The Return of Old Hurts, and My Take on "Little Women"

Well, it seems I am in a writing mode again, although I have not felt like revisiting my memoir.

I thought I was "done" with a lot of the old hurts that I used to write about, but I just found out that once again my teacher is helming a concert with his opera cronies and I am not in it.  I am done having an argument with him about this. He will just throw out one excuse after another.  I think he began agreeing to participate in nursing home concerts with me because at one point I made noises about leaving him so I could study with a teacher who put on "studio recitals".  Then at least I would have something.

Sadly, if I know how to leave "well enough alone", he doesn't.  His wife sent me an email about their concert which went out to a large email list of "family and friends".  I couldn't help but notice that when she tells people about my concerts with her husband, it's only a few choice people.

Anyhow, when I went for my lesson yesterday I didn't mention the email but when we were done singing my teacher did.  So I told him that first, I am not free on Saturdays, and second, that since I resented not being asked to participate, I wouldn't come anyhow.  Then he said he knew that.  So why did he bring the bleeping subject up???

As I mentioned in my previous post, my anger and sadness about not being able to break into the world of the no-pay opera companies has mostly receded.  Partly because of age, as I said.  All I really want is to do solo singing in front of an audience, wear something glamorous, and eat up the limelight.  So I can do that.  Of course it's not all a walk in the park.  If I want those things, I have to work hard, which I do.  And really church people are a lot nicer than opera people.  Interestingly, my teacher and his wife seem to have made a friendly social life in that milieu but I never found those types of classical singers to be a nice bunch. 

As to the second subject of this post (I guess it's a "twofer") I got to thinking about Little Women again because of the new movie that has come out.  Interestingly, the first chapter of my memoir is partly about my relationship to Little Women and how my mother was bemused by the fact that I did not identify with Jo.  "Don't all brainy women see themselves as Jo?" she would ask.  Well, first, at 11 or 12 I hardly saw myself as a "brainy woman".  I liked to read fiction, but what I liked most was playing the piano and trying new lipstick shades.  As for Jo being an "independent woman", well, in 1962 that was not as anomalous as it was in 1862. Most of the young women in their 20s whom I knew worked after they graduated from college.  Many eventually married and some stayed home (my mother did that and in fact considered being able to stay home a "privilege") but reading and writing was a calling or a job, not a "lifestyle".  I just realized recently that it was probably from reading Little Women and modeling herself on Jo that my mother bought into the trope that "brainy women", women who read and write, don't care about their appearance.  I remember her once talking about a close friend and saying "Well Hattie obviously doesn't take herself seriously as an intelligent woman because she dyes her hair."  To all these points, growing up I certainly didn't see Jo as "rebellious".  She was just like all the "politically correct" women I knew over the years who were always scolding other women for primping, or buying products that they shouldn't.  I mean selling her hair for a greater good? How goody two shoes can you get?  I mean I think it was a noble sacrifice, but it certainly doesn't fit my definition of "rebellious".

My role model as a 13 year old was Kim Novak's Moll Flanders (and after seeing the movie, I read the book). She looked just like me for one thing (at 13 I was five foot six, weighed 155 pounds, wore a bra size 36D, and despite all that extra weight had a tiny waist). Katharine Hepburn I was definitely not.  Recently, I saw the PBS Little Women and decided that if I had to identify with one of the girls it would be Amy.  She took herself seriously as a painter and loved pretty clothes, primping, material comfort, and flirting.

Of course I don't think my mother wanted me to grow up to be a literary spinster like Louisa May Alcott.  At the end of Little Women, Jo marries a professor many years her senior.  My mother did likewise.  Was it because she saw herself as Jo, I wonder? Jo loved the professor because he engaged with her writing (even if only to criticize it) not her femininity.

Ironically, I grew up to be a Lesbian who paired off with a butch who loved me for my beauty (in her eyes) and sweetness. When she could afford it she bought me flowers and jewelry.

Second Recital and Some Random Thoughts

The second recital went well.  The setting was less formal than that in the other nursing home and senior centers where I've sung, but that was OK.  Most of the "noise" came from the area near the front door of the facility.  The people in the room (including a girl who looked about 8 or 9) were very quiet.

I felt as if I sang better than before, but as there won't be any videos, I can't be sure. 

I like the new accompanist.  He is a wonderful musician and very supportive.  I will probably stay with my primary accompanist as a first choice (he charges less and lives in a more convenient location, for one thing) but it's good to have a backup.  Of course I had a tiny "ouch" moment when he said he would like to come back there and play because a setting like that is "a good place to try out" repertoire that he is going to be playing in a more formal setting.  This made me wince because it is precisely that phenomenon that has shut me out of so many of even the humblest venues. The most blatant example to me is "Sing-Through Central" (a chance to sing operas from a book with other people, for a coaching fee) which is used by professionals and emergings to learn or test-drive roles, when an outfit like that should really be for amateur "living room singers" like me who want a chance to do something they love that they will never be able to do anywhere else. Will all the "outreach" venues go that route, I wonder? 

But I can't think that way.  I am now getting back into gear to find a new place to sing. I guess singing for seniors is my "niche".  I have an affinity for the elderly, partly because I take care of one, and doing this is a chance to "give back" (although I don't really see it that way as it's my only chance to sing for an audience other than church, not something I do out of the goodness of my heart despite other opportunities beckoning) and a low-stress setting in which I can sing whatever I want to, more or less.  And I refuse to think of what I'm doing as "second best" any more than I would ever think I've settled for "second best" because the charming, funny, sweet, romantic love of my life turned out to be someone bone idle and totally unable to manage time, money, or a living space.  And now she's a frail senior.  Which makes it easier because a frail senior by definition no longer can manage those things, so I no longer resent doing them for her.  I can't see myself as a failure because neither I nor my spouse was ever an "upper-middle class professional".  Our minister said something interesting in last Sunday's sermon.  She said we as a society shouldn't only value people according to their ability to be "productive".  That the "endless cycle of producing and consuming" is not what life is about.

Speaking of church, my voice keeps getting higher and I am more and more comfortable singing even a high soprano part if the alternative is a low alto part, or in any event, one that has such a minimal "arc" that I can't get my voice to do what it does best: make a big beautiful sound somewhere between the middle and the top of the staff.  We sang the final chorus from Elijah, and the compromise was that the second sopranos sang soprano until we got to the little chunks of music where the sopranos were singing a high A at which point we sang with the altos.  Of course I got completely lost.  I wouldn't have if I had had time to rehearse, which I hadn't.  I am not a natural harmonizer, don't sightread, and know nothing about music theory, so unless I am singing the top part (which is all I hear if I listen to any kind of recording) I have to drill my part over and over, singing "against" a recording with the volume turned way up.  I probably should have just stuck with the soprano part and might even have been able to sing the high As.  At this point I am not only "reaching" but blossoming on B flats, B naturals, even the occasional C, when I vocalize.  Next week we are singing a tiny snippet of Bernstein's Mass.  The sopranos have four piano/pianissimo high As, which I can definitely sing because there is a big break before each set of two. 

