My Angel is in Heaven and I am Heartbroken

My precious Betty, my angel, my loved one of 44 years, died March 29, in my arms at home.  She just slipped away in her sleep.

I am still making myself sing.  This evening I sang "Amapola", her favorite song.  I don't know if I will ever go back to singing heavy opera or anything requiring vocal power above a G or G sharp.  I will sing in church.

We had fights, and there were things about her I didn't like (she never understood my obsession with singing opera and was fiendishly jealous of my being around straight men, particularly in story lines with too much sex), but the past three years with her have been a gift.  She surrendered her business to me and her body to her bed, where she just "stayed in and stayed cute".   She smiled a lot, so I know she was happy.

That I will never see her smile again is so crushingly unbearable that I don't know if I can go on, really.

I want to make it to June or July to scatter her ashes in Maine. And conduct a memorial service. After that I am done.

I may not write anything here again.  I may start a blog or an online memory book about her.

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?

The Lavender Scare, Bohemia, and How I Got Where I Am

In this post, I wrote about how my life was when I first met my partner; the Never Never Landishness of it all.  How exciting it was to me as a 25 year old with no education and no work history (but now sober and madly in love) to be embedded in a community where "real" jobs and careers seemed optional.

More than 30 years later (in fact for the past 10) I have bemoaned in a big way the hole in my life resulting from not having and never really having had, meaningful work.  Yes, I had jobs, and thankfully most of them were good jobs with benefits, so I am now semi-retired with a nice little nest egg and good health insurance subsidized by my last employer.  I have a lot of former colleagues, who are friends in a way, some of whom are a source of the modest amount of freelance work I do to supplement my Social Security.  But I never trained for a profession that I loved, even one I eventually failed at.  Jobs were a necessary evil.  The one thing I really wanted to do, sing classical music, seemed totally out of reach (largely, but not entirely, as a result of my own self destructive behavior). This post (by way of the "not entirely") describes (in my rather immature voice of almost 10 years ago LOL) some of the battles I would have had to fight in my chosen community if I went down that route.  So if I wasn't going to sing, I could be a professional Lesbian.  What did that mean exactly?  To me it meant taking any job, the "low-hanging fruit", which for me meant working as a secretary at a publishing house, being out, letting the chips fall where they might, and raising people's consciousnesses.  Because typing, organizing an office, proofreading, and copy editing were skills I had learned at my mother's knee, and the publishing business seemed the least unfriendly place to be "out", particularly if you were willing to stay in a lower level job (which I did for quite some time, but not permanently), I more or less stayed there, until all the life was sucked out of the industry and if I hadn't retired, I probably would have become a living, breathing, machine doing the same mindless things over and over.

A few nights ago I watched this film and suddenly had an "aha" moment.  Although I knew that when I was growing up all gay men and Lesbians were in the closet at work (although for many it was an open secret), I had no idea of the mass firings that had occurred in the early 1950s.  That would have been when I was a small child, but the fallout lasted for decades.  These were people who were the cream of the crop, with advanced degrees, people who had indeed trained themselves for professions that they loved, working in the State Department.  Not only were they summarily fired, they were not allowed to speak in their own defense or hire attorneys.  For most of them their careers were ruined.  Many fell into poverty.

One thing I noticed when I first became involved with the Lesbian Community (this was about 5 or 6 years after Stonewall) was the big time "work-aversion" of so many of these women, my partner included. A lot of them were on Welfare.  Whenever I hear the phrase "welfare cheat", I don't see the face of a Black woman with children, I see "Blue", the butch Lesbian who somehow managed to bilk the government out of SSDI for decades by telling them she was going to AA meetings (true) and that the idea of working made her clinically anxious (not).  Those not on Welfare worked odd jobs: babysitting, dog walking, house painting, being a typist sent out to different places by a temp agency. Poverty was a badge of honor. Maybe a number of these women had been cruelly fired by establishment organizations or were afraid they would be.  My partner, who had had several high level jobs at photography magazines in the decade before I met her, said that she lost the will to show up for work after she broke up with her parther (the one before me) and couldn't talk to anyone about her unhappiness because she had to stay in the closet.  She never recovered or worked in a professional job again.  A number of these voluntarily underemployed women had had a "Seven Sisters" education.  There was a former librarian who became and exterminator (she claimed she actually made more money as an exterminator but she had no benefits).  Of course there were several exceptions.  There was the doctor who treated patients at the free clinic who also had an ER job (no one in an ER really cares whom you sleep with), and her partner, an accountant, who did people's taxes (mostly in the gay community).  And there were lawyers and a tiny handful of academics.  And of course all those women, like me, working in the publishing industry.

