The End of a Decade

I know I owe readers a post (I still seem to have readers, although I have had no new comments for over a year) but I haven't felt much like writing these days.  Oddly, I think it's because whether or not I'm happier, I'm more at peace with myself.

First and most importantly, I have found a singing "home": singing concerts and recitals for seniors at nursing homes and other senior venues. I have given up trying to break into the world of the no-pay opera companies.  I really am too old.  Not from a vocal standpoint, but from the standpoint that not only is my arthritis too limiting for me to run all over a stage (including using stairs and wearing heels), I also don't see myself traveling between the boroughs (or even here in Manhattan) for rehearsals that begin after 7:00 and run as late as 10 pm.  These days I wake up between 6 and 7:30 and can barely keep my eyes open by 9:30.

Also church singing.  I have decided it doesn't matter whether I am or am not Christian.  Church singing is an art form and it's one I am good at.  What's important is conveying a message to an "audience" that is meaningful to them.  A good high church service is a form of liturgical theater.  That is not to say that I am not moved by the spiritual messages (and this church is politically to the far left, so there is a strong social justice message as well).  And I have met a nice group of women my age.  I am not strictly speaking a "member" of the church, but I do give them money.  As I've often said, I feel "too Jewish" to want to be baptised but not "too Jewish" to have a Christmas tree (or to celebrate Christmas in general) or to sing church music.  I mean aside from the "star" soloists, the world is full of non-Christians who sing in the sort of big choruses that put on requiems and masses.

As for how church music measures up compared with opera, it requires the same kind of vocal technique but is not as strenuous (the range is more truncated, for one thing) and if you sing in a church you're basically singing one aria or song and the services are in the morning which is a better chronobiological "fit" for me these days.

Right now the most important thing to me is making the end of my partner's life as sweet as possible.  All the pieces are in place (Medicaid, hospice) so I just have to stay with her on this journey.  I would like to think she will live longer than two months, but I don't know if she will see another Thanksgiving or Christmas.

I am still "orphaned" and can't seem to break through that form of isolation.  I have made a lot of new friends, but I am not a priority with them.  By the time people are my age they have accumulated a multigenerational family that branches all over the globe, so it seems.  My orphan state is the result of 100 years of choices by my forebears.

My father was the only child of an actress who divorced her husband almost immediately after he was born.
My mother had one sister whom she fell out with.
Her sister had one son who isn't interested in "connecting" with me (I made numerous attempts).
His wife is not a "social" being (she is an academic who writes books).
They have one son (he is probably in college by now).
I am an only child.
I have no children.


So I am no one's "obligation".  Last year at this time when I was asked what I wanted that I didn't have, interestingly, I didn't mention singing.  I said "A birthday celebration that I don't have to plan or pay for" and "someone whose name I can put down on a form as an emergency contact".  And both those things are related.  I still don't have either. For many people it's a sibling, an adult child, or an adult niece or nephew.  They may not be close, but there is duty.

I was told I could have my partner's funeral at the church.  If I plan some music, people will come.  I don't know what will happen to me when I die.  Will I really be in a situation where there is no one left but a lawyer?

Hospitality, Gay Choruses, Waifs, and How All Roads Led to My Weight

Thanksgiving is coming and that is more and more becoming a hard time for me.  My partner is dying (I have this on the authority of the hospice nurse; her albumin levels are dropping and her arm circumference is getting smaller).  Thanksgiving was our anniversary, although I always celebrate it on November 25 because that was the date. This year the two days are far enough apart that we can have two celebrations.  "Celebrating" will consist of figuring out something she is willing to eat and eating it in bed in front of the tv.  Probably feeding her as well.  She can use her right hand to hold a fork, but she likes being fed.  Unless she is eating something sweet, hunger does not motivate her.  Thanksgiving is about food and family.  For my entire life I had a conflicted relationship with the former, and for good or ill, I do not have the latter.  I can't remember the last time I sat at a Thanksgiving table where the people were related by blood.  In high school? In my early 20s?  When my grandparents were alive and my mother and her sister were still speaking to each other, we all had a meal together.  I dreaded these because beginning at the age of 12, I was always on a diet.  I had been overweight as a child (actually, certainly by the time I was 12, I was overweight because I was a child; if I had been an adult my BMI at that age would have put me at the top end of "normal") and yearned to be thin.  I hated being confronted with mountains of food.

