As foreshadowed: complete exhaustion. That means take out and bad TV. I might even go to bed early, which is not really my bag.
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The fact that I have an awesome day ahead of me does not make it any easier to peel myself out of bed in the morning. Nor does it help me string words together to make sentences. Tomorrow I have a daytime photo shoot (for an exciting project to be announced...) followed by an evening audition. Sunday I have my regular church job, followed by the aforementioned extra church gig concert, and I have ambition of attending a Town Hall event for the artist community of NYC in response to the recent, shocking (to me) change of political environment.
All of this is amazing stuff that I'm excited about. That's a tremendous privilege. I also see myself crashing from exhaustion on Sunday night. Commence coffee IV drip. My church gig is a little extra gigginess this week. We're singing Duruflé's Requiem as part of the church's music program. The music is great - hearkening back to gregorian chant - well, great if you like that kind of thing, I guess (I do). If you're in the area, the concert is at 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, November 20th at Reformed Church of Bronxville. If you aren't in the area, here's a recording: Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. My family's tradition is to gather at my Aunt's house near Portland, ME, Wednesday through Saturday. It is a feast of food and good company and music and stimulating conversation and togetherness.
I also dread Thanksgiving a little. Not the holiday itself, but the end of the holiday, which signifies all kinds of madness in my life. On top of the madness we all experience: holiday parties, crowds of people, shopping, eating way too much rich food, stressing about menus and travel plans, etcetera, I usually have several auditions, and multiple holiday concerts in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I used to fall into a deep depression sometime during or immediately after that time. The torpor and misery would hang around until mid-April, or thereabouts, and it happened every winter without fail. In recent years, with therapy, lifestyle management, and yes, appropriate pharmaceuticals, I haven't had this post-holiday fog, but I still worry that it might return one day. I leave for Thanksgiving in one week. I'm less worried about the potential for despair this year, which gives me hope that I'll be able to enjoy the holiday season more than in past years. Anyone want to share any favorite recipes? I do lots of auditions. Lots and lots of auditions. So do all of my opera-singing friends and colleagues. When I started auditioning, my anxieties around auditioning were about basic preparedness and the fundamentals of singing well. I never knew what would come out of my mouth, so I could just as easily give a terrible audition as I could give an amazing audition. Fortunately enough for me, there were a few amazing auditions in there that landed me jobs in those beginning years, because I know many a singer who did not have that luck.
After doing this for years, I no longer worry about preparedness. In the extremely unlikely event that I mess something up, I just laugh, everyone else laughs and I start over. I am also confident in my ability to sing pretty well, barring illness, even if I don't get to warm up as much as I would like to. Even on terrible weather days, like we have today, my voice works, and my brain works, and audition disasters are practically a thing of the past (knock wood). You would think that would make auditioning a piece of cake. But no. My standards are higher. I want to deliver moving, emotive performances that make people stand up and take notice, even if I look like a drowned rat, it's 10:15 a.m. and the auditor spends the whole time huddling over her coffee cup, barely looking up. I am experimenting with different ways of "bringing it" in auditions, and today my experiment had me directing all of my attention at the imagined space and imagined people that would be in the scene if I were actually in the opera, instead of in a run down dance studio performing for the person sitting behind a table at the opposite end of the room. In other recent auditions, my attention has been directed more inward towards the emotions that singing the character's words make me feel, but I've found that deeply unsatisfying after the fact. I, personally, find it very challenging to chew imagined scenery, but 90 minutes after my audition this morning, I feel much more satisfied with my performance, so I guess I'll try to do it again next time. N.B. If you know any professional opera singers besides me, give them some extra love and kindness during this time of year. Audition season exacts a very high toll on all of us emotionally and financially. In the short time that I've been writing this blog, Mondays have been for sharing what I'm listening to. Usually its music. Today its the Indie Opera Podcast, episode 31, on which we interviewed Stewart Copeland, the legendary drummer for The Police, who now composes opera. This episode was really fun to record and hearkens back to happier times (at least for me) pre-election. Please check it out. It's really fun. I'll be spending a lot of time with these men in the next several months. For your listening enjoyment...
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AuthorOpera singer, opera producer, podcast co-host, lover of music, travel, food, and all things mind-bending. Archives
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