By the time I had my first full-time job, "out" gays and Lesbians had been around for a while so I doubted that I would get fired for having a picture of me and my partner on my desk and answering honestly if anyone asked about it, but until the mid-90s, I never saw any "out" gay person in a higher level job.

So that's the story.  Careers were not the Holy Grail in those days for gays and Lesbians, apparently we had learned our lesson in the early 1950s and it stayed in our DNA for a long time.

As for my dream of becoming an opera singer while being "out"? That was in 1977-1980 and Patricia Racette, the first "out" Lesbian opera singer, to my knowledge, didn't appear with her coming out statement in Opera News until 2002.

ETA: I began singing, the second time, in 2004.  Coincidence anyone?

Weighty Matters

What woman, fat, thin, or in between, isn't obsessed with her weight? I know this is a blog about singing, but I'm mentioning this because I believe that my (largely misplaced) obsession with thinness was one of many things that undermined my singing, most notably starting to smoke (and becoming very quickly addicted) at the age of 13 because I was told it was an appetite suppressant.

Here is a photo of me when I was about 5. An old childhood friend, in a belated condolence letter, sent photos of a vacation our parents took together back in, I guess, 1955. (I cropped him out of this photo to protect privacy.)

At this age I already thought of myself as hugely fat, which I was not. I huffed and puffed a lot during any sort of physical exertion (there's another photo, which I can't bear to look at, of me at the same age, swinging from a bar, which most children thought was fun, with my face contorted in pain, and my feet only three inches off the ground), but that was because I needed my adenoids out, and also because I have scoliosis so running and similar forms of exercise are uncomfortable.

In any event, based on the demographics of my childhood, I definitely was fatter than other little girls my age, whose mothers only knew how to stick a tv dinner in the oven, and who were deprived of dessert as a punishment for misbehavior (not because anyone back then worried about the effects of sugar on the brain). But I certainly wasn't medically obese.

By the time I was 13, I was definitely no longer overweight in any medical sense. I was 5 foot 6 (ah, if I could still be that tall!) and my weight fluctuated between 140 and 155. But I was never a gangly ectomorph, which many girls that age are. I was built like Kim Novak, who, no longer an ideal, was now referred to as "husky" and everyone wanted to look like Twiggy or Mia Farrow.

At 13 (I have no pictures of myself at that age because I felt so fat and ugly I wouldn't let anyone take one) I was a very attractive young woman and if I had left myself alone, I might have really done something with the voice that everyone was starting to notice.

At that age I sounded like Julie Andrews and could actually sing staccato up to an E flat (I asked my teacher if I lost that range because of smoking - even though I haven't had a cigarette since 1982 - and he said no, often children with high voices lose that range, even girls.)

At the same time that my friend emailed me this photo, he also emailed one of my parents, sitting with some other adults outside our summer colony in the Adirondacks. My mother (although she wore a size 18 back then, and was 5 foot 2, 165 pounds) doesn't look hugely fat either although I remember being ashamed of her when I compared her to the other adult women and I notice in the photo she is wearing a long cotton skirt and the other women are wearing shorts.

Well, that's all water under the bridge.

When I started singing again at 54 I said that no matter what I was not going to starve myself to maintain a weight that is uncomfortably low. When I do that, yes, I look better, but I feel awful, get tired easily, have problems with blood sugar swings, and don't sing well.