At church last Sunday a friend of mine said that her mother had a "gift for hospitality" and that she had inherited it.  (Like so many New Yorkers, she has too small - and perhaps too messy - an apartment to "do" hospitality in, so she cooks for people in the church kitchen.) My mother, too, had a gift for hospitality.  Our house was always full of people and she was always serving food.  There was a nonstop feast.  If I was overweight, my mother was obese.  I swore that I would never be like that.  My house would not be full of food.  Art, yes, pets, yes, books, yes (I did  inherit my mother's love of art and books). Food, no. As a young adult things were easier for me.  I had learned how to say "no" to food even when it was around.  I spent my 20s at Lesbian AA Thanksgivings.  None of the women there were on good terms with their parents so we created our own world.  I could ignore the food and dance.  Or flirt.  Finally, I made a modicum of peace with my mother and for years my partner and I would have Thanksgiving dinner at her house.  She would invite one or two guests.  By then I was a vegetarian and so my mother did not make a traditional Thanksgiving feast.  That was not her style of cooking anyhow (I think when she was alive my grandmother had cooked the meal for us.)  I am a firm believer that people get the punishments they deserve.  Mine, for valuing cultural norms of thinness over family and good fellowship, is spending most holidays with nothing but scraps.  Although I cling to how grateful I am that my partner is still alive.  When she goes maybe I will leave the country that week, go to a place where no one celebrates Thanksgiving.

This may sound like a non sequitur, but I just found out that my friend Abbie's granddaughter is a Lesbian.  She is still in high school.  The thrill of her life, according to her mother (Abbie's daughter) is being part of an LGBTQ youth chorus.  How wonderful!  But here's what I wonder.  I got a letter from Abbie's daughter (it was a group email sent to a large number of people, most of whom probably live in the same city where Abbie's daughter and her family live) about the chorus's holiday concert.  She and her husband are "patrons".  She stressed in the email that her daughter is lucky to have the "blessing" of her parents, that so many of the youth in this chorus have been rejected by their parents and that many are poor and can't get a hot meal, so the chorus serves a hot meal before rehearsal, free of charge.  I wonder.  When I came out and immersed myself in the Lesbian community, one of the biggest attractions was that it was a world of parent-less peers.  Many of those women, too, had been rejected by their parents.  Oh, how I envied them!  Being a part of that group gave me the courage to push my overbearing Jewish mother out of my life and be myself.  When you're a teenager, is something as much fun if your parents approve of it?  I don't know, maybe times have changed.  I also remember part of the fun being that we didn't have much money (this was in the 70s, when you could still live cheaply in New York) and certainly my partner and I never ate much.  Probably only getting one hot meal a week (and living otherwise on nuts and containers of yogurt) at 26 I weighed 20 pounds less than I had at 12.

Was I always looking at everything the wrong way round, I wonder?

A Family Quarrel

The older I get, the more of a loss it feels that I don't have a family.  Families seem to be something that most people take for granted; sort of like arms or teeth. Some people like theirs, some don't. But most people seem to have some kind of "next of kin" who will step up to the plate, however begrudgingly, if something is needed.  It might involve a cross-continental move (usually on the part of the needful - I am thinking of a friend dying of cancer who moved in with her sister in the MidWest) but someone is there.

Once my partner became non compos, one day it dawned on me that I am no longer anyone's responsibility or problem.  I have no "in case of emergency please notify".  I can't think of anyone who would consider it their obligation to cancel their plans because I was in the hospital with, say, a concussion.  Yes, I have an attorney, a physician, a psychotherapist, and a pastor.  I have friends but they are all busy (we squeeze each other in once a month for an outing).

All this is a prelude to my writing about my first cousin.  I do have a first cousin, who lives in New York (Brooklyn?), has a wife, and has a son (who is probably at college or beyond now). But he cares less about me than a stranger on the street would, and I would trust him less than I would trust that stranger to make a life or death decision for me.

When I was growing up my family consisted of my parents, my mother's parents, my mother's sister (my aunt), her husband, and their son (the cousin).  At some point my mother and her sister had a falling out.  I can't be sure over what, but it had something to do that even though my aunt and uncle published a communist-leaning magazine and went to all sorts of meetings and conferences, my uncle suddenly had developed a passion for antiques and was buying and selling them, making money hand over fist, which included bilking people by telling them that what they had was worth very little when in fact this was a lie.  All he suddenly wanted to talk about was money.  When he wasn't bragging about his Chippendale chairs, my aunt was on a soapbox exhorting my mother not to vote (I think she was talking about the fact that my mother was going to vote for Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, so I would have been 30.)