As for the "random thoughts", I posted an article on Facebook about all the downsides to marijuana use.  Yes, I begrudgingly (very begrudgingly) support legalizing recreational use if only so that young people of color don't end up with a criminal record for being caught smoking it or carrying it, but I am dubious.  Social drinking is one thing; it can be considered part of fine dining.  But the only reason for nonmedical use of marijuana is to get "high" or "stoned" and to me that is such a waste of human potential (ditto for drinking to get drunk or "wasted") that why make it easier for people.  The people who will go hog-wild with it will mostly be under 25, which is the time period when young people need to be alert and at their best so that they can make plans about their future and carry these out.  I know that the tragedy of my life isn't that I drank alcoholically and abused diet pills (I was never much of a marijuana smoker - I didn't like the way it made me feel; never mind that it made me hungry which was a deal breaker) but that I did it during the years between 18 and 25 when I could have been going to college, exploring extracurricular activities, making connections with people that could last a lifetime, and charting a course through adulthood.  And I saw this with a great many of my peers.  And some of them ended up dead, in prison, or permanently psychotic from taking LSD or even smoking hashish.  Scrambling to earn a living and get a college degree at night between the ages of 27 and 40 did not allow me to accrue any of the advantages that young people are accruing today beginning in high school (at which point in my life I was so deep in an eating disorder that I might as well have been out of it on drugs).  Theater kids?  Did that concept even exist when I was growing up?  That's who I'm competing with if I want to perform somewhere.  The conservatory kids and theater kids who are now in their 30s, even 40s.  Even the ones who never made a profession out of performing have that to draw on when all I have is a lovely voice and a good ear.  And the nonperforming young people were deep into summer immersion programs when they were as young as 12 or 13.  Those things stay with you.   Which brings me back to my original point about marijuana.  Smoking it when you're young and impressionable (a phase that neuropsychology believes lasts until the age of 25) is like deliberately saddling yourself with a handicap.  The world is a harsh, difficult, treacherous, and competitive enough place to navigate.  Why make it harder for yourself?  If I remember and repeat to myself daily any slogan from AA it's "There's no situation so bad that drinking won't make it worse."   Yes, there's no situation so hard that doing it stoned (or hung over) won't make it harder.

Why I've Permanently Left the UU Church

As the daughter of two atheists (one a secular Jew) who was nonetheless raised in a "WASPy" enclave where, churchgoing or not, people not strongly aligned with a minority religion lived with a "Christian assumption" (meaning we celebrated Christmas and Easter in some fashion), who found a compromise as a teenager by singing in a Unitarian church , and who now is happily ensconced in a Lutheran church as a musician and quasi-member, I am constantly having to explain myself theologically.

I am not a full member of this Lutheran church because I am not baptized (and the idea of submitting to that makes me uncomfortable) so I don't take communion.  For years I sat in the choir stall singing the communion hymn, often as a solo, and laughingly referred to myself as the "Shabbas goy" (of course in reverse). Lately I have not had to do that because our new pastor always announces (after explaining that there is grape juice as well as wine, and gluten free bread if it is wanted) "if you don't want to partake you can cross your arms and come up to receive a blessing", which I do.

Many people at that church think I'm a religiously observant Jew (there are a handful of such who are at the church, mostly as musicians, but one is the husband of a congregant) and will in a well-meaning way wish me a Happy Passover, or expect me to understand religious names for parts of the Torah.

If I get caught up in a serious conversation with anyone about these things, I explain that I am culturally Jewish but not theologically Jewish.  And then I say that theologically I consider myself a Unitarian.  (I don't like the term "UU").

When I say that what I mean, loosely, is: I believe that God is one thing, whether you're Christian, Jewish, Pagan, Muslim, Buddhist, or something else; I believe that Jesus was an important humanitarian but not divine, and I do not call him Christ; and I believe in the "inherent worth and dignity of every human being".  I don't believe in the Resurrection.  I see it as a metaphor.  (Interestingly, the pastors at my Lutheran church believe that Hell is a metaphor - and that Genesis is a poem - but still stand by the Resurrection.)  I am agnostic about the afterlife.  As I am with someone who will be 84 next month, and may lose her in the not-too-distant future, I like to hope that she will go to some sort of "Heaven", probably out above the Marginal Way where both of us want our ashes scattered.  And when my mother died, despite having been an atheist all her life, she looked happy, as if she was going somewhere she wanted to be going, and I heard her talking to the people who had gone before.

So, readers might ask, why not attend Unitarian services?  As I have written over and over in these pages, my voice was "discovered" at my local UU church when I was 54, by a charismatic (and later toxic) figure whom I often call "Svengali".  There was a sorta kinda classical music program, meaning that the choir sang classical music a few times a year and the handful of classical soloists (now including me) sang solos.  After a year or so, the choir director was fired (for a number of reasons) and all the classical music was scrapped.  And has never returned despite the fact that the church has had several music directors since then (this was 2005) and now has a new minister as well.

So OK.  There's a lot of music that's not "classical" that I am OK with hearing in a church: gospel, contemporary Christian music, Appalachian hymns, African-American spirituals (although I prefer these when they're arranged for classical voices), even liturgical jazz.  And in fact our choir (whch is known for its Bach and Mendelssohn) has sung all of those.  But what has happened at the UU church with regard to nonclassical music is quite different.  They still have their head in the 60s and among their favorite selections are songs by Bob Dylan and John Lennon.

If I haven't said it enough here, probably the years that destroyed me and put me behind the 8 ball forever (and I will be 68 soon) was the period from 1964 to 1972, the heyday of all that "stuff".  I can't bear to listen to it, certainly not in a church, which I see as in some ways a link to old traditions.  (My Lutheran church seems to have it right: it links to the past in [most of] its music, and in its rituals, and it is firmly planted in the present in its engagement with issues of today.)

To be clear, I have been happy lately and have not wanted to dwell on negative things (although any time I get a "trigger" back to "the Sixties" I silently rage and weep for the girl who could have been - an opera singer, an academic, a lawyer?), but this post was prompted by an invitation I got from a member of my old UU church to something called "Sacred Sounds and Settings".  I took a look at it (this church is in a beautiful building and could host some marvelous sacred sounds) and saw that it was going to feature music by Leonard Cohen, Bobby McFerrin, The Indigo Girls, Sly and the Family Stone.  Except for Bobby McFerrin and possibly the "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen, I don't think any of the foregoing belongs in a church.  Sly and the Family Stone??? That's disco (drug) music!  (Oh, and I see the choir is now called a "casual choir".) How trendy and what a great way to pander to aging hippies.  (If the church wants to attract young people, I have news for you.  Young people are interested in many different aesthetics, not just that of the Sixties rebellions.)  I didn't want to offend the woman who sent this to me, but I felt like checking the box "not interested".  But that wouldn't even begin to cover it.  Quite frankly I would rather have a root canal, and to me, anyhow, listening to a "concert" in a church featuring disco music seems blasphemous and I'm not a right-wing Christian!!