This time I am giving myself the absolutely best shot at doing everything I can to sing well. Other than having to earn a living and care for my aging loved one, this is my number one priority. Needless to say, if I'm serious about my body-as-instrument, I'm not going to be stuffing myself with sugary junk food. But if the waistband on my size 10 skirt is too tight, so be it. I sing so much better now than when my waist was so small I looked like I would break in half.

A Helpful Analogy - So Now What?

One of my idols, a real opera singer, is Cindy who writes the blog "The Next Hundred Pounds". This is primarily about her journey with weight, health, and fitness, but interestingly, although I started reading the blog to get vicarious pleasure from following a real working singer's life (I think until God invented the Internet I only knew about two types of singers - Met stars and talented amateurs like me and the people I sang with decades ago in the "Opera Underground"), I also find it inspirational in an unusual way. Cindy's journey with fitness is not all that different from my journey with singing. Work hard, things improve, then suddenly there's a setback. And you can either take the setback to heart and give up (she doesn't), or pick yourself up and start over.

Like Cindy, I am not a fan of New Year's Resolutions. As someone in AA, I know we only have "one day at a time" and that, if things are going particularly badly, we can start our day over.

This year I went into the New Year in a funk. This has been one of my hardest years. It was my first year in over three decades not working in an office (which makes me deliriously happy) on the other hand it was my first year in three decades without a regular paycheck. As I am blessed to get health insurance from my last employer (who considers me "retired") I decided to set myself up as a freelance copyeditor. It took about 10 months to get enough clients to support myself, and right as things were starting to take off my mother died. She was 94, and died in peace, but when someone first is in hospice, and then has died, there is a lot to do, and suddenly I found myself in a family crisis with no paid leave.

As for singing, despite my singing better and better, it has been borne in on me that I am so far down the food chain that there is really no climbing to be done. Which means, other than singing in this no-pay choir, where I get to be a soloist every few months, I can't look for any validation from outside. No one is going to "hire" me, even for no money. No matter how well I sing, there are always other people who are younger, can read music (yes, yes, I should teach myself to do that, I know), understand music theory, and have something to put on a resume besides self-produced concerts and performances with 30 year old opera companies that are now considered a joke.

My one experience "passing" an audition, where I ended up being the oldest person with the smallest role, where I came totally prepared and had my what? three pages of singing ripped to shreds and given conflicting instructions that made no sense? left me really scarred. I don't want something like that to happen again, certainly not after throwing down $400 for tickets I will never sell. (When I mentioned this to my therapist she said, well, these things happen. Suppose you spent that much on a vacation and something went terribly wrong and it was a nightmare?)

I deliberately didn't make any New Year's resolutions because I didn't know what kind to make. I already practice at least a half hour every day and probably spend three hours a week working on music (I have two Bach arias for choir solos, one new, that I'm working on, as well as the Amneris/Aida duet that someone might sing with me in a class). I go to Pilates, mostly to reverse my spinal stenosis, but don't think that I don't love how all those roll ups have given me abs of steel that help me sing better.

But I just don't have the heart to plan anything. I think my teacher's malaise is certainly a factor as well. Not that he isn't the best teacher on the planet. Just when I feel I've hit a plateau (like I did with my upper register) he comes up with a new exercise for me. But I mean his malaise about his own singing. That certainly doesn't help me pick myself up and start planning something.

I have really just felt like hibernating: sitting at my computer and working (which I'm just about to start doing) and spending evenings in front of the tv. And weekends with my partner, who is now mostly housebound.

So as Cindy so humorously said in this post how do I "divorce my buttocks from the couch" (or my recumbent body from the bed) and get my groove back?

Maybe I need to stop looking for validation from an outside source. So OK, my mother wasn't interested in my singing, she wanted me to be a writer. My partner and her friends wanted me to sing something "womyn centered" and not give my energy to a "patriarchal art form" like opera. No one "out there" cares about a 60-year-old who is just on the verge of having the kind of secure vocal technique that she can apply to a role like Amneris. (Too bad there isn't a tv program called "America's Seniors Got Talent". I do think I might have a shot at being a grandma Paul Potts)

I keep thinking that my new blog title will inspire me with something but so far, nada.

