First Fall Concert of 2019

Again, it seems a long time since I've written.  I seem to have lost interest in writing, pretty much.  I have left my memoir to languish (although if I ever want to return to it, it's there!)  Maybe because my friend Abbie didn't like it, and then shortly thereafter, she died, which I'm still in shock over.  Finally I did find an obituary online.  It seems to have been written only three weeks after she died (it was in an Oregon newspaper) but did not show up as a Google "hit" until last week, when I decided to google her granddaughter, who has a rather unusual name, just to see what she is doing these days.  Who knows? The obituary might not have shown up simply by Googling Abbie.

Friday's concert went well.  I nailed all the big notes in the Bolena duet.  So now I get to do it all again on Monday the 14th.  Something strange happened, though.  After singing the duet I experienced such a huge adrenaline drain that I didn't sing the next two (quite easy) numbers as well as usual.  Then I did get my groove back and sounded great in the Gioconda duet - and of course everyone loves "Let Me Call You Sweetheart".

My partner is getting home hospice services which is great.  Both the GP that regularly comes to her house and the hospice nurse thinks she could "pass at any time"; that she might not go through the readily identifiable "active dying phase" that I saw my mother go through.

So it's just a day at a time.  If things reach an obvious crisis point I will hit the "pause" button, pack a suitcase, get someone to feed my cats, and cancel any commitments for the immediate future.  But that time is not now.

Catching Up

I see that I haven't written anything in about a month, which is because I have been busy with the writing contest.  I have done well so far: just mining incidents in my life and turning them into essays. I love to read novels, but when I write, I seem to find it easier to spin out pithy essays that are a combination of memoir, humor, and social commentary.  Like the OpEd pieces in the TIMES.

I have done well in this competition so far.  It started out with 50 people and now there are 13 people left.  They are going to drop 5 people on Sunday (our assignment was to write 5 pieces and the scores for those pieces will be averaged) so if I stay there will only be 8 left.  The final 4 will get some kind of money prize. My goal was to be in the top 10, which I guess won't be a "thing" because 2 people dropped out of the top 15.

I do have some news about Good Friday.  I am going to sing the alto line in the solo quartet in the "Christe Eleison" from the Beethoven Missa Solemnis and probably also in another piece that we haven't gotten yet.  So I will focus on that.  As for a solo on a festival day, I will probably either sing on Maundy Thursday again or on Trinity Sunday (June 16).  And one Sunday in August when there is an "open sing" because there is no choir and no festival days. For Maundy Thursday I may sing one of the Florence Price spirituals - "Rise Mourner", and for Trinity Sunday I suggested the Mozart "Laudate Dominum", which I haven't sung in years, so it will be interesting to see how it sounds.

I am sounding better again because I have a new strategy for taking care of my respiratory problems.  I went to get my annual physical and my doctor told me to use the asthma inhaler not just when I think I have asthma (I have the "cough variant" kind, not the wheezy life threatening kind) but also if my upper bronchial tubes feel full of mucus that I can't dislodge.  I have found that this really helps.  If my bronchial tubes are opened up, I can get rid of the mucus.  It seems to be more reliable than Mucinex.  I could really hear the difference Wednesday at my lesson and last night at choir rehearsal.

The annoying news, though, is I have not heard back from the two senior facilities that I contacted about performing.  I will have to try calling, as the people did not answer my emails.

Lastly, one source of anxiety is that my partner has a squamous cell carcinoma on her face that needs removing.  She had a biopsy last week.  When the results come back she will need to have it removed.  It is just an outpatient procedure (she had one removed from her chest two years ago) but it takes a whole day, and then she has to come back the next week to have the stitches removed.  And as the only way she can travel is on a gurney in an ambulance, we can be in the doctor's office for over an hour after she's finished, waiting to be picked up.  So I am going to draw a line in the sand and say that we can't do anything during Holy Week.  If they can't do it the week of April 1 (and remove the stitches April 8) it will have to wait until after Easter.  It is something that needs addressing, but it is not life threatening.  It is just very stressful to have to juggle these two things, not to mention that she will be put into a new Medicaid managed care plan as of April 1, so all the players that we have to deal with will be different.  And the last thing I need leading up to Holy Week is a lot of stress and time spent screaming on the phone.