After that it was downhill all the way.  My mother made a decision not to have anything to do with her sister.  Although there was a temporary thaw when my grandparents suddenly needed care (see my opening paragraphs).  My mother handled the appointments and paperwork, her sister handled the money.  The last and final quarrel they had ('Tis the final conflict LOL!) was over the fact that my aunt sold a lot of my grandparents' possessions and offered to divide up the proceeds with my mother without having asked my mother first if she wanted anything as a memento.

So this brings me to the cousin (my "next of kin" whom I will do anything to avoid listing on any form which might spell the difference between life and death for me, like a health care proxy).  Why he decided to continue the quarrel on to the next generation, I have no idea.  I tried to make contact a few times.  When he got a big promotion.  When he and his wife had a baby.  No reply. About a year after this my aunt had a stroke and was put in a nursing home.  My mother actually went to visit her once a week.  She was appalled at how little care the family (uncle, cousin, wife) were trying to obtain for her.  All they talked about was how to get her on Medicaid without losing the house.  I came once and took pictures of my cousin and his family (this was back in the days of old fashioned film cameras).  I sent him the pictures.  I got no reply.  Not shortly thereafter my mother stopped visiting her sister because there had been a two week period when she had not visited because she had been ill.  Uncle never called to ask how she was.

I remember having a talk with my mother about all this (more than one talk, I am sure) about why we couldn't just have a family that hated each other but kept in touch on special occasions, like other people.  She said she thought things might have been different if my cousin's wife had had any social skills, but that she did not.  A friend, recently, also mentioned this.  She said often women will reach out to family and try to patch up quarrels (for example the loathesome LC has stopped speaking to one of her sons but she is still on good terms with his wife). The wife did once or twice reach out to my mother, always tentatively and fearfully, according to my mother, so she might have been afraid of my mother.  But why ignore me? Wasn't she curious?  Any one with a rudimentary knowledge of psychology should know that a 90 year old mother and her 55 year old daughter are not one flesh!

But the family quarrel is not what prompted me to write this blog post.  It's an old story.  What prompted me to write was that last night, just because, I googled the name of my cousin's wife.  I knew she was some sort of academic who wrote about feminism, and that she had co-authored several academic-type articles (I never read any of them).  Well!  It turns out that she has written four or five books (one coming out next year) on fascinating subjects ranging from criminology to the rise and fall of feminism.  My cousin is a criminologist who has bounced back and forth between academia, government, and the world of foundations.  He even got a George Soros grant once.

So this just again emphasizes how tiny a fish I am in a world that seems to be overwhelmingly populated by those who are much larger.

I'm good at this and I'm good at that and I sing and I write and I know about all sorts of things but I am still in the 10% of my social acquaintance, family, and childhood friends and schoolmates who has no flashy academic credentials, bylines, or serious theater or music work in my past.

I was just starting to make some headway learning how to be grateful for my little life, and now this.

What am I lacking?  I have brains and various talents.

As I said not long ago, if I can't do well, I guess I have to settle for doing good.

Obit

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

I have so many mixed feelings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Father and a Daughter, and Some Sadness

Several months ago, I wrote about my sadness over a father's pride in a daughter's blog post. Well, there was a deja vu this afternoon, when the father, once again, referenced one of his daughter's blog posts with pride.

This father, this daughter, their respective lifestyles, their "issues", and, not least, the father's (non)relationship with me, hit so many nerves.

First, the father is a professional musician.  He has been extremely helpful to me, giving me guidance about one or two things when I asked for advice, and his advice was sound.  If it hadn't been for that advice, I wouldn't be doing some of what I'm doing today.  On the other hand, based on our interactions on Facebook (we have never met) it is obvious that I am not part of the "inner circle".  There is a way that professional musicians talk with each other that is "clubby" and exclusive that does not include serious hobbyists and to this serious hobbyist, at least, this is quite obvious.