On the other hand, I can't give up now. I stopped singing for 23 years and have spent the past 6 regretting it. If I give up at 60 I will be toast.

Coming Back to Life

I haven't written anything for a while because my mother died on October 10, and I have been both grieving and busy.

I also have suddenly gotten in a lot of freelance editing, which is what I do to pay the bills. (In fact I have had to turn down work that people wanted back in 5 days.)

We have a good lawyer who will be co-executor of the estate with me, so I will have less to do. I will get less money, but I will waste less time. There isn't a lot, but there will be something I can add to my nest egg, plus a little for my personal savings account, in case I can't manage to work full time for a while, whatever the reason.

I want to say here that my mother died without pain or fear. I spent her last 12 hours with her, holding her hand. Despite her having been an atheist her whole life, she smiled as she was leaving us, and inasmuch as it was possible, she had a "good death", meaning she died at home, pain-free, with no medical interventions to prolong things pointlessly. She died in her enormous living room in the Brooklyn Heights apartment where I grew up, facing the trees.

I haven't felt much like singing. Not because I'm too sad, but because I'm too busy. My mother never really cared about my singing. She loved classical music, but mostly as a spectator or listener. Her thing was language and literature. I want to read, I want to write, and I want to work (with the written word, which is what I do, for an hourly rate scarcely more than that of a cleaning lady).

I haven't done any blogging either here or at the other place because my priorities are work first, then sing, then if there's no paying work on my plate, I can write. (This is a stolen bit of writing, because I have been working all day since 10 am with a small break for lunch.)

Yesterday I went back to choir practice. I am, I suppose, the de facto alto section leader on a Bach cantata. It is going well. I am in a quandary about where to put myself, section-wise, since as a mezzo I'm neither one thing nor t'other. Luckily, we sing a lot of pieces with two soprano parts, so I can sing second soprano. My problem isn't the tessitura (I'm solid up to an A) so much as having to keep the volume down, which fosters tension and undoes all the good work I do with my teacher and in my own practice.

Next month I start rehearsals for Carmelites. It's a very intensive rehearsal period, ironically, right near my mother's apartment, which I will probably be clearing out for the next several months. I have a very small part and it will be memorized by November 29!! And I have a choir solo on the 14th, a nice version of "The Lord is My Shepherd" by Dvorak. And when I can squeeze in a period of vocalizing I continue to use the dreaded ascending phrase from the Amneris/Radames duet as an exercise.

Now back to work!

Above is a photo of me and my mother, taken several years ago at Fiorello's, a place where we spent many Thanksgivings and Mothers Days.

Keeping it Real

When I began singing again in 2004, no matter how happy I was with how I sang a particular piece, I didn't feel entitled to think of myself as a "real" singer. Sure, compared to amateur choir folk I was such the diva (at the Unitarian church, except for one operatically trained lyric coloratura who didn't sing with the choir, mezzo me was the only one with "high notes" - read Gs and As), but as soon as I entered the operatic blogosphere I sadly realized that I was really No One.

The fact that I had sung a role like Laura at a no-pay outfit with rickety sets, ancient costumes, and a piano, back in 1980 really meant sod-all (sorry for swearing) to the people posting on The Forum and initially when I posted things there unless I asked a question I was politely ignored. I mean these were people with managers who had sung at the sort of regional opera houses that get reviewed in Opera News not to mention that some of them had even auditioned for the Met. Having grown up in the 1960s when opera stars were very "touch me not" from their big hair to their disdain of getting into a political argument, I was rather astounded to realize that here were people blogging about their weight, their failed love affairs (some in graphic detail), and their political opinions (mostly as left of center as my mother and her lefty friends), who, nonetheless, might actually have their picture in Opera News or their name on a billboard at Lincoln Center.