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.

In the Words of my Cynthia...

I see that the month is almost over and I have not written anything.  Actually, this is a good sign.  I tend to write either when I am unhappy, or when I have some sort of news, and neither has actually been the case.

Choir season has started and I can really see my new technique in action.  We are singing a Handel piece for Reformation Sunday and I really hope that I can get to sing the soprano part, as I can sing it really well (I don't know if that would have been the case even two years ago). It only goes up to a G and it moves around.  On the other hand, there is a top alto part that may be underpowered (or maybe not - it doesn't go very high so they should be able to pull some of the seconds).  I will sing it if asked, but would rather not (I am always happy to sing top alto parts that are peppered with Es and Fs but that's another story.)

Our star violinist has moved to another job at another church.  Maybe Little Miss will go with him?  I know when I heard choral singing there, the choir director's wife sang all the soprano solos, and he is still there, so probably she is so you never know.  On the  other hand, Little Miss will probably be spending less time in our neck of the woods.

I am continuing to work on Carmen.  The A flats that seemed so high a year and a half ago, that sounded great, but took so much work, are now effortless.  The B in the Sequidilla is manageable.  I usually have been vocalizing up to a high C sharp but yesterday I had trouble, probably because I had had a cold for two days.  As a result of all the toddlers at the church (this was what my doctor told me) I have started getting colds of the sort I got as a child but never as an adult: intractable stopped up nose (does not respond to the Neti pot and in fact using it is dangerous) and runny snot.  Fortunately they don't last more than two days.

I still don't have a definite date, but my voice teacher has gone back to singing tenor and wants to sing Don Jose.  I am staying on top of trying to get everything in order for this and my birthday concert.

Lastly (which comes to the title of this post), thanks to a nudge from a woman in the choir who is also a playwright, I have finished the draft of my Cinderella play.  I don't want to say too much, as it is not copyrighted, but at the end of the final scene, suddenly my protagonist just blurted out something that explains my continued involvement with the Lutheran church, which seems strange to people considering that my Unitarian blend of Christianity, Judaism, and Paganism isn't going anyplace soon.  High church Christian houses of worship have the best theater.  It's that simple.  I'm playing a role and the choir robe with the cross on it is my costume.  And what glorious music!!  Unitarians just don't know how to do that, even with a different theology as a starting point.  The women's Moon Circles that I go to are good theater, but I couldn't make them my only spiritual nourishment because there's no music, only chanting.

Well, for what it's worth, here's what Cynthia said:

You can make theater anywhere, now that I think of it.  That’s why I like singing in church services.  I am not religious .... but if you want to hear glorious music and colorful stories while sitting in a magnificent historic building, a church service is the best bargain around. And when I sing (in a choir robe, or in a black dress) as a soloist or choir member, the issue isn’t what I believe, but what the people listening believe; that I am bringing to life something profoundly moving and meaningful to them, just like being in a play or opera, only on a smaller scale, and without having to be in a decidedly un-spiritual and snarky cutthroat environment (you should hear some of my former conservatory classmates talk about other people; you wouldn’t believe it). 

I think this will stand me in good stead for a long time.  And I have made some wonderful friends.

Juliet, Cio-CIo San, and the Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name

I haven't written anything here for a long time, because I haven't been singing. Tuesday week I lost my voice to laryngitis, which, I was told by my ENT, whom I saw a few days later, was caused by a virus.  My vocal cords were in perfect shape apparently.  So I spent a week coughing and spitting and blowing my nose.  I sang for the first time this past Wednesday (just a few exercises; I didn't go to choir practice) and had a lesson yesterday.  The concert is now only two weeks away. My voice is mostly back (except that I am still coughing and blowing my nose, somewhat) but I need to get my stamina back.  Wish me luck please!!

As for the title of this post, as I have not been singing, I have been revisiting my other persona, the writer.  Monday I went to look at the performance space, and one of my colleagues from the choir (who lives in the building where the performance space is) agreed to swap plays to read.  I gave her Duet, the light and frothy fictionalized version of my experiences with the Mentor, including his $64,000 question, asked with a smirk, after I translated Dalila's aria "My heart opens at your voice like a flower" "So what kind of a flower do you think she's talking about?"  It will be interesting to see what she makes of it.  Maybe she will have an idea for someplace that wants to produce it.  Rather ironically, her play was produced in a church where a friend of the Mentor is the music director.  Wouldn't it be rich if it were produced there??

