Maytime Take 2 and "Aging Artfully"

Last night I watched Maytime again.  My sense of it was quite different from my sense of it four years ago. First, I realized how dated some of it was.  The girl's young fiance makes her choose between going to New York to study voice and try to have a career, and marrying him.  That wouldn't happen today, certainly not among Millennials of a certain socioeconomic class.  The girl would go to New York, launch her career, then "pair off" with someone she might want to marry with the understanding that the marriage would be a partnership in which instance by instance, they negotiated whose career was more important (that year, that month).  Even after children arrived. 

The first time I realized that we were into new territory in that regard was when a friend's daughter (who was born in 1970, so she's more Gen X) decided to go to graduate school in a different city from where her fiance was living, which was where, eventually, they planned to settle.  That would have been unheard of in my day.  If you were lucky enough to "nail" a partner that you were madly in love with, everything else just sort of fell by the wayside if necessary.  I was thinking, for example, of my giving up singing at 30.  I mean there were a myriad factors, most notably that I wasn't really willing to put in the work to take care of my instrument (although by the end I was singing very well from a technical standpoint).  But in addition to needing to earn a living and get a college degree in my off hours (getting a degree in music never occurred to me; my one exposure to music theory bored me to tears) and the fact that "political dykes" didn't "invest themselves in a patriarchal art form like opera", there was the relationship.  My partner would never have countenanced my doing anything that took me away from her for extended periods.  In fact, I remember one of our ugliest quarrels (during the 20 years of our time together that I recall as "happy") took place when, while I was enrolled in college, taking a course called "Women in the Law", I got a chance to go to a conference on Women in the Law (in Detroit of all places) over a weekend.  She kicked and screamed and yelled and we didn't speak to each other for the days leading up to my departure.  I think the thaw broke when I got back but I never did anything similar again unless it was something required by work.

And getting back to Maytime, of course no doubt today, the older teacher/mentor's attraction to his pupil and his request that she marry him (the subject comes up when she tells him how much he has done for her and asks what she can do in return) would be loosely categorized under the heading of "sexual harrassment" (and "marry" probably wouldn't have been the word used, although it might have been; he seemed more interested in "possessing" her than in a roll in the hay).

On another subject, yesterday I went to a free conference called "Aging Artfully".  It was a series of lectures and panel discussions aimed at showing seniors how engaging with the arts (as a participant, not a passive viewer or listener) can keep a person young and engaged.  I didn't learn much there that would help me with my quest for venues to produce concerts in, but there was much that I identified with: the need to be seen, how being "seen" makes you an artist, the need to feel safe being "seen", the need to feel grounded, the need to feel safe but that "unfamiliar" and "unsafe" are not synonyms (a big one for me), and how listening to music can calm people with dementia.

Actually, I probably learned more techniques that I can use with my partner, many of which I already use: playing music for her on Youtube, showing her paintings and photographs on my iPad, looking through her old art books.

And they addressed ageism.  One man mentioned that people (including older adults!) make stupid and disparaging jokes about "getting old" and "old people" of a sort that no one (at least no civilized person who moves in the circles we move in) would make about a racial or ethnic group.

One disappointment.  I saw clips of a number of senior choruses but no performance classes (free or low fee) for seniors.  That is what I would be most interested in.  Coaching for solo performers ending in a concert (even just for each other and our friends). 

Throwback Wednesday

I rarely revisit old posts, unless they are "topical" (like the ones I wrote on same-sex marriage, sexism, Trump voters, and the UU church), but I saw that the movie Maytime is on tonight (at 8 pm, so I will definitely watch).  I remembered that quite some time ago (this is from 2012) I had written something about it, so here it is.

I still feel a lot of these things, but I have had to let them go.  (I'm also astounded that there was a time, not that long ago, when I was awake to watch a movie after 11.)

Here is the link to that old post.  Enjoy.

