The Pursuit of Excellence

At first glance this post will seem to diverge from the topic of the day, but there is a connection.  As a late-starting classical singer who, no matter how hard I work, no matter how well I now sing, will never ever be as polished as someone who spent 8 years at a conservatory as a vocal performance major,  this article really hit home.  I am probably not what he means by a true amateur or a hobbyist.  I sing well, well enough to give solo recitals, sometimes with other people, at nursing homes and senior centers, and to sing featured solos at church services, but anyone who has spent years at a conservatory and who mingles in those circles, can tell that I am not the real deal.  I still have rough spots in my singing technique (far fewer with each passing year, and I am 68 now), I am not 100% musically literate, my language pronunciation is not always perfect, and I often look awkward on stage (not very awkward; I am good at connecting with audiences, but I am unsure how to enter and exit, bow, and keep my arms still if I think doing this or that will help my singing).

The author wrote "Especially when it comes to physical pursuits, but also with many other endeavors, most of us will be truly excellent only at whatever we started doing in our teens."  Which is what I have been saying all along.

What is so sad, is that, with performing arts at least (I think sports are different, maybe) there is no place for people like me.  There are all sorts of choruses, but no performance groups that are simply for older avocational performers who may need a little polishing.  Or if there were one, it would, like all the "amateur" opera groups, be overrun with out of work professionals and young people looking to get a leg up.  So what I'm saying is there are not performance groups for people like me that have a way of keeping certain types of people out. 

And then there's the vitriol.  Which is one reason I have stopped participating in singer discussion groups.  I find my blood pressure is a lot lower if I stick to groups that talk about pets, British tv, and literature. If I want to know about singing I can talk to my voice teacher, my choir directors, or my accompanists.  Until I made contact with these groups I had no idea that by referring to myself as an "opera singer" (well yes, that's what I've trained to sing and that is the kind of music I do sing even if it's just in a nursing home) I was besmirching an art form, leading the public astray, and doing damage to OPERA as a cause to be promoted.  I actually find that hard to believe.  If anything could turn people off opera as an art form it's the mud-slinging these people get involved in, with each other and at people they deem "their inferiors".

To the second part of this post, it seems that it doesn't link up with the horrors of this week, but in a way it does.  I read an article in the Times a few days ago that spoke of the world that Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford grew up in: unrealistically high expectations, high achievement, and escaping from the pressure with drunken debauchery.

Some of that was familiar territory to me, some not.  My father was a professor and most of my parent's friends were doctors, academics, and school principals.  Their sons were expected to be doctors.  Their daughters were expected to be what I call "Jane Austen" girls.  Do well in school, be smart, but not smarter than the boys, and stick to the arts: literature, painting, playing a musical instrument, singing a little, taking some ballet classes.  Get into a good college so that you can meet the right kind of husband.  My generation rebelled, but differently.  First and foremost we rebelled by rejecting achievement.  Turn on, tune in, and drop out.  And for many of us, we stayed "dropped out" long after we discontinued drug or alcohol abuse.

The parties described by Blasey Ford and others, though, are quite different from the ones I attended (and I was a little older).  Yes, alcohol flowed freely, drugs were readily available, and there was lots of meaningless casual sex, but nothing was ever violent.  Was that because we were the "free love" generation? The men who were there were ones who had found a way to avoid going to Vietnam, who hated war, who, yes, wanted lots of women to be available and didn't want to be tied down, but I don't remember anyone forcing himself on me or anyone else.  We were all in it together.  Looking back I would call it "quasi-consensual" sex.  Things I and other women wouldn't have done it we'd been sober, but I don't remember anyone assaulting or pursuing me if I said "NO", which of course I was more likely to do if I was sober.  Love was free then.

Not long after that I became a Lesbian Separatist and we encouraged each other to observe the "Pence rule" if we had to venture beyond the bounds of our sect (mainly this meant at work).  Don't consume alcohol at mixed parties (many of us were twelve steppers anyhow).  Don't go for a meal alone with a man.  Dress modestly.  If you work in an office with straight men and it's too conservative for pants suits, make sure your skirt comes below your knees.  Don't smile excessively.  Be businesslike and matter of fact.  Apparently that (and the fact that I worked in an industry that was predominately female) stood me in good stead. 

