Recital Recap

First, I suppose I should apologize for not having something to say about the horrendous events yesterday in Las Vegas.  I guess I should say here that everyone else has no doubt said whatever there is to be said.  I don't generally talk about mass tragedies, the way some people don't talk about politics  I usually feel that I don't have anything meaningful to add. 

As for my recital, overall I felt that t went well, although I won't have a definite sense of it until I see the videos.  The woman who is making my partner's legacy videos came and video'd the whole recital without charging me, which was above and beyond.  She is going to use some of the songs I dedicated to my partner as part of the legacy videos which will be on the nonprofit's web site.

For some inexplicable reason, I started getting a migraine when I got to the venue, which is very unusual.  Since going through menopause 17 years ago I hardly ever get migraines any more unless I go too long without eating or drinking coffee, which was not the case.  My sleeping habits have become erratic, maybe that is it.  I always get enough sleep, but it is often in two segments (Friday night I fell asleep at 10:30, woke up at 3:30, went back to sleep at 5:30 and woke up at 8:30) or I will go to sleep and wake up very early (Saturday night before the recital I fell asleep at 9:30 and woke up the next morning at 5:30.) Which is why, now that I only sing things that I plan, I never book a concert in the evening.

There were a few rough spots, which I noticed, but I doubt most other people did.  My voice teacher may mention them at my next lesson.  Although I could tell that he was mostly pleased.

Two friends who live in Florida came because they happened to be in New York for a few weeks.  They used to live here and we used to go to the opera with them.  At that time I wasn't singing.  I was a little hurt because one of the women said, first, "Wow! You really are a real opera singer" but then added "even if you're no longer at your peak".  This hurt me, on the other hand, it is so off base, that how could I be hurt by it? I know that whatever imperfections I still have, I sing so much better than I used to.

One thing that hurts (and in a way this goes back to my musings on amateur versus professional singers) is that no matter how hard I work, I will never attain the "polish" of someone who went through a Masters of Music program at a conservatory (although I know that I have a better natural instrument than some; some graduates just market their small, musicianly voices to be paid choristers in churches or with symphonies). The problem is that as a woman first in her 50s, then in her 60s, with a variety of responsibilities, there simply was no way that I could become proficient in several languages, and get the kind of currying and combing that people get if they sing in performance classes and in front of juries all the time, while also working on vocal technique.  Practicing an hour a day, learning repertoire (including choir music), and at least understanding what I was singing, has been about all I have been able to manage.  The most I can afford financially is two voice lessons a month (which is fine; when I started I had enough basic technique to be able to work on my own and progress from lesson to lesson) and two sessions with an accompanist if I am going to be performing.  I have improved my musicianship by singing with the choir, and if I haven't taught myself to sightread, I know it is out of laziness and lack of interest.  But my lack of "polish" is something I am keenly aware of.  One way, at least, that I am making progress with this is by asking someone to make a video every time I sing a church solo.  That is not a big deal; I just had to bite the bullet and ask.  So I can see myself and see what needs fixing.

In other news, it turns out I will not be singing at the funeral.  Apparently the woman who died left instructions for what she wanted (why not??) and a soloist singing the piece I had chosen was not a "fit".  (Apparently neither was a choir anthem.)  So it will be interesting to see what the funeral is like.  I plan to go in any event, to pay my respects.

In other parts of my life, I am working on a memoir, about religion, British literature, and church music.  A woman I know who is a retired literature professor said she would read the chapter I wrote about reading Dickens.

And (in the not so good news) I now have to get my partner recertified for Medicaid.  I'm terrified that if the paperwork isn't in order she'll be struck off.  I just have to have faith, I guess, that all the knowledgeable people I have working with me will see that everything is as it should be.

What I Yearn for and How to Get It

I rarely post twice in one day, but I came across this post on my reading list and had to share it, because it is this that I feel so desperately deprived of, as a mature, now officially "physically challenged" church and concert soloist.

I yearn to dress up, get into mischief, flirt, play with props.  Especially in the realm of make believe on someone else's dime.

Sure, I could try to stage "fancy dress" parties (as the British call them) but it would probably cost a fortune (I can hardly see doing this in my studio apartment!) and the little bit of mischief I get into has to be very discreet.

If I can barely get on and off a bus and am so terrified of slipping on the sidewalk that I use a cane not only if it's snowing but even if it's just raining (and this has nothing to do with my recent back injury), I can hardly run all over a stage engaging in high jinks.

OK, so what can I do?

Lean back against the piano singing "Moonfall".  My SO won't be at the concert so I can wear something low cut.

Slither among the guests singing the "Habanera" and hand out flowers.  The producer is going to give me some beautiful silk roses so I won't need to buy any.  And even I can walk indoors in heels, and if I think the floor is slippery, I can wear ballet flats.