On a seemingly unrelated topic, our new pastor (speaking out against the racism of many white Evangelicals) said that the problem with many Christian churches is that they care more about the "culture" than about the gospel.  Now I know she was talking about white red state American culture, which does not resonate with me (in fact, as a third generation New Yorker, I've had almost no contact with it).  But might it be possible that I am really attracted to "church" because of the culture? (Not white American culture, obviously, but the culture of Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, and Agatha Christie?) I grew up reading Brit Lit where the Church of England (and its assorted vicars, curates, vergers, deans, sextons, and others) were recurring characters.  I have recently begun working on a memoir (amazingly not about singing!) in which I describe the disconnect between my life growing up as an atheist and my continued exposure to the Church through literature.  (And later through all the Britcoms I watched.)

I began thinking of going to church after reading an article by Gertrude Himmelfarb about the churchgoing habits of Victorians.  She said that after the popularization of Darwin, most intellectual Victorians did not believe in the "supernatural" events described in the Bible (sounds very Unitarian to me!), but they still attended church regularly and considered themselves Christian because to them it was a social and moral identity (and being a member of the Church of England was also a part of British identity) rather than a spiritual belief system.

I know many people dislike Himmelfarb because she leans rightward, which certainly I don't (except perhaps in my attitudes to music, dress, and drug use), but I have to say that reading this article of hers made me feel "OK" about going to church, regardless of what I actually believed.

So what better place to begin than with the UUs.  I had felt (wrongly) that this UU church on Manhattan's Upper West Side would be like the Unitarian church of my childhood: Protestant minus the supernatural.  (Well, it was, kinda, until the choir director was fired.  Then it went rogue Hippie with a vengeance!)

Let's just say it is a far cry from our 1965 Christmas Messiah sing to Sly and the Family Stone!

I'm glad I'm out, and will probably never be back.

I'm happy where I am.  I just always have a lot of 'splaining to do.  But that's OK.  If I can sing, I'm willing to 'splain to anyone who's interested.

Jaded

I had a series of experiences over the past few days that had me on an emotional roller coaster, and led me to the sense that in addition to being lonely (I am certifiably not depressed), I am extremely jaded.

Most people I know who are happy seem to be people whose lives have exceeded their expectations.  Either they grew up poor and surprised themselves by becoming comfortably off, or they were the first (or the only) person in their family to go to college and are impressed by their own knowledge and intelligence (I don't mean in an arrogant way, I mean in truly finding these things a source of pleasure), or they have moved to New York from somewhere else and continue to be amazed by all the possibilities.

Thursday night I went to hear a Skype conversation with a young couple from the church who have moved to Jerusalem to be "missionaries".  I put the word in quotes because to me it sounds slightly quaint, or possibly iffy, if "missionary" means trying to convert people.  But I was assured that Lutheran missionaries do not try to convert people, they only go where there are already Lutheran churches and try to help.  These two young people are good.  Truly good.  I love them very much.  So much that sometimes I want to cry.  I didn't grow up with people who were good.  I grew up with people who were ethical and generous, but that was always tempered with a good dose of intellectual snark.  Almost as if that snark were a mandatory component of being intelligent.  Then there were the people who rebelled against that by being touchy feely in a hippie-ish kind of way that I found silly.  The media seems to think that this younger generation (is it Gen X or Gen Y?  I can't keep track?)  invented "irony" but believe me, it was alive and well when my mother was growing up in the 1930s.  My mother modeled herself on Dorothy Parker with a dash of Elizabeth Bennett thrown in.

After I came home Thursday night I felt spiritually renewed, feeling that knowing those young people and seeing their joy in doing God's work had changed me somehow.  My life would be so much happier and simpler if I wanted to be good  instead of wanting to be a star (even in a tiny venue), but I don't.

Then on Friday night I heard Audra McDonald sing Make Someone Happy and thought, "why can't I just be happy with that?  All the fighting and friends with benefits aside, I have made one person happy for a long, long time, and she has made me happy.  Not everyone has that.  Why can't that make me happy?  Why can't it be enough?"

Lastly, I saw an interesting post on Facebook, from a woman from the church I am friendly with, who said her life was so rich and varied "beyond my expectations, coming from a small town" and you see that is the problem.  How can I be happy with anything when I've been up to my eyeballs in the best of everything since I was 5 years old?  My parents were not rich, and in fact after my father died my mother and I were poor, but they/she managed to take me to the ballet, the theater, concerts, museums, etc. so that by the time I was in High School I had seen it all.  What was left for me to do that could ever even live up to those standards?

For a while I could be a Lesbian activist.  Not many people were doing that, certainly not any women who looked like me, and it was considered edgy, different, pioneerish.  Maybe I was my own kind of missionary, now that I think of it.  Now that's gone.

Will I ever have the sense of wonder and excitement that people have to whom things are new?  I just don't think so.

And it's a two way street.  I do not impress anyone and very little impresses me.  I suppose the only thing that impresses me is the level of skill, expertise, and ambition that so many very young people have.  They start out starring in their chosen endeavor in High School (when I was in High School I was so overwhelmed with eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual conflict and apathy I could barely maintain a B average) and keep it up through prestigious schools.  Now it's true that many of them will probably not be any better off at 62 (I will be 63 before you know it) than I am, but what I'm seeing is the beginning of the story not the last chapters.

So now I am off to my choir "gig".  (Some people laugh at me for calling it that, as I don't get paid, but that's tough nuggies.  I work as hard as any paid choir singer.)  This piece has 8 parts and last Wednesday the choir director actually publicly noticed the "second sopranos" and said thank you for staying on a difficult part.  That was a first.  His specialty is that any compliments or criticisms are always very general.  I remember a friend of mine (another late starting classical singer) mentioning  how her previous choir director "made a fuss" over her and another singer in that choir with training. Well, I guess if the church is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, good amateur singers don't impress anyone.

ETA: After rereading this I realize that it needs some clarification.  Obviously I have not seen and done it all.  In fact, I have been to very few places, far fewer than most people I know.  There are countries, cultures, animals, scenery, and many many other things here in the United States and abroad that I have not seen.  What I meant, was basically two things.  First, that having grown up in New York, I have seen and done everything there is to see and do here, the best and the worst, the scariest, the funniest, the most upscale and the most gutter.  So 9/11 excepted, there is nothing I have seen here as an adult, on the street, on the subway, or in a theater, that I find surprising, shocking, or astounding, in a good or a bad way.  And - and this is more to the point - there is absolutely nothing in my daily life that even approaches the tamer dreams or expectations I had growing up, let alone exceeding them.  I do fewer different kinds of things at work or at play than about 95% of the people I grew up with or those I know now.  So short of suddenly having the time, money, and freedom to travel, I can't think of anything that is likely to cross my path that will take my breath away, surprise me, or astonish me.  Nor is there anything among my meager accomplishments that is likely to amaze or astonish anyone else.  Which is very sad.

Money May Not Matter, but Mentors Do

This blog post was inspired by hearing from two sources recently about the relationship of having money to being able to pursue a career in classical music.

In one instance, a blogger was responding to an online comment from a woman who (I believe) was whining that she could have had an opera career if she had had money, with the purpose of debunking this myth.

In another, a friend of mine mentioned needing money to pursue such a career, as was evidenced by the number of conservatory graduates who can't make a go of a career in music.