20 Feet from Stardom

Yesterday I saw the movie 20 Feet from Stardom. I don't follow pop music, and loathe the white countercultural music from my generation which I associate with drugs and pretentiousness (and the message to "turn on, tune in, and drop out" that for me was so deadly and had lifelong consequences).  But I always loved Motown its immediate predecessors, like early Tina Turner.  And listening to that music during the peak of the civil rights movement, when girls like that in my school glee club were the chosen few, it brings up a lot of feelings of sadness and old envy.  Also, watching this movie I could really see and hear the throughline from African American (and by extension other) church choir music to this type of pop music.  I may not have heard it before because I did not sing in choirs as a young person, other than the Unitarian church choir which did not sing that type of music.  Which explains why these singers (they were mostly women) looked wholesome and healthy even today in their 70s.

And for the first time, I will humbly say, I was able to really hear and appreciate the artistry these singers were capable of. Lisa Fischer, for example, has a dynamic and vocal range to rival any opera singer's, including the most glorious spun pianissimi.

Much of the movie dealt with themes I have been grappling with: being a backup singer when you are in your soul a soloist; the soloist temperament (which I have to the tenth power); having a "fire in  your belly" that you can't ignore - it will come back to bite you decades later if you do; and, most inspiring, being able to be at the top of your game in your 60s and 70s.

A must see.

Now I am off to run through the Carmen/Don Jose duet and work with one of the people I am considering for a narrator.

"Maytime": A Cautionary Tale

Last night after watching the 11:00 news, I stumbled upon the movie Maytime with Jeanette MacDonald. Her singing is decidedly mediocre, and the whoever wrote the book (was that from the original operetta, I wonder?) obviously knew nothing about opera fachs, having the heroine sing in "L'Elisir d'Amore" and "Lohengrin" in the same year!, but the story line was compelling. Ever since I was about 16, I fantasized about some kind of life for myself that roughly fell along that story line (minus the disruptive young love interest): an older charismatic mentor, fame and success (at something - maybe even just scandal), glamour, traveling and living in hotels....I can't think of one moment in my adolescence or even young adulthood when I wanted garden variety domesticity.

So I keep asking myself, how did I end up where I ended up?  In a relationship, however flawed, that is in its fourth decade, in the same apartment for almost three, and in a dull, but apparently rock-solid, industry?

I think I had lots of little tidbits of glamour and flash along the way, so I didn't notice the whole: being the star of a women's dance in my long dress in a sea of jeans (not likely to happen today - many younger Lesbians enjoy glamming up),being a baton twirler in the Pride parade, singing in an occasional amateur opera production, speaking at all kinds of twelve step meetings and topical workshops of various kinds.

Gradually these things fell away and I became just another middle aged woman in a suit (that was one or two sizes too big), working in an office as dull as ditch water, watching my partner grow less romantic, less functional, and more disagreeable with each passing year.

And then I met the Mentor.  I had always wanted a mentor - just like the one in Maytime.  Who knows?  I might very well have found such a person exciting, which would have turned the plot line   completely on its head.  (I remember having a huge crush on a  - male - friend of my mother's, her age, who had a heavy French accent and made the kind of remarks which today would be considered "sexual harassment" but which to my chubby, moonstruck 16-year-old self seemed deliciously romantic).

But no mentor ever really materialized, certainly not until I was well past my "sell by" date as far as the world of classical music was concerned and that relationship was tumultuous and short lived.

But getting back to Maytime, what surprised me was how sad it made me.  That she lived without love and grew old alone. So she advised her young friend to make a different choice.

Oh - and before that, at the concert rehearsal, I heard someone sing "You're Nobody 'til Somebody Loves You". That made me sad too.  And I realized it said "You're Nobody 'til Somebody Loves You", not "You're Nobody 'til You're Famous, Have a Brilliant Career, or Have Your Name in the Newspaper".  And yes, somebody has loved me for three and a half decades.

So this is yet again about The Road Not Taken, which I mentioned in my previous post.

So why do there have to be two roads that separate?  Why can't life be more like a balanced meal?