A Ghost from the Past

It's a new year.  This year I didn't make any resolutions....couldn't think of any.  I am of course continuing with my promise to always have a singing project as well as a church solo on the horizon.

And I feel that I grew a lot in 2012 as a result of my involvement with The Artist's Way. It has given me a way out of a life that is too quiet, colorless, and mundane for my taste. So I suppose my New Year's resolution is to "do something colorful and fabulous every day", something that engages with the senses.

It seems also that this is going to be the year of self-esteem.  The first thing I have done, after three years of blogging, is turn on the "moderate all comments" function.  That means no comment will show up here without my seeing it first.

Please note: This is not meant to discourage commenters.  I am eager to have more readers and more commenters!  I will accept most comments with a few exceptions.  I will not tolerate "lectures" that are meant to "shame" me out of one my funks, which I can get into frequently.  Helpful suggestions are welcome, as is advice about vocal issues. And I will not tolerate cruelty. I have begun screening comments because about a year ago I posted some sound clips here, hoping for some honest constructive criticism, by which I mean this sort of thing, from voice teachers, coaches, or experienced singers (who would all know what "flaws" might be the result of the recording process), but what happened instead was I was ripped to shreds (not just told my singing was horrible, but that I probably didn't practice enough!!) by someone with less experience that I had.  As you can see from the referenced blog post, someone I respect very much said that this person meant to do damage (he had read her comments before I deleted them), which I guess is rather sad.  I would have long let this go (I have sent the clips to other people and gotten the sort of combination of compliments and constructive criticism I had been looking for) except that this woman keeps posting comments here, not nasty ones, but she continues to behave like a bratty child trying to get my attention.  I would not even give her the time of day by writing about this, but I want to alert most potential commenters to the fact that they are welcome and that their comments will be read, answered, and appreciated!

Second, something very strange happened yesterday, which has led me to want to devote a blog post to the topic of a ghost from the past.  The strange thing also involved an assault on my self-esteem, which I put a stop to.

Someone I had known in childhood and adolescence, a heterosexual male who had always been a friend, but never anything else (the feeling was mutual), "friended" me on Facebook yesterday.  A lot of what our past friendship had been about was his attraction to a friend - no, a "frenemy" - of mine, a girl named Beth (not her real name) who was a stuckup princess with a heart of ice.  I need to make it quite clear that despite being attracted to women, I was never attracted to Beth, only envious of her. More about Beth in a minute, but first I want to mention that after this man friended me, we exchanged several emails most of which were about his continued obsession with Beth, whom he had found on Facebook. I realized after a few exchanges that this man's only interest in renewing a friendship with me was to talk about Beth, so I "unfriended" him and told him frankly that I didn't want to continue this type of interaction, that I might not have had much self-esteem as a teenager, but I did now, and that as a woman who liked to think she was attractive and interesting in her own right, being used as a shrink to hear about a 40-year-old obsession with another woman was extremely insulting.  I got a brief email back from him saying that he was sorry, so now I can close that door again, thankfully.

I want to take time to mention Beth, though, because probably she was one of the three biggest influences on the "self" that I created over all these decades (the others were my SO, as she was when I met her, and the Mentor).  What they all had in common was that life, for them, was primarily an aesthetic experience.  And they were all snobs about aesthetics.  Beth actually came from "old money" but until I was much older I had no idea her family was rich, or I wasn't sure.  She had very expensive dolls and "party dresses" but often she would show up for class (we both went to an exclusive prep school - my father was a professor and when he was alive there was money for that) without some item that everyone had been told to bring (like a notebook), saying that her mother couldn't afford to buy it.  Later I realized that the family had plenty of money, her mother was just scatterbrained and disorganized.  What I envied about Beth (aside from the fact that she was ectomorphically svelte, had long hair like a storybook princess, and moved gracefully) was that she seemed to care only about things that were beautiful, never about anything that was practical, and that this was encouraged by her mother.  She studied ballet, and she drew, but she did poorly in school and her mother seemed not to care.  She was well versed in the nuances all things fashion and decorating, and seemed to think her purpose in life was to be decorative.  Whether there was a connection between this and her family's money I don't know.  Not necessarily.  I knew other rich girls at the school, and many of them were neither pretty, stylishly dressed, nor charming.

I don't know whether or not Beth liked me.  We spent a lot of time together and had many things in common (an interest in the arts, a love of cats, a total ignorance of sports and popular culture), but being around Beth made me feel fat and coarse, not unlike how Pip felt around Estella in Great Expectations, only sans the romantic attraction.  I suppose Beth was sort of a cross between Estella, raised to break men's hearts, and Gigi raised to be a courtesan, well versed in all things fashion, decorating, and fine dining.

The friendship with Beth continued until I was about 18 or 19, then I made a conscious decision to drop her.  She got married (she never went to college) and I took up with my SO, a butch woman who treated  me like a princess.