I think money helps, certainly in the beginning, and particularly for instrumentalists.  A family with money is more likely to buy the child a musical instrument and pay for lessons.  With singers I believe this is less important, although it does seem to help if there are musicians in the family (I believe David Brooks wrote that it took three generations to make a career.)

What I do think, and this is my whine, is that you need the right person to come along at the right moment and do or say the right thing, or, more important, for the wrong person not to come along at that moment and do or say the wrong thing.  Or for the right person saying the right thing to drown out the wrong person saying the wrong thing.  And this doesn't just need to happen once.  It needs to happen at various points along the way.

I was a troubled teenager.  Almost at the same moment, a music teacher friend of my mother's told me that I had an exceptional voice (it was loud and high - by which I mean secure on Fs, Gs, and As), and I began smoking.  The immediate trigger was, actually, my mother, who herself was obese, telling me "have a cigarette, it will curb your appetite".  I was 13 and had a BMI of 25.  Hardly obese.  Then there were the thin girls who smoked.  And who hung out in coffee houses in Greenwich Village talking about the meaning of life.  Talk and smoke.  Suppose that music teacher had been my mother instead?

Suppose someone had said to me "You have a gift and you need to protect it.  Leave your weight alone."  Suppose I had auditioned for the performing arts high school and developed a different social circle, instead of the beatniks who smoked and talked, and later drank, smoked pot, and took amphetamines.

There's also the issue of screening out distractions.  And this has to begin when you're very young.  Some people have more discipline than others when it comes to doing this.  But then some people also have more distractions than others.  And the very age at which you need to be building your talent (I am talking about all the work that has to get done before you get into the music program, not after you leave, which is what the above referenced blog post was discussing) is that age at which most people are most distractable.   And of course mentors help here as well.  That oh-so-important high school teacher who can tell a young girl to treat her voice gently and stay away not only from smoking and drugs but from trying to scream like Aretha (when she doesn't have the training yet) or Giulietta Simionato (when - well, ditto).  Or who can tell her she really needs to re-think the boyfriend who is shooting up or the BFFs (see how with-it I am!) who keep telling her she's fat.

Of course money (or at least education and savvy) can sometimes help with screening out distractions.  My coach's daughter, a recent Juilliard graduate who is now studying in Europe (although she did neither of these things on family money - she got grants) was spared getting drawn into all the destructive things teenage girls do by being homeschooled  until she left for college.  Her family doesn't have a lot of money but they had the savvy to be able to homeschool her.  And she is very close with her mother, who has encouraged her dreams rather than laughing at her, as mine did.

Suppose I had been in a kind of time warp and had met the Mentor when I was 14, or even 34, instead of 54?  No matter how much he tormented me at the end, he made me believe in myself, and more importantly, he made me realize that God wanted me to sing and that that was what I had to do no matter how many sacrifices I had to make.

There have been so many times I thought I should give up.  Or just be a nice choir singer.  But just an hour in my bathroom singing arpeggios (yes, that C has been easier this month) and pouring over the score of Werther finding that if I can sing the progression up to the A just the way I sing the progression up to the G flat maybe I can nail it and know that I've nailed it and not panic ever again - maybe, tells me "no, you're not 'done' yet."

If I could just be Benjamin Button!  Then in no time at all I could be 45 and who knows what I could accomplish then?

The Tragedy of Lost Creativity

I am taking a break from work, which I had intended to use marking up the score of Werther, but which I also now would like to use to write a blog post on this article , which really moved me.

So much of what the author says is true. Why is is it, as he says, that "We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity"?

Children are encouraged to be creative.  Certainly I was.  But I soon learned that having and fostering an imagination was "childish" (and this by about age 11).  I went to school with two types of girls: those who talked about boys and clothes all the time and those who did nothing but study.  There were a handful of kids I grew up with who really excelled at playing a musical instrument, or at art or writing, for example, but "really excel" meant just that.  If you were not Juilliard or Pratt material, it was like, "enough already".  Be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant.  (I don't think anyone was encouraged to go into banking - the author of the cited article mentions working in "the City", London's equivalent of Wall Street.  That, at least, was too crass.)

And women were not encouraged, really, to do anything at all.  Yes, we were supposed to be educated, because educated women are interesting.  But jobs were something you did until you married, or after you got divorced, or, like my mother, widowed.  It's sort of hard to imagine, as I was encouraged to be brainy, not decorative, but I never thought about having a "career", and just ended up doing what most of the "bookish" women I knew did: get a secretarial job in publishing and then become an editor.

And if you were female, even a Lesbian like me, the most important thing was "the relationship".  Don't pursue activities that will take time away from "the relationship".  That, and the fact that I was told that Lesbians shouldn't be involved in a "patriarchal art form" like opera, put a premature end to my hope of a singing life, if not a singing career.

So what do you do if you've found what you love but are too old to do it in any way that other people care about?  Not because you don't have talent and ability, but because too many people in too close proximity to where you live, have more talent and ability.  My problem with singing isn't that different from the general problem with the middle class.  It isn't really that people have gotten poorer, but rather that the rich have gotten so much richer and so much more numerous that everyone else is poor or  might as well be.

Being older, the issue isn't just ageism or lost time, it's that what I'm competing with now are at least three generations (is a generation a decade, I wonder?) of people, most specifically women, who have been encouraged to pursue dreams of some kind.  And are doing interesting things.  When I was only looking at my own generation, very few women had high powered careers that they enjoyed and the ones who did were considered odd (many never married or found a satisfactory life with a significant other), and there were only a tiny handful of highly trained professional singers, so as I've said 100 times if I've said it once, the community opera groups, such as there were, were for amateurs with day jobs whose singing was less than perfect but who loved doing it.  Now almost every school in the country seems to offer a degree in vocal performance and they vomit out their graduates in the five boroughs of the Big Apple (not to  mention the three conservatories that are right here).

I think however sad it is that there is so much lost creativity, there is less than there used to be.  An awful lot of people, particularly women, are doing interesting creative things, if not successfully in a monetary sense, successfully enough that their picture is in the newspaper or they get a spot talking on tv.

So I've found something I love and it's killing me, to paraphrase the author of this article.  But it hasn't killed me yet, and I am going to go down fighting.

Why I Started Going to Church in the First Place. Oh, and Paging Dr. Who

I realize that with all I've written here about the Mentor, the Unitarian church, my current involvement (mostly, but not entirely musical) with the Lutheran church, and my atheistic family, I have never really explained why I started going to church in the first place.

I should say that despite my parents being atheistic Marxists and my mother being ethnically Jewish, we lived in Brooklyn Heights, which was an extremely WASPy neighborhood.  At that time it was not, however, an expensive neighborhood, the way it is today.  There were Old Money WASPs there and poor WASPs (not to be confused with poor whites). These poor WASPs were people who had somewhere long ago been connected by blood to Old Money but had severed all connections with their families either because they were gay, were or had been active alcoholics, lived a bohemian lifestyle of some sort, or their parents or grandparents had been crazy and had given most of the family money to charity.  And most of these people attended the local Episcopal, Presbyterian, or Unitarian churches (in those days Unitarian churches were not that different from Protestant churches except that they didn't call Jesus "Christ" and didn't mention the Resurrection or the afterlife; but there was classical music and people got dressed up to attend services).  So this was the culture I was immersed in.  Not to mention my total immersion in Brit Lit, where the local village church and its vicar were regular stock characters.