Many of them wrote about trips to New York, which made me a little sad. I mean I live here, but I never get within ten miles of anything more than a homemade concert or (recently) a company with an orchestra offering me a small role in exchange for selling tickets (actually I'm glad now they only offered me a small role, otherwise I'd never have been able to sell enough tickets to break even). So here are people trekking to the Holy Grail which for me is just a place to do grocery shopping. I often have fantasies about running into one of them at the Juilliard Bookstore or a small local shop, actually.

But now things are starting to get real.

The woman having the salon heard my MP3 file (it's on my profle as a "sound clip")which even I don't love as much as I did when I made it, and still wants me to sing for her. And I know pianists who know real singers who want pianists.

And I no longer worry that the people on The Forum just think I'm a big joke, because I'm almost 60, because of the name I use there (which I love love love, and it's much nicer than my real one), and because I 'fessed up that I had sung with the notorious Madame LaPuma (who actually had some very good singers on her roster, in case people are wondering).

I'm not a joke any more. I'm real.

There are a few people on the Forum now who have actually heard me sing, who know how hard I work, how I've transcended the barriers of age and obscurity. Not that I'm expecting any big contracts. Just to be real.

Rip Van Winkle Waking

When I returned to singing at age 54, I was rather astounded at how much better I sounded than I had at 30. Well, for one thing, I was several decades, not five years, away from my last cigarette, and for another, I had stopped crash dieting. At the time I resumed singing I was still five foot six (I'm now five three and a half, and that half is something I've regained from studying Pilates) and was up to 145 pounds and that was just fine. I also had better posture. When I sang in my 20s I had so much conspiring against me - a recent history of alcohol, drug, and nicotine addiction; thinking I had to be "really skinny", particularly because my specialty at that time was trouser roles, ("really skinny" to me meant keeping my weight under 130 pounds, which was still nowhere near fashion model size but made me look boyish while, unfortunately, keeping me weak and easily tired); feeling isolated as the only Lesbian I knew who sang opera; having an unsympathetic partner (this hasn't changed). I also (this one's for the gals) think being post-menopausal helped my voice. It sounded and felt "lighter" and had more clarity, for one thing, and I also felt more or less the same any day of the month.

So in any event, there I was, my properly produced voice soaring over the church's small choir, feeling my oats singing excerpts from Carmen, Samson et Dalila, and La Gioconda not to mention all the sacred arias I sang in church, thinking the world was my oyster. I mean, if I sang circles around the 30 year old self who had been cast as Laura, I was ready to compete, right? Sadly, wrong.

A lot had changed in 25 years. When I was in my 20s, I sang in what I now know was called the "Opera Underground" - small opera groups that didn't pay (only one, back then, expected singers to pay them) where most of the performers were older, had established "day jobs", and had minimal musical (although often superb vocal) training. The singers ranged from "as good as what you'd hear at the Met" to, well, let's be frank - "cringeworthy". So as a young, slim, hardworking mezzo with a pleasant voice, I got cast in lots of things. Never as Carmen, which was a sore point (I was told I "didn't have the personality" which was code for "honey, you look like a dyke") but I did get cast as Laura in La Gioconda. Yes, there were conservatory graduates back then, who followed a different career path, but there were lots of performance opportunities for us amateurs.

Now things are different. Everything (except maybe a handful of pay-to-sings) is a training ground for young emerging professionals or a pit stop for managed professional singers who want a role on their resume that they're not likely to get cast in for money at a particular point in their career.

So no matter how I sounded, there was really nothing for me, who obviously was over 40 and really had nothing on my resume other than "choir soloist" for the past several decades.

Despairing of a place to sing, I stumbled on a few nuggets. The first was a "Meetup". Meetups are open to whoever is willing to pay the $15 or $20, so I began with that. In the beginning I was terrified and it showed. Not to mention that all these people knew each other, which meant they rooted for each other when they stood up to sing, while I was mostly ignored, although I did get some applause. Gradually I lost some of my fear and most importantly, I kept going. When I got a Facebook account I had some of my fellow Meetup singers as friends. That kept it real.