But I always knew it was because of Beth that I loved all things Victorian: she personified the entire Dickensian landscape, being both a princess and a waif. And it is because of Beth that I will always choose what is beautiful over what is practical.  And it is probably because of Beth that for good or ill, I have always been totally indifferent to what I did for a living.

My SO had many of the same qualities.  She was always poor, but she loved beauty. She would eat canned soup and buy an expensive item of clothing at a thrift shop.  Or something pretty for the house.

And of course then there was the Mentor, with his orange walls and open vials of patchouli, unmade beds with brightly colored sheets, vintage china in a kitchen where the dishes hadn't been washed for a week.

Well, there you have it.  This post is a strange one to begin a new year with, but maybe not.

There is a lot of "Beth" in the life I've learned to live from The Artist's Way.

P.S. I snuck a look at Beth's Facebook photo and she certainly is no longer pretty.  Here's my latest self-portrait.  Eat your heart out.

Money and Ambivalence

This post is prompted by a number of things, most specifically that I re-connected with someone I had been friendly with when I was just out of high school and we friended each other on Facebook. She seems to be an opera lover, and as she lives in Paris, loves Samson et Dalila, so I said I would post a sound clip of me singing "Amour Viens Aider" on her wall. This was part of a package my mother got me as a Christmas present several years ago. She has a friend who's a sound engineer and he hauled his equipment to my coach's studio in Manhattan and made a CD of me singing several arias (the best is "Stella del Marinar" which I have as my sound clip on this blog).

When I listened to "Amour" just now I really wanted to cringe. Yes, I got up to the interpolated B flat, and actually, that two octave run sounded quite good, but the rest of it didn't. When I'm singing, I'm always conscious of how my upper register can get screamy, but on recordings, it's my lower register that sounds dreadful. Sort of like it won't perch on a pitch anywhere and is just what I call "sqwawky and talky".

Now if I were a "real" singer, I would have made another recording by now, but there's no way I can justify the expense. This probably cost my mother about $300. Even if she were alive I wouldn't have gotten that kind of expensive Christmas present - I spent the past year using dribs and drabs of money in her bank accounts to supplement my income.

Then there's the issue (less directly related to singing) of photographs. There's a "real" singer I follow on Facebook and on my pseudonymous blog, who is "who I wish I were". She is a working opera singer (no big sexy roles, but still...) and is quite attractive in a zaftig kind of way. In any event she exudes sexuality, despite (perhaps because of?) not having a steady relationship. One thing I envy about her is her self-confidence/self-involvement. At least once a month she's posting a spate of very attractive pictures (I have no idea if they are professional photos but they certainly look as if they are). Big cleavage, big lips, everything shown off to advantage - definitely not family snapshots.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the nice photos I have of myself. I just don't know people who take those sorts of photos and again, I couldn't justify spending money on something like that.

When I first began my post-2/15/04 journey, I had no photos of myself at all that didn't make me look middle aged and sexless, so I spent about $300 for head shots. I guess it was long enough ago that I got a contact sheet, and out of about 100 photos, only one didn't make me look like an uptight Junior League lady

but I couldn't justify doing something like that now. What would these pictures be for?

I don't know whether it's generational, but most of the "real" singers I'm so envious of are just enough younger than I am that they are well versed in how to use web cams, make Youtube videos, record themselves on their laptops, etc. If I had the time to learn how to do those things I'm sure I could, but my plate is pretty full, what with copyediting to pay my bills, taking care of my partner, and singing and learning the music I need/want to learn.

So speaking of money....

I am very frightened by what's happening in this country. How can the American people have elected representatives who think it's better to let a big corporation like GE not pay any taxes, than to see that average people can have Social Security, Medicare, and other support programs? I can understand that certain members of Congress live in a bubble, but most people in this country are not rich and you'd think that they would rather have a safety net that they might need than a dream of getting rich - which they won't.

How this affects me personally is that there's a big chance my partner might miss a Social Security payment, and an even bigger chance that her food stamps will be cut off. (If anyone's wondering, that's one of many reasons why we're not getting married. She needs to spend down to get Medicaid and other services, and my assets don't need to go down the drain so that she can be in assisted living. We're at the point when many straight couples wonder how to get divorced so that the surviving spouse won't end up destitute if the older sicker spouse ends his or her life in a nursing home.)

So there's certainly no money for self-indulgences right now. Not to mention that we haven't had a vacation in several years. I actually feel much less stressed out working freelance and not taking vacations than I did working in an office, making twice as much money, being sleep deprived, bored, and angry, and then taking a nice vacation once a year, but it would be nice to take one more trip to Maine and perhaps one to England in between the time our little dog dies (he's 13 and not well, and we simply can't leave him)and when my partner does.

Voice lessons aren't an "indulgence" and neither are group coachings, or the rental of the studio for my concert (that will actually pay for itself), but recordings and photos - those will have to wait.