As I grew older, when I wasn't seeing myself as a femme fatale, I saw myself more and more as a character in one of these books.

An essay that changed my life was an essay on the subject of Christianity and the Victorians written by Gertrude Himmelfarb. I hesitate to mention her because her husband and son are rather loathesome right-wing ideologues, but Gertrude has mostly confined herself to writing about the social sphere and has equally condemned the "feel good" revolution from the left and the "greed is good" message from the right as being responsible for fraying the fabric of society.

This essay mentioned that after the ideas of Darwin gained a foothold, very few British intellectuals believed in things like the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, or the afterlife (although they continued to mythologize the latter), but that hey still considered themselves "Christians", most notably "Anglicans" which was part of having a British identity.  Even Jews, such as Disraeli, considered it not oxymoronic to be both Jewish and members of the Church of England.

So this led me to think that it was "OK" for me to want to go to church even if I didn't believe a lot of the doctrine.  Having had fond memories of my childhood visits to the Unitarian church in Brooklyn, including singing in the choir, I decided to go (with my partner) to the local Unitarian church on the Upper West Side.  Well, the rest is history.  When I started attending services I had no intention of singing, but, well, the hymnals were there, so I sang.  And I met The Mentor.  And then I developed a faith in God, which I had not had before, even after 28 years of sobriety in AA.  If my voice returned, better than it had ever been, after 23 years, when I was in God's house, then s/he must really be there.

After I met the Mentor my identity shifted from "nice churchlady" who watched Masterpiece Theater, to  "occasional femme fatale", but I thought I had a niche.  I could sing solos on the big holidays (really the only other trained singers were a coloratura soprano pursuing a career, and The Mentor himself) and once in a while sing an aria in one of their annual "talent shows", which consisted of a little singing in various genres, a little poetry reading, a little dance, and some silliness - very English village.  But that did not happen.  I fell in love with Mentor, he fell out of love with me (that might have happened anyhow; I think he would have gotten bored with me in any event), and the congregation decided it didn't want to hear operatic style singing or "Christian" oratorio pieces.

Where I am now is a lot more formal, and has in recent years, despite that there is no pay for singing, become a magnet for serious talent, not to mention that it is smack between Juilliard, Mannes, and the Manhattan School of Music.  And, oh, did I mention that Marilyn Horne has made an arrangement for her proteges to give recitals there?

When I was thinking of scaling back (not giving up singing, just giving up opera singing other than the occasional aria or scene) I was imagining myself somewhere where I could do what I did at that Unitarian church: be one of a tiny handful of acknowledged "stars" in a struggling choir, sing solos at the big holidays, and sing an aria or two at special events.

If I shut my eyes tight I can imagine myself, in the late 1940s or 1950s, in a tiny church in St. Mary Mead, listening to the choir struggling through a hymn with gusto, my voice soaring above them. Oh, Dr. Who, could you please take me there?

An Ode to Frivolity and a Seguidilla Surprise

This isn't strictly about singing, but it is about me, and I really need an outlet right now.  As I no longer have the pseudonymous blog, this is it.  So now to keep it honest yet discreet.

For someone who is - OK I will say it - basically narcissistic and diva-esque, I am not sure sometimes how I ended up where I ended up.  I never wanted to save the world or rescue people.  One exercise in The Artists Way asked you to list five imaginary lives/professions you could see yourself in and not a single "helping profession" was on my list. I am not a compulsive caregiver. (When I was in that dismal LGBT caregiver group a number of the members referred to themselves as having a caregiving addiction, something I had zero identification with.)

I do have a strong sense of ethics and feelings of compassion for the people who are in my life.  Well, the person who is in my life.  I haven't noticed myself jumping to help people in my broader circle, mostly because I feel like a rubber band stretched to capacity.

Although we never legally married, my partner and I did have a commitment ceremony complete with vows, and although in the physical sense when I got too lonely I chose to ignore the one about "foresaking all others" I believe that it is my duty to honor the rest: to love and cherish, in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, for better for worse, 'til death do us part.  And I will not waver.

But when you add up limited funds, limited time, a livelihood spent at home at a laptop editing articles many of which are about people dying of cancer, much time with significant other spent at her home, doing chores, and making plans around her various health challenges it can be very wearing.

I don't know why (maybe it was my upbringing?) but everyone I know is what I would call "terminally serious".  No matter what my mother talked about, it always felt like listening to the New York Times Op Ed page.  She could take almost any potentially juicy topic and wring the lust and laughter out of it by turning it into a polemic.

Then, Heaven help us, because as a young adult I decided I was attracted to women, I got dragged kicking and screaming into The Women's Movement, which was really just a suffocating multiplication of my mother haranguing at me not to buy cosmetics.

Most of the friends I have now want to talk about politics, their health, or their money problems.

Where has all the laughter gone?

Yes, I have political opinions but I rarely talk about them, unless I start to get scared that my senior entitlement programs are going to be taken away.  I don't define myself by them.  Many of my friends, particularly from other parts of the country, define themselves as liberals in a sea of conservatives (their families and childhood acquaintances? neighbors?) whereas I have always defined myself as a bimbo in a sea of intellectuals.

So why now.

I have known for a while that my partner was having cataract surgery on the 20th, but it was only today that she found out that this means she can't bend over to tie her shoes for 10 days.  She often stays in the house for that many days, and I always go over on Friday night and do chores for her on Saturdays, but this means that not one but two weekends, the second one being my birthday, will be taken up either with waiting on her, or staying in the house with her.  She will not expect me to be there during the week.  That is my work week.  But still.  Is it childish to care about my birthday?  For a long time I thought birthdays were primarily for children.  Mine is in July and I remember being reprimanded by a camp counselor (I was 9) for, in response to her asking me what my favorite day was all summer, saying it was my birthday.  But then suddenly in the "greed is good" 80s I would hear many of my coworkers rhapsodize about the expensive jewelry they got from significant others.  Jewelry (unless it was arty costume jewelry or something ethnic) was totally frowned on in the circles in which I moved even if someone could afford it.  In all fairness, during that brief period when my partner was working she did buy me a few pieces of jewelry, but those days are long gone.  I am lucky to get an inexpensive lunch and a discounted theater ticket (we are going to see "Mary Poppins" as a joint birthday present, sitting in discounted seats for the disabled).

What are all these young people giggling about in all these pictures on Facebook?  One of the nicer readers of my pseudonymous blog said I probably was envious of people having a good time, which is absolutely true.  Maybe I have "a good time" once a month if I'm lucky.  How do I define that?  Doing something totally frivolous where I don't have to be constantly poised to take care of someone else's needs, worry about their well-being, slow my pace, go gently, not overdo, take lots of breaks, cut out early,  be home before dark....something where I am not worried about money or time, where I am by myself without my partner (whom I sometimes laughingly refer to as "the cleavage police") censoring what I'm wearing.

