Home Safe?

This post is not about singing.  Not really.

On Saturday I celebrated 38 years of sobriety.  A few weeks ago, my partner and I started going to a meeting in her neighborhood.  I hadn't been to a meeting since 2005 or thereabouts.  Even as this program had saved my life, after a while I got turned off.  2004-2005 were pivotal years for me.  If you read this post (if you haven't already) you will see why.

I tried going back to meetings then (where I always grabbed for help) but the one available at lunch hour was packed with unemployed young people, I always came late (lunch hour? work? duh?) and so never got called on.  The conversation was mostly about drugs, there was lots of slang and profanity, and as a 50something wearing a suit with long term sobriety I was not perceived as needing help.  So I got help from the Well Spouse instead.  And from blogging communities, and later, an in-person caregiver support group.

When my partner and I went to the Unitarian Church in 2003, we had hoped that that would be an extension of our spiritual life in 12 step programs and that it would be something that would bring us together during a difficult time.  I was burnt out from working in a stressful high level management job, she had just sort of opted out and spent the day in bed, waiting for me to come home (often at 8 pm) and make dinner.  Instead our experience with that church tore us further apart.  I was swept off my feet by someone who got me to sing (the sexual aspect of all this was really the messenger, not, as I had thought at the time, the message), a dream I had deferred but never forgotten, and I became someone else.

From time to time, I hope that the spiritual messages I get from the Lutheran church will spark something beyond my love of the music there (and opportunities to sing my oratorio repertoire) but these sparks come quickly, and fizzle out quickly.  Recently my main feeling at that church is one of being subsumed beneath all the superachievers.  Everyone either has a music degree, a theater degree, or the means to travel all over the world.  At the panel discussion a few months ago that sparked so much envy and self-dissatisfaction, they were able to assemble a Broadway producer, a Broadway company manager, a high profile Broadway actress, and several recent conservatory graduates.  A 60something with a nice voice who sings an occasional solo and produces a concert once a year just didn't make the cut.

The meeting I started going to is not on the Upper West Side, where, no doubt, I would encounter the same demographic that I see at the church.  It was in South Murray Hill, where my partner lives, which is a lot more low key.  True, market rent apartments are as expensive there as anywhere else in Manhattan, but the population is a lot less flashy. And among people my age, there are many in lower middle income, uninteresting professions (or retired from them), who moved there in the 1960s or 70s and stayed.

Interestingly, I felt a lot more "spiritual" there than at church.  I shared my experiences of being 38 years sober, and listened to other people share about their lives.  Not once did I hear about where anyone went to school, or even what they did for a living.  For the first time in a long while I didn't feel "Well, I'm only a copyeditor", "I only have a BA from  Hunter College", "I'm only an unpaid church soloist".

If I am looking for a spiritual home, maybe that is it, regardless of where I choose to make music.

I can hardly wait to go back there, holding my partner's tiny frail arm, to do God's work.

Happy and Grateful

Today I am very happy and grateful.

First of all, today is 35 years without a drink (since "being on the wagon" is slang for being sober, I couldn't resist the graphic).

It's really hard to fathom. I drank heavily from the age of 18 through a few months past my 25th birthday (during what, if I were young now, would be called my "emerging adulthood").

Drinking wreaked havoc with every area of my life but I in some ways I don't think it did as much damage to me as a singer as the fact that I started smoking at age 14. I started smoking because I thought I was "hugely fat". I was not. I was five foot 6 and my weight fluctuated between 140 and 160. So, ok, at 160 I was too heavy but at 140-150 I wasn't even overweight and had what in the 1940s or 1950s would have been considered a sexy figure.

Ironically, it was not long after I started smoking that people began commenting on what an extraordinary voice I had. I sang in the soprano section of my glee club (because it was easy for me to sing a G or an A - still is, but not higher) and sounded like Julie Andrews with the volume ramped way up. I began to toy with the idea that I could be a singer, however I simply could not give up the demon weed. Not long after that I began drinking (and stuffing my face with just about anything else I could find - except LSD, which I had heard could make you crazy for life).

I stopped drinking a few months after my 25th birthday and about a year later stopped smoking (the first time). After that I started studying voice with the teacher I'm studying with today (before that I had done a brief stint as a chorister and cover for the lead contralto in a Gilbert & Sullivan troupe)and kept singing better and better over the next four years. I stopped at 30 (I've written quite a bit about this - my choice was based on a need for a more regular income, wanting to go to college at night, and my partner's dislike of my involvement with an avocational activity where there were too many straight men) and then went right back to smoking.

Fortunately, not for very long, since a woman who was my age (32) had died of lung cancer, which scared me. Also, just as I was told that "dykes don't sing opera" I was also told that "self-loving dykes don't smoke", which, I guess, helped. Although I never went back to singing - not until I was 54.

Although I wanted to smoke every single day up until I began singing again, fortunately, I have never wanted to drink after about the first year.

No matter how much I kvetch, I am very blessed. I am extremely healthy for someone of 60, and, at the same weight and height I was at 12, where I was teased for being fat, I am considered "curvy and trim" compared to most women my age. I have someone who adores me, even though she lives with many mental and physical (and financial) challenges, and the privilege of being able to work freelance and get health insurance for my former employer, who considers me a "retiree".

And I'm singing better and better. Yes, I often feel envious, sad, and self-hating because I buckled under to pressure and never went back to singing until I was seduced into it by The Mentor Who Shall Not Be Discussed, but I have what I have now. I am getting to learn one of my dream roles (Amneris) and even if I will probably never have the stamina (or a decent C flat) to sing the whole opera I can sing various scenes in concerts, which I am signed up to do over the next year.

While we're on that subject, I had a really good runthrough of the duet yesterday, beginning with "L'abborita rival". Yes, singing that upward progression on one breath with my mouth closed at the beginning, is the key.

Then I went with my partner to see My Dog Tulip and came back to her house to see our beloved Dachshund, who is getting better every day!