If I am bitter about anything from those days, it is not that I got myself into sleazy situations when I had had too much to drink (or more) but all the waste.  Time and energy I could have spent on my talent. Yes, "Especially when it comes to physical pursuits, but also with many other endeavors, most of us will be truly excellent only at whatever we started doing in our teens."   Those people must have been around in 1968 or in 1971.  Why didn't I take my cue from them?

My Fun Home

A few months ago, my partner's visiting nurse, who has become a friend, took us to see Fun Home the musical. We loved every minute of it and not just the subject matter. It was a moving story, the music was original (and melodic, not to be taken for granted in this era of generic scream-belting), the text was witty, and the performances, particularly 11 year old Sydney Lucas, were stellar. Yesterday, in looking for a clip of this song to send to someone, I stumbled upon this clip of Beth Malone and it got me musing about my life as bisexual woman (for years exclusively a Lesbian), about transgender issues (which are in the news a great deal these days), and about my struggles to make sense, years ago, of what it meant to be a Lesbian singing opera.

The first thing I was struck by watching the musical, was that Alison seemed to be at least as much transgender as Lesbian.  Her first inklings of being Lesbian seemed to be all intertwined with not feeling comfortable in a girly party dress. I think I was aware of attractions to women when I was quite young (always older women in positions of power), but I also was happiest in a pink party dress.  In fact I was probably more cis-gender (the current term) than most girls who grew up to be straight.  I loved dresses, dolls, and fairy tales, and hated sports.

One of the highlights of the show (referenced above) is the song "Ring of Keys" about young Alison's first encounter with a butch woman, seeing her from a distance.  I smiled listening to the song because the first time I saw a woman who looked like that I was transfixed as well (I think I was much older - in high school) but in a completely different way.  Recently I imagined what it would be like to sing that song (I would probably need permission) somewhere and I realized that I would have to change one line.  The issue for me wasn't "I think we're alike in a certain way" but "I think we would fit in a perfect way".  A perfect yin and yang.  The first time I saw a woman who looked like that yes, I could see immediately that I would have a lot more fun "under" someone like that than I had had with clueless, fumbling high school boys, or even the slightly older college men I had dated.

I was actually quite shocked to hear Beth Malone speaking about her experiences.  She referred to herself, playing straight women onstage as "being in drag".  Isn't that transgender?  I don't hear gay men in the theater referring to themselves as being in drag when they wear trousers and play a romantic lead.  If you're acting you're not yourself.  And chances are if you're acting the person you're playing a love scene with isn't someone you're madly attracted to, regardless of the person's gender.  I know that over the years it seemed that about 90% of the Lesbians I knew had a visceral negative reaction to putting on a skirt.  To me that seemed so "other".  And what especially confused me was that these very women would be outraged if I referred to them as "butch" or expected them to behave in such a manner with me.  And they didn't even particularly want me.  They wanted someone who looked like them.  I just never got it.  Yes, there was the feminist take on skirts, which I certainly understood when I was working in low paying jobs.  If you wear skirts, you need pantyhose (unless you have gorgeous tanned, slim, legs, or don't care if you look utterly drippy) and pantyhose run at the drop of a hat and are expensive.  So pants make more sense.  But pants are functional (which is fine at work, because work is functional) and feeling romantic and full of desire (which I don't feel in pants) is something else.

I remember when I tried to explain to someone on the Forum about my experiences playing Laura in La Gioconda, and about my feeling that I "shouldn't" want to be onstage playing a woman in a dress (even though I loved every minute of it) someone told me I was being "ridiculous" and that the women telling me these things couldn't be Lesbian, they must be transgender (and this happened to be a gay man).

In any event, I am happy to be shed of all that orthodoxy.  It has only taken me 40 years.  Whom I want to sleep with (the Mentor excepted, of course) is one thing.  What I like to wear is something else.  They are not synonymous and no I don't feel like I'm in drag wearing a dress I feel like a million dollars.  And I would have to act just as much kissing Enzo if I had a husband at home as I would if I had a "butch beau" at home (I will never have a wife; if there's any wife in the equation it would be me).  And I hate very short hair.  It looks God-awful on most women unless they have perfect cheekbones and a slim body like Beth Malone.  Even most butches.

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.