I will try to do something for myself over these next few weeks. I will have to give up a trip to Giverny in the Bronx and one to a concert at the Met Museum, but maybe I can go to the women's Moon Circle (a place I can wear bright colors, engage in sacred play, and honor my pagan self).  (My love for this activity is one reason that no matter how much I love singing Bach and respect the social outreach at the Lutheran church, I am not converting to Christianity any time soon.  Also pagans can be nonmonogamous.)

On a more cheerful note, I am finding the Seguidilla much easier.  I just had to sing it into my voice.  I can do the ending up to the high B well enough to keep the role in my repertoire.  I mean it's one note and that's not really what the role is about. (God would I love to sing this role in full costume!!) And FWIW, I was just listening to a recording of Carmen with Grace Bumbry, and she transposed the Seguidilla down a half a step!

ETA: Right after I posted this I spoke with my partner.  She is really quite frightened about the cataract surgery (it usually goes smoothly, but she had to sign a waiver that mentioned blindness and death) and I want to be there for her.  I suggested going this weekend to get her another pair of sneakers that has a velcro closing instead of ties, that she can put on with her reacher.  In addition to the cataract surgery there is also the issue of her having an artificial hip replacement and not being able to bend into certain positions.  She also cried and said it hurt her when I invited her to go with me to do things at night.  One thing I have very poor judgment about is when I am being unreasonably selfish and when I am being unreasonably self-abnegating.  I grew up thinking I was much more selfish than most people (the kids I grew up with, even the rich ones, were punished if they acted greedy about, for example, wanting an expensive birthday present) but as we moved into the Reagan Era and beyond, I continue to be surprised at how selfish and self-absorbed many people are, regarding wanting presents, treats, etc., even middle aged adults, who expect expensive birthday presents from spouses, etc. or the younger performers who endlessly post photos of themselves in various outfits.  So I have no benchmarks that I trust.

Of Lent, Benefits, and Other Things

I haven't written much lately, mostly because I am drowning in work. Today is Ash Wednesday. To me Lent is mostly about singing (my choir sings more during Lent than at any other time) and sometimes about trying to be a better person.

Growing up Marxist, needless to say I was not raised with Lent, but I certainly was expected to live a life of penance, at least on some level. I went to an expensive private school but wore old second hand clothes, went to the theater but owned little jewelry, and of course was discouraged from fussing with my hair or using cosmetics (my rebellion was neither to become a Weatherperson nor a Conservative but simply to stuff my bathroom cabinet with lipsticks, nail polish, and hair products of every possible type and variety, the more the merrier). I was also made to feel guilty about any personal vanity. The triggering event (I think) to the brouhaha surrounding the pseudonymous blog that I deleted involved my asking the universe whether or not singers in general were self-involved. This was prompted mainly by my envy of the number of photos of themselves these people have (and post everywhere). I was not making a moralistic value judgment. I was probably mostly expressing envy not only that I didn't know people who would take these sorts of photos of me unless I made a big deal of asking them (hence my new profile picture here) and that I don't have the kind of smart phone that makes it easy for me to photograph myself, but that I also think I shouldn't want these sorts of photos. There was a time in my life (before the digital age) when I had a camera with me on every vacation, as did the friends I went with or visited. But the purpose of that was to photograph the larger world, and if people appeared in the picture it was incidental, and we hardly primped ourselves beforehand.

To be honest, I am extremely self-involved regarding my appearance, I just don't move in the right circles to milk this aspect of myself.

In any event, I feel that so much of my behavior and life is "Lenten" that I am not much in the mood to do anything to honor the season other than stick to my promise not to pick fights with my partner. She is mostly an ex partner, we don't live together, I can do what I please when work allows (and this covers quite a lot of territory that I don't discuss here), so I should be agreeable and kind during the weekend days when I cook, do laundry, shop, and sometimes even have an enjoyable outing with her.

Otherwise I am mostly focused on what solo oratorio piece I will be singing. The choir director said that "Lux Aeterna" would not work as a solo (well, yes...I wanted to sing it as a trio but couldn't get two men from the choir to sing the other parts) so I might do "Buss und Reu" from the St. Matthew Passion as it's a "Matthew" liturgical year and the choir will be singing some of the choral sections on Good Friday. Or I may sing "Fac ut Portem" again, which I love.

As for the other subject of this post, benefits, I saw a Facebook posting from a "real" singer (she is not one of my envy targets because she is a different voice type and is actually not one of the women who posts lots of pictures of herself) saying that she finally had health insurance. She said she mostly sings for a living but has had to take some other work as well, to feel more financially secure.

So how did I get where I am now. I was never unemployed, not even for one day, since 1977, until I left my last full-time job in 2009. And I have never not had benefits, full stop. When I left that job in 2009 it was with a "retirement package" that allows me to stay on their health insurance rolls. Now I am working freelance 30 hours a week.

I have a singer friend (another late bloomer, like me) who said that she probably wouldn't have wanted a career as a singer because of the cutthroat competition. For me, the issue was not that, but rather, among other things, the idea of financial insecurity.

I also almost cried when I heard from my teacher how little he is getting from Social Security. I am going to claim it when I am 62, and it won't be much, but it will be almost 5 times what he is getting.

Was all this worth 35 years of boredom and counting? I don't know. I made the choices I made.

On another subject, on Monday I saw Aida at the Met. I don't have time to write a review here now, but might do so another time.

Singing Better - But I Wanna Play Dress Up!

Today at my voice lesson I went through "Acerba Volutta" and Sappho's "O Ma Lyre". My teacher said they sound much better than several years ago. In fact he said that "Acerba Volutta" sounds the way that type of music - Italian verismo - is supposed to sound. My upper register seems to be much freer (although it could be freer still) but most importantly, I have a whole voice that sounds like a real Italian mezzo. My teacher says, yes, this is the repertoire I should be singing.

So why do the "envies" constantly creep up on me?

There is something that I want. A lot of it has to do with singing - singing is the core of it, but it's more.

When I read Facebook and other postings from "real" singers, what is it they are doing that I am so envious of? Well - dressing up for one.

I grew up in an environment that disapproved of dressing up. My mother used to quote Thoreau - "Distrust any endeavor that requires new clothes". O how different from my ultra-feminine friends with their ultra-feminine mothers who wanted to take them shopping and admire them in this, that, or the other. In fact, if you look at the photo that my mother wanted for her obituary

you will see that she has, in essence, no hair (it is scraped back in a knot), no cosmetics, and a face that is, at least to me, rather genderless.

When she died and I went through her things, I could see that she had not bought any new clothes (except the odd turtleneck and some sneakers) in probably three decades, and I have inherited no jewelry other than some beads and some politically-correct ethnic horrors that I gave away.

When I was a child and an adolescent I was always jonesing to dress up which she had no understanding of.

As an adult, when I ended up with a partner who was female, I found that I was marrying an ideology, not just a person, and was surrounded by hordes of women who chanted disapproval of me as I wistfully played with my cosmetics (they were all I had left to adorn myself with - I owned no skirts, dresses,or women's shoes).

Decades later, I have a closet full of gowns and long skirts (and a few other oddities, like a fringed black lycra skirt and another tight black skirt with suggestive zippers that can be zipped - or not) but noplace to wear them.