Her play was about a Lesbian minister.  I don't want to say more than that because there are things that are confidential.  In any event, if nothing else, it brought back lots of memories.  Back in my activist days, this was exactly the sort of bandwagon I would have loved to jump on with a group of women.  I was not raised to be religious, and would not have chosen this as my battleground, but anything high profile where there might be reporters was right up my alley.  And in fact we had already been there before.  This play was set in the 90s but in the 70s there had already been an ordination of a Lesbian minister (I don't remember with what outcome) and a song was dedicated to the whole thing called "You can't be in the closet with God".  It has so fallen off the map that it took me a while to find it online, but I did, and I will give a copy of it to my friend.

Now here's where things get weird.  Am I the only person who thinks half the fun of being gay was being an outsider?  I don't mean an outsider who will get run out of town on a rail or have my house burned down, but the kind of outsider who is, well, not welcome at family or other "respectable" gatherings.  If I had yearned to be part of that world (something I am ambivalent about) I would have married a rich man who would have bought me a brownstone to live in and let me pursue a career in the arts for no money in exchange for supervising the housekeeper and entertaining his business associates.  The whole gestalt of being with a woman was that I chose love and romance over respectability and practicality. (I could easily see myself marrying a man I was not in love with for practical reasons, but a woman never!)  We didn't want to be invited to the family Thanksgiving.  It was much more fun to make our own community get togethers.  Like being part of a sect or a cult (which had its downside, I later discovered) or a family of outlaws.

I grew up with Romeo and Juliet, Madama Butterfly and La Traviata.  Even though I was never a lyric soprano, there was a period when I played my recording of Butterfly over and over again because almost every word she sings could have been sung by a Lesbian in love.  All of it.  Being rejected by her family, being told her marriage is not "real".  Of course it simplifies things that she kills herself because then she doesn't have to wonder what to do later.

But the point I'm making is that the more "society" didn't want us, the closer we became, either as individual couples or as a community.  Being outsiders didn't make it harder to bond as couples, it made it easier because we could set our own terms.  (Actually many straight feminists envied us our freedom and open ended approach to relationships and were looking to us for leadership on how to create alternatives to marriage.  How ironic!) Now there's nothing. You have women pairing off, getting a marriage license, making nuclear families. The whole thing leaves me totally cold.

But as I said in an earlier post, maybe it's just as well.  Thirty-five years ago I gave up singing for my community and it norms.  Now I can just sing.

Erfreute Zeit!

Yesterday morning I sang one of my all-time favorite church solos: the Bach alto cantata "Erfreute Zeit" (loosely translated as "A Happy Time").

I love singing this piece for a variety of reasons.  First, it has a virtuoso violin accompaniment and is, in fact, more of a duet for voice and violin than a solo.  I sang it in the summer of 2011, sans violinist, because that was the summer that my beloved violinist friend began his rapid decline (he was 88) and was no longer able to see the music (or remember it from one day to the next).  Second, it is an object lesson in the fact that you don't have to have a high voice to sing something flashy (something that triggers a gut level "wow"! reaction from listeners).  (Here is a link to the version by Angelika Kirchschlager.)http://youtu.be/Dpj5N9lTnHM  Finally, I love the piece because it is happy.

I had a really happy day yesterday.  It is the kind of day I wish I could have more of.  Singing, in a situation where I don't feel I'm competing with anyone, and in which, in that moment, I can excel on my own merits.  Getting acknowledgment (I got compliments, Facebook posts, and even applause, which is almost unheard of for a church anthem.)  And then, when my inner diva is satisfied, enjoying other people for their gifts and their friendship, and letting the day wind down by doing something cozy with my SO, or even at home in my bed with my little Siamese cat (yesterday I did both).

I find these moments of happiness very hard to come by (the glorious ones, not the quiet ones; the latter for me are much easier to find).  So should I be damned for this?