Second, he is genuinely proud of his daughter.  As an adult, a separate person.  My parents loved me, but only as a child.  When I began to have adult concerns (am I pretty?  why am I not popular?) I was just blown off.  My father died when I was in high school, at the height of our estrangement.  Would he have encouraged me to sing, I wonder?  (I know he would have beaten me bloody if he had ever seen me smoking.)  And my mother, who died fairly recently (I was 60) never was able to relate to me as a person, only as a piece of property, which as the years went by, so obviously did not meet with her expectations.  She wanted me to be "an intellectual", most particularly a writer, but only on her terms.  She could never remember what I actually did for a living (making it harder for me to learn to like it and have any self-respect in that area) and when I did have a small success with a piece of writing (a play that I suppose would qualify as "chick lit"), she kept the bound copy in her bedroom, while keeping the typescript of a friend's son's postmodern novella on her living room coffee table.

Then there is his daughter's lifestyle.  She is a housewife.  How fortunate!  I would love to have (or at least to have had) the experience of living off someone else's earnings, even briefly.  And obviously I don't mean family.  I mean someone who chose me because in some way I was romantically attractive to them.  I learned from this recent blog post that this young woman had problems with mental illness.  Well, so have a number of people I've known, and most of them have had to soldier on, bouncing from dead end job to dead end job, using the "reasonable accommodation" HR law to get them through if they needed time off.  Most of them could not maintain a long-term relationship, certainly not with someone willing to support them!

In all honesty I can't say that I have ever had a major mental illness (other than active alcoholism, in the very distant past) but I have had various degrees of mental un-wellness that have probably interfered with my fulfilling my potential.  I had a keen eye for jobs where I didn't have to work too hard and could take long lunches to go to AA meetings, spend hours with a phone tucked under my ear while I sized art, and, more recently, blow off steam in email and chat room exchanges.

There are people who like me and people who love me.  I know that.  I suppose sometimes I yearn to feel "showcased" the way that daughter was by that father.

And the bad weather doesn't help.  I know I will have Carmen rehearsals starting soon.  And I will have to fight with my partner, who got angry when I mentioned how fond I was of my new "sponsor" and how much that relationship means to me.  And I was pleasantly surprised at choir practice last week when the choir director asked me, in front of the group, how my concert went.

...When Family is Not Supportive (Reprise)

Because this has been an ongoing theme in my life since I began seriously singing in my 20s, I knew I had made a post on this subject earlier so I went back and re-read it. Many things have happened in the past 11 months: my mother has died, we are on a path toward moving my partner into an assisted living facility, and one of the two auditions I mentioned led to my being cast in a small role, spending $400 on tickets, only to be tortured and bullied by a conductor and deciding I wanted "out" - so badly, in fact, that I didn't even bother to ask for my money back, but just took it as a tax deduction.

Before my mother died, I had been going from time to time to group coaching sessions. I was always the oldest person there, and with the least experience, although compared to some people who showed up, I was often better prepared. I simply didn't have the heart for this for several months (or I was too busy), but on a whim I decided to sign up for one for this afternoon. I didn't plan on singing any opera. I am too stressed out at the moment to sing "Condotta" in public, which is what would be next on the agenda for me (I have already sung "Acerba Volutta", "Stella del Marinar", "O Mio Fernando", Fenena's short aria from Nabucco, and Dido's Lament there, as well as a few pieces of church music.) So I decided to bring "Liber Scriptus" from the Verdi Requiem and "Fac ut Portem" from the Rossini Stabat Mater. (The fact that it's Lent also gave me an excuse to beg off opera.)

Well, my partner gave me this long lecture about why my doing this sort of thing is stupid: I feel bad that other people are younger and better (true), it's a waste of money (not true - these things cost about $15 or $20), and basically she implied that this whole thing is a "fantasy". She said "you sing in a choir and do some solos". Isn't that enough? No. Because, for example, I can't sing a piece like "Liber Scriptus" in that setting.

I spent my whole last therapy session crying about the fact that I have stopped making plans to sing anything other than choir solos. I just feel I can't afford it either monetarily, or in view of my living in a constant family crisis. I know no one is going to "hire" me to do anything, but I also know that if I wheel and deal, I can plan something myself and carry it off well enough to give people an enjoyable afternoon of opera and myself a diva platform which is something I am starved for. But this involves making this particular thing, and the date that it's scheduled for, and the dates that rehearsals are scheduled for, the most important thing in my life (as I'm freelancing now I can always work - if I managed to plan concerts when I had a full-time job I can certainly plan concerts when I'm working at home on my laptop!). And how can I do that when my partner is in a constant state of crisis and she resents the small amount of money I spend on an ad hoc two hours of coaching?