In any event, these "real" singers spend their days purchasing gowns for concerts (even if all they're singing is an alto part in an oratorio with minimal exposure) and being stuffed into period costumes with cleavage (even the "frump" roles get to show cleavage, so it seems). Then they post the photos on Facebook and everyone oohs and ahs.

When I left my last full time job I got a "severance package" which included, in addition to the crown jewel of health insurance for life until Medicare, a year of career counseling. The outfit I went to was quite good and they actually specialized in finding second careers for people over 50. So I thought I could at least segue into a glamorous career, if not singing, maybe selling toothpaste (I am being partly facetious here) in a different city every month (or at least in a different office every month) with a drop dead wardrobe as a work requirement. On that score, though, I think this career counseling outfit overestimated its power. What I ended up with was tools to find work I could do at home in my pajamas, which has left me more time for singing, more sleep, the freedom to fulfill my eldercare responsibilities without having to beg and beseech time off like a child asking "Mommy may I?" but it hardly fulfills my need to be glamorous. And needless to say, on a small budget, even if I have the clothes, I am not about to go anywhere where I could wear them, as such places are expensive to frequent and what excuse would I have to be doing so in any event?

Now make no mistake. Even if I'm going grocery shopping I have on stage makeup and when my big hair starts to wilt (which it certainly has by now) I call in my Irish hairdresser to perm it in smelly rollers for two hours (she is coming Thursday). And usually if I go into a store that sells cosmetics someone asks me if I'm an actress, because of course I wouldn't be caught dead in anything that looks "natural" even if it's only to wear to the grocery store.

Who Am I?

I am taking a break from work (which I can ill-afford) to take up this existential question, because I think this is at the root of a lot of what is making me unhappy.

I have said, truly, that I am not sorry I don't earn my living singing (although it would be nice to have "getting my makeup and hair done" in my job description not to mention being able to travel on someone else's dime), nor do I wish I had an opera engagement (even an amateur one) every month on end.

Yes, I want to keep singing better and better (which I think I am) and yes, I wish someone would invite me to join them in a concert, which would make me feel that I really am a singer, and I definitely wish I could devote 2 hours a day to working on music, but the crux of it all, I think, is really this:

If the people who flit from regional house to regional house to perform and come to to New York for auditions are singers, and the people who pay through the nose to sing with the expletive deleted orchestra that treated me like garbage and go to several auditions a month are singers, then who am I?

I spend about 30 hours a week copyediting, 10 hours a week on eldercare, and maybe 5 hours a week singing - or maybe 10 if you include choir commitments. I sing maybe 7 church solos a year and maybe one "something else". Since I sang Dalila in 2008 the "something else" has had an audience of less than 20, or an audience primarily made up of nursing home residents.

One of the reasons I went to all those auditions wasn't that I seriously thought I'd be cast in anything, but because it was an excuse to get dressed up and sing in front of people and feel special. Most people get a "no thank you" so that was not hurtful. I suppose it kept it real. I had thought going to those meetups would keep it real but it just made me realize how insignificant I really was in the scheme of things.

Now one thing I have always been, whether I sang or not, was a diva.

Now the esteemed Susan Eichhorn Young whom I quote so often, said no one can call herself a diva who hasn't earned it. So hm....

Why do I say I'm a diva? My partner's sister, with whom I have almost nothing in common (she lives in Texas and likes Glen Beck) do have in common that we know we are divas. We love big hair, big makeup, bright colored clothes, gold jewelry (she can afford it, I can't, although she did give me one or two pieces she was tired of), and red home decor.

One of the earliest pictures of me (I don't have it - at one point I tore up most of my childhood pictures because I thought I was fat and ugly) is when I was three years old and sitting at my parents' upright piano, turning my head to try to imitate a cabaret singer showing off.

This picture shows what I looked like at 18 (I only let people take neck up pictures, but I think I look pretty hot and neither my hair nor my cosmetic style is "natural")

and

this is what I looked like in the mid90s when I was a baton twirler with the Big Apple Corps Marching Band. (Why should the guys have all the great outfits?)

So there you have it.

As I said to a friend a few minutes ago, if I lived in "East Eggshell, Iowa", I could really be a diva! Being a soloist at a local church and singing an aria outside a bake sale would be enough!

Being a Diva

Pride Week has come and gone, but when I was having some painting done in my apartment I took down my pictures and found this one, of me twirling a baton at the front of the Pride Parade, as a member of the Big Apple Corps Marching Band, in 1995.

Seeing this photo, taken during the extended period between 1980 and 2004 when I wasn't singing, made me realize that whether I was singing or not, I was always a diva.I know the esteemedSusan Eichhorn Young has written many blog pieces about the subject of Divas, including that no one can confer that title on herself, but that it has to be earned.

So why do I think of myself as a diva? I am not a prima donna. By which I mean I am a "team player" (much as I loathe all those tidbits of corporate jargon) and I also know when it is time for me to step out of the spotlight and let someone else step into it. Or when I should not be in the spotlight at all.

Well, when I was a little girl I loved pink frilly dresses. Of course my communist mother hated these and would buy me something functional. I wanted long curls she wanted me to cut my hair and make it "practical". In High School I wanted to be a baton twirler but they wouldn't let me because I had a few extra pounds.

My mother wanted me to identify with Jo March I identified with Moll Flanders.

And then there was opera. I dreamed of being Violetta (on stage of in life? not sure....I remember at that time reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses) while my peers were trekking off to Woodstock to wallow in the mud.

And then of course after I came out I was always the token femme in a dress, as here, when I decided that "girls can have fun too" and "why should the gay guys have all the great outfits in this parade"? (I was actually the first female baton twirler in the darn thing.)

Of course times have changed, and now, I saw from the TIMES, there was a woman born woman honest to Goddess pole dancer!!

Anyhow, my partner knows I am a diva (and often rolls her eyes).

I always have on stage makeup, even to go downstairs to do the laundry, and I don't even own a pair of sweatpants let alone a parka. And don't you dare suggest that I go camping!

Everyday Rapture

Yes, yes, I'm supposed to be copyediting, but before I start I wanted to make a post about Sherie Renee Scott's Everyday Rapture

Overall it was a fun afternoon at the theater, and I think she's a major talent, but there were a few issues.

In The Plus Column

One of the most moving themes in the show was her talking about her gay cousin, and how he gave her the confidence to perform, then eventually died of AIDS after being shunned by the Mennonite community in which they grew up. It's obvious that his ghost is with her always, for both good and ill.

There were also some great, memorable lines, including

"I always felt I was growing up inside a song."

and the priceless

"I always wanted to build a closer relationship to God with everyone clapping!" (Doesn't every church soloist? I must find a way to recycle that line.)

And her ending, about the rapture to be found in everyday life, was very moving.

In the Minus Column

I wanted to hear her sing "My Strongest Suit"!! What we got instead was snippets of the song intertwined with a bit about how a teenage boy (gay, no doubt) had a correspondence with her on the Internet and didn't believe it was really her. That's a great song. And of course since I'm totally immersed in Amneris right now I was dying to hear it.


There was a (IMHO) rather tasteless rendition of "You Made Me Love You" supposedly directed at Jesus. As we're listening to it, different images of Jesus flash on a screen. It's interesting. Since I've been singing at this (very left-wing and serious) Lutheran church I just don't find things like that funny any more than I would find something funny if it was racist or homophobic.