After the suicide of Robin Williams there has been a lot of talk about depression.  People, at least in the circles in which I move, understand depression the way they understand cancer or diabetes.  Unfortunately, according to both my therapist and on online screening test, I am not depressed, so people write me off as having a bad attitude.  I don't think that is true either.  I think (this was a term my therapist used) I am suffering from "affluenza", in other words, as I wrote here I am in a "toxic environment".

So I need a way to find more "Erfreute Zeit" moments.

On September 11 I will be singing Handel's "O Had I Jubal's Lyre".  That can be one of them.  And then there will probably be a Christmas concert.

A Memoir, a Song, and a Short Story, or Amneris, not Joanna

This post started out as a Facebook post that no one responded to, so I decided it might do better as a blog entry.

Since Maya Angelou died recently, a lot has been written about her first memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Thinking about the title of this book reminded me of a song that I had almost as turbulent a relationship with as I had with Dalila's "Mon Coeur": "Green Finch and Linnet Bird".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBnNyL5O0Tc&feature=youtu.be

I laughingly referred to it as "the Caregiver's National Anthem" even though it is written to be sung by a young ingenue (although as it sits in my comfortable range of middle C to high G, I have sung it and I believe I have sung it well although I sound nothing like the woman in the Youtube clip).

For years I felt like Joanna: trapped with someone elderly in a passionless life.  In fact, in some of my earlier online communities, my "tag" was "if I cannot fly, let me sing".

This song was, in fact, my final battleground with The Mentor.  He coached me through it ridiculing me and mocking me, screaming and making faces, and, before we were finished, telling me I looked like Norma Desmond.

(When it came time for me to actually sing the piece - in a church fundraiser - he was notably AWOL.  In any event, it was after that session that I decided that he and I needed to call it quits.)

I have had various degrees of identification with this song over the years, and yes, although my life is no longer passionless, I still sometimes feel like a prisoner.  But I know I am not.  And I haven't had any impulse to sing this in a long time.

The import of my original Facebook posting was that I had wondered if Sondheim had seen (or read) the Angelou  memoir when he wrote this song because of course, the theme of it is "Why the Caged Bird Sings".

Later, when I entered an online writing contest (one thing I am proud of that carried over from the pseudonymous blog that I eventually deleted) one of the "prompts" was "the Caged Bird" (was this also an homage to Angelou?) I wrote a three page short story about my experiences working in the "Data Factory", which was, I guess, a short version of my Cinderella play, which I have let languish.  The story was published in an anthology called Idol Meanderings.

If I am not Joanna, I am definitely Amneris these days, with or without those dreaded B flats.  I had a voice lesson Tuesday for the first time in almost a month.  I sang through most of the Amneris/Radames duet (that is what my teacher wanted).  It sounded as if the role had been written for me except - what else! - when I got to the section with the dreaded ascending scale I panicked, started breathing shallowly (if at all) and pretty much blew it although I did hit the note on pitch.  Of course when I went back and only sang the few measures leading up to the phrase itself it sounded like gangbusters.  Now, what my teacher told me to do (this surprised me) was to start at the beginning of the duet, singing as well as I know I can (and he told me the way most of this role is written is ideal for my voice) and then, well, just keep singing well, with my larynx down and my throat open, and my support working, and see what happens when I get there, but not to obsess and panic and spoil the rest of the piece.  And if it doesn't work, he said then I can go back and sing the phrase by itself.  (And in a few minutes, I will do just that!)

And: at last night's choir practice I sounded really good.  There is a piece we will be singing with a high A flat and it was like, easy peasy.  (Now the question is will it be that easy at 7:50 am when I have to give it a whirl in my bathroom before leaving the house?)

Writing Assignment: The Most Important Thing that Happened to Me This Year

To my regular readers: I posted this in response to a "prompt" from the woman who taught the writing class I took this summer.  Much of the "history" here is familiar to you.  It isn't to her, so I needed to include it here.  And I suppose there are always new insights.  So of course I would love you all to read this.

The most important thing that happened to me this past year was finding a mentor.

When I look at people who have achieved excellence (and perhaps renown) in their chosen field, what they all have in common, is that they had a mentor.  It might be a parent (David Brooks once said that it took three generations to make a career), teacher, coach, or even a spouse or lover in a the same or a related field. I never had a mentor for my singing.  My mother wanted me to be a writer, in high school I was steered toward academics, not music (interestingly, students from disadvantaged backgrounds with good voices were more likely to be encouraged to sing than I was), and after I graduated from high school, let’s just euphemistically say I “fell off the map” for a looong time.

