register that I've fought so hard for is still there.  I am probably singing the soprano part in "Glory of the Lord" from the Messiah, which we are doing in two weeks.

I have one or two tentative solos for Lent/Holy Week.  One thing I like about this new Minister of Music is that he contacts all the soloists ahead of each season with available dates and asks us each to pick one or two choices.  That feels better than having the onus always on me.  I said my first choice was singing "Qui Sedes al Dextram Patris" on Maundy Thursday, otherwise I said I would sing on April 2 at 11 when there doesn't seem to be anything scheduled.  Based on the reading for that service, I thought I could sing "Patiently I Have Waited for the Lord" from the Saint Saens Christmas Oratorio.  It's not Christmassy at all.  And speaking of Saint Saens, one little known opera that I have always loved is Henry VIII.  The role of Anne Boleyn is for a heavy lyric or a dramatic mezzo and she has a gorgeous aria.  It has a sustained high B flat, but I think I could sing that now.  And I was able to download the score for free!  I still have not felt like making concert plans; I want to have something settled about my partner's care, but I will do that eventually.

Don't Worry; It Gets Worse

Nothing is happening on the Medicaid front.  Or rather, things are creeping along.  Will her money outlast this dawdling?  I have no idea.  Money is still hemorrhaging out paying for the private aide.  The nursing home screwed up the paperwork yet again.  The Medicaid Group that is helping us wants more money.  The money that was supposed to come from Texas on the 24th did not come.  (I called the bank manager and she is looking into it; the money comes from rents from a farm that my partner and some of her relatives own). I told the CEO of the Medicaid group that I would make a partial payment but not a complete final payment.  She is very nice and seemed to be OK with that.  My partner is confused.  OK, so she meets the textbook definition of compos mentis but she certainly can't wrap her head around all these financial intricacies and what's possible and what isn't. (We are going to try to get her free help from the city until the application is approved.)

And then there's Trump.  Everything he has done is so fascistic there are no words.  Other people seem to be able to discourse about these things better than I can, even though everyone always thought I was smart and I am good with words.  Most of my friends across the country went to the women's march.  I didn't.  I thought my place was with my partner, taking care of her.  Particularly if there was even a .02 percent chance I might be in harm's way.  I have no idea if these marches will accomplish anything.  What frightens me the most about Trump isn't even his assault on healthcare, but his assault on journalists and scientists.  If truth-tellers are muzzled, what kind of country are we living in?  I can't believe that Congress, even a Republican Congress, can support these things.

So am I singing.  Yes, I try to practice every day.  My upper register keeps getting more secure although when I went over the Amneris/Radames duet at my lesson on Tuesday the first high B flat sounded straight and strident.  Subsequent ones sounded better but of course the acid test is how the phrase sounds after singing the entire scene.  I don't think I want to sing it in public right now, which is fine.

I spoke to my teacher about planning a concert at the nursing home where my partner was.  I should certainly be out of the woods with all this by May.  I think I will do a variant of my birthday concert, taking out some of the numbers I didn't care for all that much and substituting them with some solos for my teacher and maybe one duet from an opera.  I do want to sing "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" and "Home Sweet Home", two simple songs that I have a very powerful emotional connection with.

Choir rehearsal last night was a dud.  We were working on a spiritual with a high soprano part.  I certainly could have sung it - or not.  The choir director asked most of the second sopranos to sing the alto part instead and asked the altos to sing the tenor part.  There are very few men, and there was a split bass part, so he split that between the tenors and basses.  I don't care what part I sing, really, if it's in the interests of the piece as a whole, but I really resent being told which part I would find more "comfortable".  No, I do not find it more comfortable to sing a part that sits around the E at the bottom of the staff.  That takes a lot of finesse, moving in and out of chest voice.  This is an important skill for this mezzo to have, so that's fine.  It was his use of the word "comfortable" that really teed me off.  How does he know what is or isn't comfortable for me to sing?  Like most dramatic mezzos, when I sound like I'm pushing my voice and screaming is when I am singing with the least tension and get the least tired.  I would have had no problem if the choir director had said that he wanted X vocal color on the top line, not Y vocal color.  That's an artistic decision which is fine.  Also I think I would have been less angry if there had been some of the trained high sopranos there.  But what he did was have one second soprano (who does have high notes, just a bit straight-toney) sing up there and then one of the other second sopranos (the only person I can think of in the choir who can barely carry a tune and can't even make it up to a G!) asked if she could "try" to sing the top part and he said yes.  As I said, I don't mind being told that my vocal palette is not right for a particular piece of music or part, but I really resent being told I need to take the easy route, like someone who is less skilled.

Maybe it's time for me to start planning another concert.