What's holding me back isn't lack of talent or lack of a good teacher or even my age, so much as getting no support from anyone. I know this sounds whiney, and if I were twenty years younger I could just divorce the unsupportive spouse and move on, but I can't do that now.

I don't know why my partner hates the whole idea of my singing opera. I used to think it was because she thought I would meet straight men who found me attractive (or vice versa) but there were plenty of straight men at the career coaching group I went to and she never said anything about it. I think she had an agenda for me and singing was never on it. She wanted me to be a "professional woman" who dressed like the women who show up on tv newscasts in suits. It's similar to how (after we outgrew the whole politically correct Lesbian in jeans thing) she was always steering me toward conservative suits that were two sizes too big, and telling me to cut my hair. That's just not me! If I can't be a real diva I'll be a bathroom diva but I'll be blowed if I'm even going to go do the laundry without makeup on and believe me - I never buy anything that says it's supposed to look "natural" because I don't do "natural".

I thought I sang well enough at the group coaching. I mean I have no future, so the agent husband of the woman who runs it (who is very nice and can sing anything) thought a good time to take a bathroom break was when I was singing, but the woman herself admired my pianissimo high E (well for a mezzo it's a "high" E) in "Fac ut Portem" and one of the men said I had "big high notes" after hearing "Liber Scriptus".

But having no support team just makes me sad. I mean my teacher is good to do some quarterbacking with, but as I've said in the past, he's a voice teacher, not a mentor.

It also makes me angry. I have tried to be forebearing with my partner. I love her, and I feel sad that she is in such physical and mental decline, and I want her in a better living situation. I am even resigned to the fact that I spend "leisure time" doing her chores not going to movies and museums like other healthy women my age. But when she blows off my singing, my heart turns to ice.

Be Who You Are, Love What You Have, Do What You Can

That is a quote, I believe, from the great Unitarian minister Forrest Church.

Yesterday my partner was talking to me and she said "You have so much". Some of this was in connection with her sadness over age and infirmity, which I, despite having, at 60 totally aged out of the serious "emerging pro" track, no matter how well I keep singing, still haven't experienced yet. At least not the "infirmity" part, beyond not being able to easily walk up and down stairs, or being able to walk at all in high heels.

I have a choir that I love, friends there that I respect who respect me, friendly neighbors (not to mention a rent controlled apartment in a prime location in Manhattan), work that I can do at home, and good health.

So why do I keep grieving over what I don't have?

Yesterday I posted a status update on Facebook where I asked "Is letting go the same thing as giving up?"

After my bad experience with the opera production, I began asking myself, should I give up the idea of singing opera forever? An odd question, because the things that are so strenuous about opera (mostly the murderous range and stamina level required)were not relevant in that situation.

Why can't I just be happy singing church solos? There's a lot of great music out there - Bach, Mozart, Rossini and more - none of it requiring me to sing above a G sharp, or even an E or an F most of the time.

And if I can't sightread (I have a sightreading book at home but have never been able to muster up any interest in it - I'd rather learn a new aria) I do a pretty good job of faking it.

What's interesting, is that, apparently unlike many people, I do my best if I am not surrounded by people who do everything better. That just intimidates me. For example, one of the unpleasant things that happened in this opera situation involved an ensemble section, which I had worked on at home with the recording, and thought I knew, but suddenly was unable to sing surrounded by other singers who appeared to have more confidence and knowing that this conductor had his ear pealed for me to make a mistake. Yet the very next week when I went back to choir, I was able, in an almost identical situation, to hold my own on the second soprano part, which I had never sung before other than with the recording, because I knew I was the one people would be leaning on.

So what is it that I want that I don't have? I know I will never have a "career" and interestingly, I don't much care if I get paid for singing or not. I do still have an overpowering yearning to sing certain roles but, well, I can do that. I sang Dalila, didn't I? It would have cost me less to produce Carmen in a church than I spent on tickets to this opera production that I will never get or sell even if I got them.

I guess what I want is respect. Surrounded by conservatory graduates, YAPPers, and "emerging pros" (never mind the real pros) I feel that I am nothing. It's funny. I feel that not only do I not have a future, but I also don't have a past. Until I started frequenting the Forum, I never realized that the places I sang in the 1970s were laughingly referred to as "the opera underground" and thought of as some kind of a joke. So an experience that used to make me proud (that I had sung this or that role) now has been reduced to an embarrassment.

I just am feeling very small right now, like I want to curl up in a corner.

What to Do When Family is not Supportive?

Truth is, I don't know.