I began studying voice seriously (I had had a few informal lessons before that) in my late 20s, and was singing quite well, but at that time I was immersed in Lesbian-separatist political activities where I was discouraged from “giving my energy to a patriarchal art form,” particularly one where I would have lots of interaction with straight men.  So at 30 I stopped singing and enrolled in college to get a degree in – what else? – Women’s studies.

I say that after that I never thought about singing again until well into the millennium, but that is not really true.  If people were gathering around a piano at a party to sing, I would join in (and blow people away) and at least once a week I had a dream (I’m referring to the nocturnal kind) about singing.  And when we played “getting to know you” games at the office, I loved being able to answer the question “What is something nobody knows about you that would surprise them?” with “I used to be an opera singer” which I can say was true, even if I never got paid a penny for it.

Fast forward to 2003, the year of my “discovery” sitting in the back pew of my local Unitarian church, singing from a hymnal.  My partner and I started going to that church because we liked the idea of going to church but didn’t believe in most of the supernatural events that are the bedrock of most religions.  Certainly I didn’t go there to sing.  But one day, a very charismatic figure who looked like a cross between Rudolph Valentino and old drawings of Mephistopheles, whispered in my ear seductively “You’re a professional singer, aren’t you?” and things were off and running.  He led me a merry chase, which I wrote about at length here, but the end result was that I have been singing for ten years now.  He and I had a very ugly falling out (and then made peace five years to the day after that fateful Samson et Dalila duet, when I was singing the "Habanera" at a Valentine's Day concert at the Unitarian church), and I left the Unitarian church both because of that and because they decided to stop using classical music in the services, but I got right back on my feet and now have some solid (or they would be solid if I didn’t live in the most talent-packed ZIP code in the country) accomplishments under my belt.

Looking back, I realize that I would not have been so susceptible to a lot of his silliness (voice lessons, at which I learned a lot, were laced with racy comments – to me flattering, I suppose; I was 54 – and silly New Age blather) if I hadn’t been so starved for a mentor.

And I did not find another one until this year.  I have a good voice teacher, a musically knowledgeable choir director, and several coaches, but no one who was really interested in me.  I mean, really, when you come to think of it, who wants to mentor someone over 60?  Everything is about young, young, young, young talent.

But this year someone materialized.  I had sung with her before, but this year it has been different.  She says I have the perfect voice for Spanish songs.  Which to her includes Carmen.  She is going to help me produce a concert of excerpts from Carmen with someone reading from the novella by Prosper Merimee.  She gave me a big thumbs up for the Youtube video I made, singing the Habanera in the Strand Bookstore (available on request, just send me an email).  She suggested a book of Spanish songs for me to buy, as well as a book about Spanish culture.  And if the weather had been better, she had planned to come to the Lutheran church where I’m singing now to hear me sing a Spanish song about the birth of Jesus at a service conducted entirely in Spanish!

I have had so many disappointments since my 2003 “discovery”.  There are about 10 “community opera groups” (aka they don’t pay people) here and none of them wanted me.  They are filled with professional sounding singers (some even have managers) with conservatory degrees and impressive CVs.  Even a choir that doesn’t pay is now filled with the “stars of tomorrow” from the big conservatories.  I was starting to give up hope.

Now I can believe again.  That someone sees a special spark in me, no matter that I’m over 60, have no music degree, and nothing on my resume except church solos and a few homemade concerts (produced by me or someone else).

And if nothing else, I can still hope that someone turns my blog into a movie.  If it happened to “Julie”, cooking from Julia Child’s book, in obscurity, it can happen to anyone.

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.

Is Anybody Out There??

First, let me say that since taking the writing class (which I loved), I am eager to write, and I may, from time to time, write about things other than singing.

This doesn't mean that I have stopped singing!  In fact I am looking forward to my voice lesson today, when I can work on some of the scenes from Carmen.

But I would like to branch out.

Something happened yesterday that made me terribly sad, and of course now I feel like an idiot for feeling sad!