Then a woman I had bumped into on the Forum asked people to sing at a hospital concert. So I got on the roster for those.

And I found another meetup.

I soon learned that even if my confidence (mostly about singing above the staff) was still not what it should be, I could hold my own in that at least I always knew my music, never looked flustered, almost never lost my place (unless I was trying out a brand new piece of church music) and never asked for a do-over. I just smiled and soldiered on.

It was still hard not knowing anyone. I don't really have any "singing friends", people who are where I am vocally, and chronologically. Except my bass friend, who started singing opera at 39 after singing Music Theater exclusively.

So now I've found a Sunday afternoon salon. It says we can sing scenes or duets, so I've emailed him re: if he wants to join me. If not, I'll go by myself.

There are still things conspiring against me. I still get tired easily (I have a big voice and for a voice that size I'm still a small person, not to mention I'm going to be 60 next month and spend most of my time as an editor hunched over a computer), my partner is unsympathetic, and I have to worry about her health crises not to mention my mother's. And I have to put in a certain number of hours copyediting or I won't be able to pay my bills. And I don't have a conservatory or regional opera background and the network one builds from that.

But I know God wants me to sing (why else would s/he have sent someone to find me at the back of a church) so I must.

A Real Verdi Mezzo

Tonight I played hooky from my job counseling program. That's ok. I have had three weeks of Hell with my mother being hospitalized once and my partner being hospitalized twice, once after the two of us spent six hours in the emergency room. During those three weeks I was also going to school, taking my first course toward my certificate in Training.

Amazingly, I still found time to practice, and have continued to sing well, better than I ever have in my whole life.

Tonight since I had a whole evening (after spending the morning at Pilates and the afternoon at a Caregivers Support Group) I decided that before I dove into a pile of copyediting that I've been blessed by (income!) I was going to sing through Amneris's big scene.

It never ceases to amaze me how easy this is to sing. What happened?? I have been working my tail off with this teacher now since Christmas of 2005. I would get inklings of this sound from time to time, a high A here, a low B there, but nothing like this and I certainly never had this much stamina.

I think part of it is now that I'm not working in an office any more and being sleep deprived 6 days a week; eating healthy meals instead of cheese, crackers, and fruit on the run; and not squeezing my upper register to try to blend in with the choir sopranos (we now have a real coloratura soprano fresh from a conservatory so I can just be a mezzo now) my real, God-given, big, dark voice has been allowed to flourish. It's sort of hard to believe. I mean I'm going to be 60 next month. Many singers retire in their 50s and those who don't often scale down. But I'm just beginning to scale up!!!

Can it really be that Verdi is my niche?

I know when I sang Laura in La Gioconda at the age of 30 I felt like I was "home" and my voice was about half the size it is now and I was still obsessed with crash dieting. And the Principessa's aria from Adriana Lecouvreur really rocks despite some residual fear from bad memories of getting tired and not being able to nail that ending.

So maybe I really can sing both parts of that Judgment Scene back to back (actually it's unlikely I'll be doing that soon, since I'm singing one concert with a bass in October - no big deal, it's just in a nursing home - and then the concert with my teacher as a tenor next year). But it's sure great to be able to sail through that whole scene in my bathroom even when I've had a tiring three days.

I just wish I were 30, or even 40, so I could feel all this "matters"!

We Interrupt the Detour for Some Regular Programming

Since I now have had the chutzpah to make this blog's link part of my "signature" on The Forum (which, BTW, no longer intimidates me so much since I'm being taken semi-seriously at auditions and group coachings) I thought I'd do another regular singing post.

Something I'm really excited about, is that my wonderful voice teacher (I'm not comfortable posting his name here without his permission) said he would do a concert of duets with me in the Spring.