A More Serious Thought

Why do ex-fundies have all the good stories? In a way it's almost a chiche: growing up fundy and naive, peripherally meeting gay people, dreaming about performing, coming to New York filled with awe, and falling in love with this sophisticated world because it's new.

What kind of story do I have as the child of commies? I grew up here and had seen everything by the time I was 10. I mean since it was only 1960 I wasn't smarmily precocious the way kids are now (although I certainly had met many couples who "lived in sin" - they called it "not wanting the capitalist state to put a stamp on their relationship" - as well as plenty of gay couples) but I had heard discussions about people going to jail for being communists, modern art, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the song about Rape from The Fantasticks.

So there's really no arc there. When everything's been talked about around the family dinner table what do you really have to talk about?

I suppose that's why I fell in love with all things old fashioned: Victorian novels, Nineteenth Century Italian opera, the English countryside...

There really isn't a story there, though.

Backgound, Ethnicity, and Carmen

Here, as promised, is my post about Carmen.

First of all, I should say that my first experience singing opera, as distinct from legit musical theater or Gilbert and Sullivan, which I had been singing since I was six, was when I was 14 and my large multiracial Brooklyn high school (white) glee club teacher decided that the way to get kids interested in opera was to have a girl sing the Habanera and a boy sing the Toreador Song at the annual glee club concert.

So there were auditions. And I auditioned. Four other girls auditioned. I was the only Caucasian. The girl that got the gig was African-American and sang the Habanera like a rock song. To put this in context, I no doubt sang it like Julie Andrews singing "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" from My Fair Lady which would have been just as inappropriate. The other girl probably did sing better than I did and if the glee club teacher had said something low-key like "Well, this time _______________ did sing better than you did, but maybe you can sing something next year", that probably would have been the end of it. Instead, the teacher said "Well, dear, I wouldn't worry too much about this. Singing is part of _________'s heritage, you know. You are on the Math Team because your father is a professor of engineering." Lucky I didn't grow up to be a Tea Bagger. On the other hand, her saying that was probably just as racist as my snit, more so since she was an adult and should have known better.

In any event, I have spent years wondering whether or not there's a connection between ethnicity and singing, ethnicity and rhythm, ethnicity and uptightness. I thought about this incident again yesterday because I both saw the telecast of this year's production of Carmen (which I had seen live with a different cast) and also read an article in Opera News about opera singers who grew up in the African-American church.

My parents defined themselves as "New York Intellectuals" and I was exposed to everything from Cole Porter to Rogers and Hart to Gilbert and Sullivan to, yes, opera, which I didn't much care for until I got into High School. But they were also militant atheists so I grew up sans choir immersion.

Was I uptight? I never particularly thought so (I am certainly not a prude) on the other hand I come from ultra-WASPy Brooklyn Heights. And 40 years later the mentor who changed my life forever while intermittently tormenting me said I had less sense of rhythm than anyone he had ever met.

Be that as it may, I sing the Habanera every chance I get (see profile picture), strut my stuff, and hand out flowers, sometimes to people in nursing homes, sometimes to children having a party to send them off to Bible Camp.

As for last night's Carmen I had seen it live with my idol
Olga Borodina who despite some excess pounds is the sexxiest creature on earth, and the young
Brandon Jovanovich who was a close second. The production was riveting and exuded sex from start to finish. Every detail was perfectly conceived.

I was prepared not to care much for Elina Garanca because although she is a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice, she just isn't Carmen to me. I adored her as Rosina and Cenerentola, but worried that she would be too "soubretty" for Carmen. She surprised me, and I admired her artistry, but never quite got carried away by her the way I did by Borodina, perhaps because in the telecast I got too many views of her expensively capped teeth (definitely un-gypsylike) and pert little nose.
Roberto Alagna isn't my favorite tenor from a purely vocal standpoint, but he also did a superb acting job, capturing the character's randy loser essence.

All in all, it was a delicious experience, and just reinforces my determination to sing this role in its entirety before I die, even if it's just in a vanity production where we sing from books.

The Shop Around the Corner

At the end of the month I have an audition for a role in a Handel opera (a long shot, of course, since the character is a romantic love interest and the production was advertised as avante garde) so when I wasn't able to find a CD of it at The Lincoln Center Library, I decided to buy one at The Juilliard Store.

Which brings me to a subject I have pondered for quite some time. What's a gal with a modest talent to do when her "local" this, that, and the other are Lincoln Center, the Met, and Juilliard??

Many's the time I wished I lived in "East Eggshell, Iowa", a generic catchword used by one of my former coworkers for small town America. If nothing else, I could be a working comprimaria at their local opera house and a minor celebrity in the grocery store.

Many readers know that, in addition to singing opera, I have also written a play. It's called Duet and is the story of a young church singer whose life is transformed forever by singing Dalila's "Mon Coeur S'Ouvre a ta Voix" under the tutelage of a charismatic voice coach. The play was produced in a tiny town in Texas and there was a story about me in their local paper. When I was interviewed, the interviewer asked if I would like a copy of the story sent to my "hometown paper". "Won't the people back home be proud of you?" he said. Well, I just burst out laughing. "My hometown paper is The New York TIMES", I said. "And no, I don't think they'd be interested."

So why haven't I moved? First of all, New York is where I come from so there's noplace to go back to. I wasn't strictly born in the Big Apple itself. I was born in Brooklyn Heights which used to be a lot like a small town, but now rents are prohibitive (my apartment in the armpit of Lincoln Center is rent stabilized), and it has lost its small town flavor. When I was growing up there was a theater troupe called The Heights Players which really was for the locals (in those days primarily housewives who had once dreamed of being actresses)and I and other local children sang in the chorus if they did a musical, but now as I understand it's overrun with people from the tristate area who are serious about having careers in the theatuh, much as the no-pay no-fee opera groups that used to comprise the Opera Underground several decades ago have now re-emerged as prep schools for yappers and resting places for managed professional singers between gigs.

So Brooklyn Heights really isn't an option. And when I add to the mix that there really is noplace I could live more cheaply, not to mention that I've never learned to drive, I'm sort of stuck here. Which is fine, most of the time, I just sometimes have these yearnings not to be such a tiny fish that I can't even really swim my way into a tiny pond.

Unless you count church fundraisers of course.

If I haven't mentioned it, my profile picture shows me hanging out in a minister's office preferatory to entertaining the congregation and their friends with the Habanera. An hour of dressing, including professionally applied stage makeup and a wig, for less than 10 minutes of singing, but I had a ball.

Some people idolize celebrities. I idolize "working singers" in my fach who sing medium sized roles and cover larger roles in medium size opera houses. I laugh when I read their postings about "coming to New York". For them, New York is the Promised Land, and my "nabe" is the Holy Grail. Maybe sometime I'll run into one of them on their way to an audition while I'm grocery shopping in my jeans, big hair, and stage makeup.

Oh, if I didn't mention it, even though I'm not a real diva, I always dress like one, even in the grocery store.

Now It's back to listening closely to my audition aria and coming up with solid ornamentation for the da capo.

A bientot.