A Need to Change the Narrative

Or move the needle, as people are always saying.

I am trying to make a happy life for myself by putting as much creativity in it as I have time for, and being grateful for the rest.

I don't consider taking care of my partner a burden; it's not just that I love her, I also find many of the people-rich activities I am involved in as her caregiver to be stimulating.  I love most of the aides who take care of her. They have opened my eyes and heart to a whole world that is very different from the one I grew up in and still live in, and which always leaves me feeling that I don't measure up.

A team of nurses came to see my partner.  We are now enrolled in a program that originated when she was in the hospital the last time.  It is geared toward people over 75 who end up in the hospital via an emergency room.  They suggested that I buy her a coloring book.  Now they are trying to get her a "buddy" (which would be a graduate student) from the Alzheimers Association.

I have one mini concert on the horizon and am doing some other networking.  My far off future plan, if my loved one dies and I am still healthy, is to sing for seniors not just by giving concerts but also by volunteering at nursing homes where I could come sing at their bedsides (or talk with them, listen to their stories, read, or anything else).

I am not going to try to get any kind of advanced degree.  I hate academics.  I can do this as a volunteer and continue to spend 20 hours a week copy editing.  It is boring and isolating, but it is what I need  mostly because I can make my own schedule and I know how to find work.  It is a very low maintenance kind of livelihood.  And (God works in mysterious ways) I now am working on a journal about aging.

Here's the problem:  I am distracted by bright shiny objects.

Almost every new person I meet is a real performer of some kind.  Is or was.  Is enough to have a web site and a list of credits going back to high school.  Gorgeous professional head shots. A place to be seen. For example, if I tick off the 20 or so people in my choir, more than half of them have music or theater degrees and more than half of them have advanced professional degrees from prestigious schools.  Many people have both.  Someone new joined the choir (she is very nice, and not someone I would be competing with because she is a musical theater style belter) who has a flashy web site and a public presence. (Right now she has taken a "break" from regional theater to work in tech, and who knows? She might stay there.) But her web site is what I mean by a bright shiny object.  Not the site so much as the fact that someone I met in a church choir has one. I want one too.  I suppose I could make myself one, but what for? I have this blog, and a Youtube channel, but I am not part of the conversation.  People will tell me "oh, you sounded lovely" but I am still at the bottom of the food chain.  The people in my Pilates class are all retired academics, or something similar.  One was a casting agent, one was (is?) an architect.

I can be having a happy day and then something coming out of the tsunami of uber-successful people I am drowning in will act as a trigger and I will dissolve into self deprecation because I am not a "bright shiny object" the way they are.  Someone told me (I suppose a propos of all the talk about Stormy Daniels) that with my large frontage (real), my age (a niche market) and my expertise with hair, makeup, wigs, and even masks, I could have a web site full of "adult" photographic content.  Is this the best I can do?? No thank you.  Prudery aside, that's an overcrowded market, too.  Is there anything that isn't?

If I can't have bright shiny objects (or be one) why can't I change the narrative? I can lose myself and be happy in small things (although nothing - except snuggling with my frail, sweet, partner - makes me as happy as getting up in front of an audience, singing well, and hearing applause) so why can't I stay there?

ETA: As always a glutton for punishment, I went back and googled "choir girl" to see what else I could find (a Facebook page? see who her friends are?) and found an article from last year's TIMES about her and her roommate (an aspiring opera singer) not about them as performers but about their travails with a North Manhattan apartment (I don't want to link to the article here for the sake of people's privacy).  There was a gorgeous photo, and quite a lot about these two young women.  So how did they nail a piece of publicity like that? That's what I'm dying to know.  Are aspiring performers better at networking with journalists so that they can promote themselves in every way possible? I know a lot of people have various apartment travails and they don't have huge pictures of themselves in the paper. This just confirms my whine that I just don't know the right people.

Lost and Found, and More Musings on Friendship

Well, surprise, surprise!

Yesterday out of the blue I heard from the woman who had deleted my video(s) from her Youtube channel, and attached to her email was a link through which she "shared"  one of the videos with me.  Because of the format it was in, I was able to download it and save it on my computer hard drive and upload it to my own Youtube channel (which is pretty sparse in its offerings).  I thanked her profusely.

Here's the bitter irony.

Over my two years or so of corresponding with LC, always deep from the heart and the gut - at her prompting; she sent me materials from her "Covenant Group" (a UU offshoot) that had word prompts that were supposed to lead to deep reflection and honest sharing - I (thinking she was someone I could trust) shared a lot of anger and resentment that I felt toward people in my life.  With one exception, none of this anger and resentment constituted a deal-breaker, I just wanted to get things off my chest and LC appeared to be a willing listener.  Having been trained as a counselor, I assumed that she could be adroit at changing the course of a "discussion" if something made her uncomfortable (or simply saying that she didn't want to talk about a particular thing, which would have been fine with me).  Never in a million years did I assume that the things I said would make her angrier and angrier until one day she would tell me she never wanted me to communicate with her again.  People with psychological savvy don't do those sorts of things, one would think.  There are so many more subtle and less drastic ways to back off from a relationship that is becoming uncomfortable.

The bitter irony is that I am now back in touch (and happy to be so) with all the people I told LC I was angry with, because I vented about them to her (and perhaps one other friend), to my therapist, and in these "pages", but said little, if anything, to them themselves, although they all knew I was teed off.  Much better than reading someone the riot act, or telling someone you can't tell them why you don't want them to communicate with you because it would be hurtful, which it is the same thing, really.

