Of course I need to start with the Sweet; to quote Stephanie Ruhle "Who doesn't like good news, right?"
My life is sweet. I am enjoying Christmas. I bought both my partner and myself a small Christmas tree.
I have learned to enjoy Christmas. If I consider myself a Unitarian theologically, I can celebrate any holiday I like. Also, my therapist told me something interesting. She said that probably the reason my mother always had a Christmas tree (and loved Christmas) despite considering herself a secular Jew was that in Germany before the Holocaust, most Jews (who were not Orthodox) celebrated Christmas. It was considered a German holiday, much as Thanksgiving is considered an American one. My maternal grandfather came from Austria-Hungary. My maternal grandmother's family had been in Philadelphia for generations and most likely originally came from Germany in 1848.
I have a solo. On Christmas Eve I will get to sing lovely music with the choir. I am surrounded by beauty.
My voice seems to be back on track. "O Mio Fernando" is back in my voice. Right now I'm not sure where I'd sing it; maybe I can swap it with "Mon Coeur" in one of my nursing home concerts. If I do the 30 minute demo concert that I had discussed with the recreation director at a new residence, I would use "The Drinking Song" as my aria because it's bouncy and "party-ish".
As for future church plans, I was speaking with the new dramatic soprano in the choir. and we may do a duet together next year. (For whatever reason, I don't feel envious about her the way I did about "Little Miss"; probably because she's older, much more modest, and does not want to use church as an arena for showing off. She helps with the choir or sings a solo when asked, period.) Anyhow she mentioned to me that she had made a recording of "Inflammatus" from the Rossini Stabat Mater and so I told her that I had sung "Fac ut Portem" at church several years ago. I mentioned that there is a duet in Stabat Mater and that maybe we could sing it during Holy Week 2019. I will take a look at it and when the time is appropriate, see if the Music Director could find a spot for it. She seemed to be interested.
As for the Bitter.
Last night our chamber music series featured a one act opera that starred a mezzo whom I had been in one of those meetups with long ago. (I didn't go to it; I said I would be tired after teaching all afternoon, but I suppose in addition I didn't think seeing this particular woman would be all that great for my resolve to love my life and mind my own business.) In retrospect, I can say that what I learned from those meetups was that they were for people like her not for people like me. At the time she was very young and just doing audition rounds. I was struggling with my large unwieldy voice and my nerves. She was probably in her 20s. I was about 58. Now, 10 years later (I looked at her resume) she has not only received acclaim for her world premieres, she seems to have an extensive resume of roles from Rossini to Wagner, both soprano and mezzo, and to top it all off she is no bigger than a size 8!! (I know this not just by looking at her picture but because the stage manager was trying to find the right kind of skirt for her to wear in the performance.) Digging deeper (boy am I a glutton for punishment!) I read that she grew up with musician parents and spent every summer at a prestigious music festival, beginning with the age of four (sounds like the children of my choir director and his wife). So this is my "competition". Not for roles - I don't have that much hubris!! - but for attention, for getting to perform in free spaces, for audiences. And people like her are everywhere. And with each year that my singing technique improves, these people multiply and, say, go from A to M in the time it has taken me to get from A to D and I am between 30 and 40 years older than they are and time is running out!! So again, it's really an issue of struggling to make myself believe that I matter.
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