I just feel so much loss.  Loss of the possibility of doing anything "noteworthy" with singing, loss of the possibility of having an interesting and stimulating livelihood, loss of a peer partner (which is a lose-lose situation; if she dies I will be desolate, and as long as she lives I am trapped in a lesser life), loss of my mother, who, even though she had a deformed spirit, still really was interested in what I was thinking and doing, even if only to argue with me about it.

The thing that made me sad involved an interchange between a father and daughter on Facebook, in which the father expressed pride in an blog essay the daughter had written about bisexuality.  True, this is not a new story.  In fact,this article covers a lot of the same territory. But I felt sad that never, in a million years, would my mother have been "proud" of anything I wrote as it stood. (The subject matter here is immaterial; it never bothered her that I had a same sex partner, it bothered her that I had such an ordinary life.) Her first impulse would always have been to gleefully, like a child asking permission to eat a forbidden cookie, say "is it ok if I take out my red pencil" (pant pant slobber slobber) which of course put an end to it.  If I said no, she would tell me she would rather not read it.  She was never really interested in what I thought, or in how well I formulated my thoughts, or in relating to me as a separate person, with whom she could agree to disagree.  Although specifics really didn't matter.  No matter how compellingly I might write that something was blue, she would make a case for the fact that it was red, and if I had written compellingly about the fact that it was red, she would have made a case for the fact that it was blue.  In any event, discord would ensue and everything would be spoiled.

But since she died, in some ways things are worse.  Give or take one or two people (my SO aka my "it's complicated" is not one of them) no one really gives a damn.  I can't tell you how many interesting Facebook status updates I've made that no one has responded to (and believe me, most of them are more interesting than what Jane Doe ate for dinner or the fact that Mary Smith spilled soup on her blouse!).  Or the fact that this blog has only 13 followers (the daughter I referenced has 23).   I mean every day I look at my stats, which show that obviously I have more than 13 readers, but still.

My therapist helped me see that so much of what makes me feel wanting is generational.  The women who have the things that I want are 40, not 63.  I have not done badly for someone who was told during what is now called emerging adulthood to "turn on, tune in, and drop out", the latter with disastrous lifelong consequences.  Few women of my generation had "careers".  Blue collar women had blue collar jobs and "intellectual-ish" women worked in the pink collar ghetto of the publishing industry cleaning up grammar and syntax, which is what I am still doing.  That work has as little to do with the putative "glamourous world of publishing" as being a house cleaner has with being an interior designer.  But the types of "career" that not only pay well but that entail traveling, attending conferences, and meeting people, did not figure in the lives of most women, even intelligent ones with a good postsecondary education.  And it was not just the women.  Baby boomers dropped out of college in droves, to finish, sometimes, at night as middle aged adults.  People in their early 20s made hippie marriages, some of which they ended up stuck in (I would count myself here even though I am not legally married).  Being lazy was a virtue, working too hard was frowned on (one of the dream jobs back then was being a case worker for the city, which in those days entailed visiting clients, allowing for huge swaths of absenteeism during the day that went unnoticed).

So I really don't feel wanting compared to most women my age, except that some managed to marry someone gainfully employed for most of their lives, and many are still working full time (many at jobs they dislike as much as I disliked mine).  The handful of women I grew up with who had enviable careers are all single.

I probably was happier in those two sessions of the writing class than I have been in a long time.  That was the first time in - decades, it seems - when I was in a small group where it felt that the playing field was level, and each person's story was deemed equally worthy.  Each person got an equal share of the talking time and was listened to.  I can't remember the last time I felt listened to on a regular basis, even in cyberspace.

I am not sure where I am going with this.  Tomorrow I am having lunch with the only friend I have (herself bisexual, and, like me, someone who never had  the luxury of being a stay at home wife and mother) who totally agrees with me that marriage is about money not about love.  Unfortunately, my SO will be there with me, so we can't talk about that (last time we talked about it briefly while my SO was in the loo).  Maybe if I can catch her on the fly she will tell me "you made a good point there, BabyD, succinctly and well put".  Other than in the writing class, that's a phrase I haven't heard in a very long time.