Most people's lives revolve around work and family with some occasional mindless down time. So if you sing, or work in another art form, but it's not your livelihood, then what? Shouldn't that be the first thing to go out the window if there's too much stress in your life?

For me and my singing, it's well past the 11th hour. A colleague of mine from choir said that she lost her voice when she left her fifties. Her upper register anyhow. Well, I'll be out of my fifties in a little over two months. So if not now, when?

I happen to have been lucky enough to land two auditions: the one for the Handel opera and now, one for a concert version of a Wagner opera.

Now for those of you "real" singers out there (you know who you are) this is not "work". If I beat the odds and get one of these roles I'll probably end up spending money not making any. And so I still have to look for paying work of some kind. (If I can luck into something freelance, at least I can make my own schedule).

And these auditions are a few days before my S.O. goes into the hospital. In fact one will be at night after I've spent the afternoon with her at a doctor for a pre-op screening. So why am I bothering, people will ask? Because if not now, when? There won't be a "later". It is later.

All the work I put into this to date has been "stolen time". Stolen from job hunting, preparing for a job interview I might have next week, helping my S.O. with the herculean task of organizing paperwork.

Because I deal with two elderly family members, I see a social worker regularly to discuss how they're doing and how I'm doing.

When I met with her earlier this week she said I must not cancel these auditions. I feel (partly) that lack of support from my S.O. (whom I've been involved with for 35 years) was responsible for my giving up singing in 1980. She always thought it was a waste of time, didn't much like opera, thought I needed to focus on things that were lucrative and spend my free time traveling with her and being a part of the Lesbian community which in those days was pretty exclusive and had no room for women who still clung onto "patriarchal" art forms. I didn't know any other Lesbians who sang opera so I had no role models. If there had been someone like Patricia Racette would I have had the inner strength to soldier on? I don't know.

In any event, that was then, this is now, and my caseworker says I can't have a deja vu all over again.

You won't believe this, but I'm actually scared to tell my S.O. about this second audition (the Wagner one, which I just found out about). I'm waiting for the right time. In the meantime, I'll do a little exercise my caseworker told me to do (in fact she asked me did I journal!!!)

ME: I have another audition on Thursday night

So What Do I Think SO Will Say? I thought maybe my going into the hospital would be more important.

Truth Is You're going into the hospital a few days later.

SO Will Probably Say So what I'll get is leftovers. Maybe then I don't want you to come with me to the hospital.

My caseworker told me to "pull a cloak over myself" and just continue on. Not let grief and anger choke up my voice, go to my audition, let this blow over, show up at the hospital, remember I'm dealing with someone who's not playing with a full deck.

Now I'm going to see her off for a little holiday before her surgery. A friend will be taking care of her. So I will study my music.

(Sigh).

You Don't Have to "Feel Like"

People who know me in the real world know that I have two elderly family members in a medical crisis at the same time that I'm looking for paying work (either freelance, or a full time job with a somewhat flexible schedule). This does not leave a great deal of time or energy for singing. When I took an "early retirement buyout" from my last (extremely boring and stressful) full time job ("early retirement" means I get health insurance from them not that I get a pension I can live on) I had envisioned spending a lot of time singing, learning music, and "making my own opportunities". It turns out I have had a lot less time for this than I had hoped due to family issues.

However this does not mean that I don't practice every day!!!

Yesterday I had spent the day at my mother's, had several lengthy phone calls with my S.O. about her upcoming surgery, engaged in numerous email exchanges about work, did a grocery shopping and a laundry, and then before I knew it it was 8:30 pm. I had planned to watch and listen to Carmen on P.B.S. (I will post about that later today or tomorrow) so at first I thought, "Oh, heck! I'll skip practicing and just go have my lesson on Friday [which is now today]"

But then I thought, well, "every little bit helps" and I remembered my Handel audition at the end of the month and how the aria is not memorized, the da capo ornaments are not completely sung into my voice and that when I get up there in two weeks I am determined to sing the expletive deleted out of this piece since I will be competing with women 30 years younger with YAPs and conservatory degrees on their resumes.

So I sang a few arpeggios and sang through the aria from start to finish. It's coming along, I'm able to do all the long runs without breathing (the woman on my recording isn't, FWIW!), it's all starting to fall into place, and wow! I felt really happy to have gotten something accomplished!

And I was done by 9:00. And yes, that half hour made a big difference in bringing me closer to my goal.