We met 34 years ago when we were both singing with the "Opera Underground" (a facetious name for the no-pay opera groups that were around in the 1970s that predominately but not exclusively featured avocational singers of all ages who were not conservatory graduates, many of whom had gorgeous voices, some of whom had flawed voices, and most of whom did not sight read or stray too far from the standard opera rep). He was transitioning from baritone to tenor and I was a hooty contralto who had been singing with a Gilbert & Sullivan company and smoking like a chimney. I had recently quit smoking and needed some help learning how to use my head voice (when I smoked I not only had no high notes to speak of - I could barely scream out Katisha's high G at the end of Act I of The Mikado- I also could neither hum nor scream, only squawk). When I found out that this young singer (we were the same age) was a teacher, and would only charge me $10 a lesson to learn what his teacher was teaching him (mostly techniques for lightening the voice) I jumped at the chance and have never regretted it.

When I first began singing again at 54 I studied with The Mentor Who Shall Not Be Discussed but after we had irreconcilable differences I returned to my original teacher, who was still around. At that time he was singing tenor, but switched to baritone again. Now, at 60, he is back to singing tenor and we both think a concert of duets would be a great thing to do.

As I said in a response to a comment on The Forum about whether or not there are any skinny opera singers with big voices, I mentioned that when I returned to singing I was about 10 pounds heavier, had stopped starvation dieting, and was much better able to support my voice, which has turned out to be much bigger than I had thought it was way back when. In fact my teacher has me learning Amneris (an aria-less role that is none the less the Holy Grail for dramatic mezzos) and it is one of the most comfortable roles I have ever sung in my entire life!!!.

I had already been working on the Judgement Scene which is a mezzo/bass duet, for a concert I will be doing with my bass friend (another older avocational singer) and now have made a start on the duet immediately previous. It has two High B Flats in it, which don't scare me at all since they're part of an upwardly progressing scale, which makes singing them really just like vocalizing. And she has to sing big, but she gets lots of breaks.

I have always thought of this role as out of bounds since I don't know if I have the C flat for the Triumphal Scene (how mean could a composer get? making a mezzo sing out of her range in a context where she could just as easily be singing an octave lower since all the chorus sopranos are singing up there) but there's nothing to stop me from keeping those two last scenes in my concert rep.

So maybe I'm a moving from "Baby Dramatic" to the real deal?

Art and Chaos

Although I do not define myself as Christian (my mother is an atheistic Jew and my father was an atheistic Scotsman) I sing in a Lutheran church. So I am getting quite a theological education, which I find fascinating, whatever I decide to do with this in terms of how I live my own life.

Today was Pentecost Sunday, which meant that people wore red, the pastors and children waved magnificent red banners, and the choir sang a lovely piece of Mozart. (I sang with the altos and had a couple of short solos.)

The theme today was The Holy Spirit (referred to as "she"!) and the pastor's sermon was on "Chaos", and how when the Holy Spirit enters one's life, chaos can ensue (I hope I got that right).

When my life changed forever on February 15, 2004, it was thrown into chaos. There were a lot of contradictions that day: I was in a house of worship, albeit a Unitarian one, in the thrall of a mentor whose attraction for me was a lot more than spiritual, singing the sexiest aria ever written, to commemorate Valentine's Day no less. Was there a Holy Spirit hole in the church ceiling that day? I now think maybe so. None of this was what I had expected to be experiencing in a church.

I had already developed a faith in God as I understood (him? her?) after finding my voice in the back of that Unitarian church, after 23 years of not singing. (Although I dreamed about singing all the time, which must say something.) But this was something more. I knew that nothing would ever be the same again.

To pursue art for no money when there are so many other things that need to be done, so many bills to be paid, so many other "more important" priorities, is, I suppose, a form of living with the Holy Spirit. For me to have scheduled a coaching for two auditions that probably won't lead to anything, when my severance check is half gone, my unemployment insurance has most likely run out, and I have no work on the horizon, is certainly a leap of faith although I'm not sure of what kind. Pretty soon things will be in a state of chaos if I don't have a full time income.