Feeling Happy: Enjoy it While it Lasts

I had an exceptionally good voice lesson yesterday.  Now we all know, I have had these before, and made breakthroughs, and then they have not entirely held, and I have felt back to square one.  Well, not quite, just back to not having mastery over my breathing, my centeredness, and my groundedness, which is where the problems lie, basically.

For the umpteenth time, my teacher pointed out that if I "croon" my way through sections of a piece (the sections that sit, let's say, in the octave from middle C to the C above) thinking I am "saving" my voice for the high climax, all I am really doing is getting everything out of alignment so the high climax will be harder. He pointed out that I can easily sing an arpeggio up to A and back, even holding the A for four counts before I come down, so that is all this difficult passage is, and I have enough time to take a breath beforehand!  So today I sang through the the scene going three pages back (I have already mastered it going two pages back).  Next time I will try it going four pages back, etc.  And that is really it, because there is a big break after "Va".

And I took out the score of Hamlet and played through the scene I am thinking of doing.  So it has a B flat in it.  It is at the end of a long scale, which is something else I can do.  My B flat has really improved lately.  I still don't think I can open my mouth and sing it off the cuff (and right now I don't have to) but I can now hold it easily for four counts in the middle of an arpeggio.

In other news, I have signed up to take a writing class which is being given at the church by a woman there who is a playwright.  She is one of those people with an "interesting life" who has written a play and has traveled all over the world with it.  The focus of the class will be on finding your voice as a writer.  I don't think that is my problem: I already have that.  My problem is finding the right audience.  I mean if a woman my age who became obsessed with playing the cello in her 50s ended up with her picture in this article in the New York Times I don't see why I can't end up with mine there too!! It's all a question of whom you know, I guess. The  main thing I hope to get out of this writing class is to reinforce that my story matters and is interesting even if I don't have an interesting job or go to a prestigious school.

And I wrote something on the Forum on the subject of being "discovered", which is one dear to my heart. There has been a lot of talk about the myth of being discovered, like Lana Turner, which is how I describe my experience. I believe it can happen, but it is not a substitute for hard work. What the "discovery" does is give you someone in your corner, sort of like an AA sponsor, or really any kind of mentor who takes a holistic interest in your life and checks in with you about the choices you are making.  The main reason I feel proud of myself for posting something there is that it is part of my determination to nurture my self-esteem.  This is my story.  I am not just a superannuated joke, or a "troll".  I work very very hard.

Now I just need to nail down a date to do "Laudamus te" with the violinist in the summer.  If I don't at least one thing on my calendar I feel antsy.

On Writing, Not Singing

Over the weekend, I went to an LGBT themed brunch, where I must admit, I felt like a bit of a hypocrite; on the other hand, I still certainly count as solidly B.

In any event, I met someone there who is a high-level Broadway producer, and when another one of the guests mentioned that he had written something and the producer politely agreed to look at it, I just bit the bullet and told him about my play Duet. (If anyone is interested in reading it, you can post a comment with your real email address - which I will delete later if you ask me to). I don't actually know how this play got written. My mother always wanted me to "be" a writer (I - to my disappointment - got the English medal not the music medal when I graduated from High School) so I probably do write a lot better than I sing, but I had never written fiction before.

But when all the brouhaha was going on with The Mentor Who Shall Not Be Discussed, and there was really no one I could talk to because everyone I knew was either a friend of my partner's or of his, this play just sort of wrote itself. I mean he was very funny and a bit pretentious. An excellent voice teacher, yes, but besides his not knowing the difference between being seductive and being supportive, or being seductive and being appreciative, or what you will, he also did spout a lot of new-agey claptrap that was quite funny when I put it all down on paper.

The line of the decade (after hearing me sing "Mon Coeur)":

TMWSNBD: What are you singing about there. Translate it for me.

ME: My heart opens at your voice like a flower at the kiss of dawn.

TMWSNBD: Sooooooo. What kind of flower do you think she's talking about?

This play did have its world premier at a small community theater in Texas and sitting in the audience hearing people laugh at the lines I had written, which came from the torment I had suffered, just put me over the moon. I think the play is really good. It's funny and well-written. If it were a movie it would be called a "chick flick". The off-Broadway theaters I had sent it to weren't interested....not edgy enough, but even people from there seemed to be impressed with it.

So who knows? Maybe that tortured and transformative phase of my life will live on forever?