As I said, because  I'm "talky", forbidding me to "talk" is the cruelest thing anyone can do if I've cared about them at all, or opened up to them the way I did with her.  (It's like someone asking you to strip naked and then telling you how ugly you look, basically.  If she had thought I had an "ugly" soul, wouldn't she have had an inkling of that long before she had to enjoin me from communicating with her?)  I would rather have a screaming match, complete with insults, apologies, hugs, and tears. To me that's what intimacy is.

And as I've said about LC, I am astounded that she managed to raise four children, three of whom she is still in touch with, along with various ancillary relatives.  To do that, you have to either "work through" conflict, or find a tactful way to back off.  You can't just throw someone in the garbage and walk away smugly thinking you smell like a rose.

I have to say here that I don't "miss" her.  All that navel-gazing that these email interchanges elicited was probably very bad for my mental health.  It's that I feel angry and ripped off and I think "how dare someone do that to me?" And because she isn't part of the fabric of my life I have no one to commiserate with as in "oh, she'a a bitch.  She behaved like that with me [or with so and so]; just write her off and get on with your life."  I know she is estranged from one of her sons, and when she told me the circumstances, quoting herself, I can see why. He was talking during her grandson's (his nephew's) funeral and instead of just saying "shhh" and looking stern - what I would have done - she said in that smarmy way she has "Now would be a good time to be silent".  So he was silent.  He has never spoken to her again.  I almost felt like writing to him (he has a Facebook account) but decided against it because I find his political views so odious.  Of course her daughter is still a "friend" on Facebook but they live together, so I don't want to get into it with the daughter.  But I have considered unfriending her (or at least unfollowing her) several times because every time she types something about "Mom" I want to either scream or throw up.

So as I said, the irony is that all the people I was angry at (mostly over last year's birthday) are now back in my life as friends, no hard feelings, even the woman whom I thought had deliberately deleted my video, and the woman I used as a confidante has dumped me.

I really wish I could just forget her.  At the last Moon Circle we were each given an egg to smash on the ground and were told to have it symbolize something we wanted to let go of.  So I imagined LC's smirking face.  Wish it had worked, but it didn't.

Oh well, time heals all wounds.

And at my last lesson, I ended Trovatore on the best B flat I have ever sung.

Back to the Wizard of Oz OR My Kingdom for a Video

Well guess what?  I woke up this morning, read my email, looked at Facebook, and there was a video clip of Little Miss, posted by her musician/composer/conductor boyfriend, with endless kvelling.

I have, to date, not been able to obtain the video of me singing "I Know that My Redeemer Liveth".  The church Communications Director said it was too big to download easily, although when we last spoke, he was doing just that.  I don't want to bother him again.  It's too bad, because I was happy with how I sounded, at least in the bit that I heard.

Yes, I have talent, and now I have a decent technique too, and I'm even pretty good looking for someone almost 66, but what I don't have (hence the Wizard of Oz reference) are any cheerleaders.

My voice teacher doesn't know how to make videos with a phone.  He says he used to make videos of all his performances (I guess someone else operated the camera) but he now has told me he doesn't like how he looks on camera.  He is going to make an audiotape of Carmen, he told me.

Well, I guess the next thing I am going to do is write to my former boss, the photographer, and see if he can bring some kind of camera to document the performance in some manner or form, so that I can have something to post and kvell over.

How can I not feel despondent when no one even cares enough about all this to document me?

Is this little blog really all there is?

Unforgettable?

Overall, things have been going very well.

I nailed the big note at the end of the anthem, with no negative feedback that it was unsuitably loud.

And I now have a "fan".  A woman who is a seminarian studying to be a minister as a second career, who is also an artist and a poet, has come up to me and raved not just about three solos that she heard me sing, but also about hearing my voice cut across the top of the choir singing the "Hallelujah Chorus" and this past Sunday's anthem.

And last night I sang through the entire Carmen program, setting the timer for the breaks I will get when the narrator is reading, and everything went well (even the B in the "Sequidilla"!) and I did not get tired. I need to work on the "Card Aria" and some of the recitative, but otherwise that's it.

In less happy news, I have still not received the video of "Redeemer".  When I asked the Communications Director for it last Sunday (it had been a week) I prefaced my request with "I know how busy you are" and he said, "Oh, it's not that, I just forgot".

Now "forgetting"  is not something that sits well with me on any level.  Being too busy, yes, I understand that.  It was like Rich Lady apparently having "forgotten" my birthday.  I WILL NOT BE "FORGETTABLE".  I will not have that.

When I wrote to a friend and asked her what she thought I should do next, she told me to ask him, when I see him this coming Sunday, just to email me the video then and there.  It is probably something he can do with his phone.  He had also, when he first made it, said that if I wanted, he could cut it down so that I could use a section of it for posting.  Then my friend said "Don't take it personally, it's not about you."  But that's the whole point. I'm upset because "it wasn't about me".  I want things to be "about me".  At least sometimes.  At least as much as Little Miss has things that are "about her". She doesn't have to beg people for videos and plead with them to post them on Facebook and kvell.  People just do it.  And all I was asking for was a video.  I was willing to do my own kvelling, such as could be done without being "unseemly".

People: is this lady really so forgettable?