Lately there's been a very earthly voice in my ear saying "Look. If you get offered a full time job you should take it, even if it means losing valuable practice time [not to mention losing sleep] and maybe not being able to get to all the singing activities you want to. Just forget about singing all that strenuous opera. You can be a nice choir alto, even a nice choir alto soloist without overtaxing yourself, worrying about how much sleep you get, how much you talk, the nutritional value of every morsel you put in your mouth. If you have a full time job you can take a vacation. You can read novels on the train. Things can be the way they were more or less, on February 13, 2004."

But I don't think the Holy Spirit will let me.

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.

Am I a Novelty?

Seeing the movie Julie and Julia changed my life. No, I don't cook, but I sing opera. I am not a professional opera singer. I am an almost-60-year-old unpaid choir soloist who is polishing both my oratorio rep, which runs the gamut from "I Know that My Redeemer Liveth" and "Rejoice Greatly" to "Liber Scriptus", and my opera rep, which seems to fall under the Fach known as "baby dramatic mezzo". Seeing Julie and Julia made me realize that you don't have to have a major talent to be a celebrity, all you have to do is chronicle what you're doing and hope someone else finds it interesting. After all, I'm sure even Julie herself would admit that she was neither a great cook nor a great writer - just someone who was passionate about cooking who had a knack for self-promotion.

I have kept a private blog for years under a pseudonym (and yes, you will have to waterboard me to get the link to it). Most of what I wrote about had to do with my singing with odds and ends about my personal life thrown in. Since I want people "out there", whoever you are, to read about my life as a mature avocational singer, I decided to go public.

My Autobiography in Brief

I fooled around in what I now know was known as "the opera underground" in the 1970s when I was in my 20s. Since I had only recently quit smoking and kept myself thin enough to fit into a size 29 jeans by living on yoghurt and peanuts, my voice was quite small and my stamina minimal. So I specialized in "trouser roles". My last hurrah (in 1980)was singing the role of Laura in La Gioconda, by which point my voice had gotten some more heft to it. That was the last time I sang in public until I was "discovered" in 2003, singing from a hymnal from a back pew in my local Unitarian Church, by a charismatic figure who was the main influence on my life and art for the next six years at least. I have written about him at length elsewhere and will not do so here, suffice it to say that I reacquainted myself with solid vocal technique, learned something about the Dalcroze method, shed many tears, retooled my self-image, and decided that I wanted to sing seriously more than anything else in the world.

I was a regular soloist at that Unitarian church for two years and then moved on. I was told that Lutheran churches like operatic voices, so I found a lovely church fairly near where I live with a superb music director. I am not primarily a choral singer so "blending" in the choir while developing what has turned out to be a quite large operatic mezzo voice has been a big challenge, albeit not an insurmountable one. I usually sing second soprano, and sing solos at least once a season.

Since in my new incarnation as a rather more zaftig, larger voiced mezzo I developed an intense emotional relationship with the role of Dalila (people who know me from elsewhere have heard quite a lot about this!) I decided to "actualize" my dream of singing this role and put on a bare bones concert version at the Lutheran church mentioned above.

My current teacher (the one I had studied with in the 1970s, who has done nothing but good things for me) says that even though I am almost 60, I can probably continue to sing the "baby dramatic" mezzo repertoire for another 5-10 years. I take very good care of myself. In fact I am probably much healthier than I was in my 20s.

In addition to spinning my wheels as to where I can put on my next opera in concert, I also audition regularly for no-pay no-fee productions listed as being for "emerging pro" singers. One company out and out said (politely) that I was too old, even though the role I was auditioning for was La Zia Principessa in Suor Angelica. The rest have yielded nothing, but the experience of auditioning is good for me. It keeps it real. If nothing else, spending $10-$25 to put on a fabulous looking dress, stand up in front of several people, and sing (and present) an aria as best as I can, is worth a lot more to me than a movie ticket.

Starting this blog is also my way of saying that even if you don't, I take myself seriously as a singer.

A bientot.