The Red Queen's Race

There's a part in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass that I think sums up the life of a performer--or, let's be real, grownupitude in general--pretty well. Alice has just met the Red Queen (not to be confused with the Queen of Hearts, who, while still pretty great, is from a different book entirely), who explains to her that the geography of Wonderland is set up like a giant chess-board and that the way to advance one's position is to advance to the other end of the board. Alice begins as a White Pawn and wishes to become a queen. And then this exchange happens:

'Now! Now!' cried the Queen. 'Faster! Faster!' And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.

The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, 'You may rest a little now.'

Alice looked round her in great surprise. 'Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!'

'Of course it is,' said the Queen, 'what would you have it?'

'Well, in OUR country,' said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'

'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'

 For the last couple of years, I've been doing a lot of running, and it's easy to feel like I haven't gotten much of anywhere. Audition season is often like this, but the past year felt particularly demoralizing. Coming off the high of my first 5K and singing the most musically difficult role of my life (oh, Turn of the Screw, you gorgeous sadist), I spent a couple of weeks in New York City, got new headshots, recorded new pre-screening audios, and reformatted my CV. I was on this.

And then the invitations for a live audition just . . . didn't come from most places I applied to. The few auditions I did get didn't lead to gigs. And, as a singer, someone whose instrument is literally a part of her body, it was easy to internalize this rejection as a reflection on my worth as a person and/or artist, rather than just an indication that maybe the roles that were available weren't a close fit for my voice or personality. This impulse to beat myself down was a rookie mistake, and I'm not proud of it. So, my first truly miserable audition season in the books, I'm preparing for the start of a new round this fall.

That's the thing with a lot of life--unless you were born with an insane level of talent, plus a great work ethic and understanding of your field, PLUS some stunning family connections, you're going to get rejected a lot, and it's going to suck, and you're going to have to either keep trying or find something else to do. Audition season is absolutely the Red Queen's Race. For three to five months at a time, we sprint from room to room to room across Los Angeles or Manhattan or wherever, and we get a breathless four-to-eight minutes to prove that we are the answer to whatever question the casting director is asking himself at the moment. Some of those rooms are too small or too hot or have terrible acoustics, but we do it because the only way to even have a chance at progressing to the status of Queen (or, like, convincing somebody to pay us for singing high notes, amirite?) is to keep moving. The second we stop, we may as well be moving backwards.

All of this is to say, it's been a really long time and I missed writing for the two or three of you who actually read this shit (hi, Mom!). Here's a reaction gif to illustrate how I feel about being back:

So. Now that that long-winded and heavy-handed metaphor is out of the way, here's some stuff that happened over the last, like, two years:

1.  My hair was short, and then long, and then short again. It grows fast, so we're pretty much back to status quo now. Yes, I know you give a shit about this, and you're welcome for the update.
2. I visited New York, like, five times, and Los Angeles three or four. I have developed a grudging appreciation for both of these places (and a very enthusiastic appreciation for my amazing friends who live there), but it's cheaper to live in Chicago, so I'm gonna stay here a while.
3. Last summer, I spent a month in Hawaii and somehow came back paler than when I had left the Mainland. This may be due to the fact that I even wear a cardigan to the beach.
4. After my beloved Camry was destroyed in a car accident right before Christmas 2012, I bought a Toyota Corolla, whose name is Napoleon, who is now paid for in full. I feel good about this.
5. I saw the following shows during various audition trips to New York City: Matilda (twice!), Pippin (circus-y!), Cabaret (Alan Cumming!), On the Town (?!?!?!!!!), and A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (patter songs!).  There's still a list of things I'd like to see despite being THE POOREST, but discount ticket vendors are the actual best thing ever.
6. In September 2014, I left the mostly-full-time job I had held for nearly 3 years and decided to see if I could support myself on substitute teaching and tutoring alone which is mostly working so far? Ten months later, I have just taken on a fourth part-time job, still live and die by Google Calendar, and am no longer suffering from at-least-weekly migraines.
7. And finally, this jerk still lives in my apartment. We play fetch, and sometimes she gets to come on road-trips.

So there we have it. I've been a bum, and I'll be around more now that the obligatory "I'm sorry for my protracted absence" post has been written. I love you all.

They're American planes, made in America

In lieu of an actual post (and I am so very jet-setting and whirlwindy these days that I haven't had time to write anything real down), I thought I would take a moment to transcribe what I typed into my phone in an attempt to stay awake at various points during my recent return to the US from a weekend in London. Also, all of the preceding was just one sentence. Wow. In any event, this is what I'm like over the course of a few hours when running on little-to-no sleep:

11 March 2013, 4:10 a.m. GMT (or thereabouts)

Waiting on the train to Gatwick. No wifi. Haven't slept yet and probably will not until we depart for Manchester (2.5 hours UGH).

In the station (which is freezing): squatters sleeping under the escalators, man who has sneezed but not wiped his nose pacing from one end of the station to the other, kid doing first push-ups and then the Electric Slide to stay awake. Three kinds of people in Victoria at 4 am: homeless, crazy, and on the way to Gatwick.

Missing Chicago not because of the weather or because I don't love London but because I miss my own bed and the cat, electric heating pads and hot showers and peanut butter, which nobody thinks about till they have been in a foreign country and craved it but the shops sell only Nutella or Marmite (worst of all possible fates) because THERE IS NO PEANUT BUTTER IN EUROPE. Thinking about becoming a peanut butter evangelist. Eventually, though, the Toast Spread Crusades would inevitably follow, which would be a damned shame.

No sleep in 22 hours now. Nausea setting in, headache settled behind the eyes, imagining that the train is rocking back and forth. Sore from my long walk and imagining that my body is poisoning itself with lactic acid seeping from muscles into veins. Feverish but no fever. Entire body is vibrating. So tired.

Took tomorrow (today) off from work. Plan on taxi-ing home, feeding Pen, taking muscle relaxant, sleeping till tomorrow morning. Might sleep on plane, will probably sleep on plane, but never any guarantees.

Train moving. Stay awake. STAY AWAKE.

- - -

About two hours later:

Did not stay awake. Got a blissful thirty minutes of sleep on the train.

Shin splints made the jaunt between the two terminals an adventure. Can't wait to sprint from my gate in Manchester to the gate for the flight to Chicago.

Breakfast at a French(-style) cafe: omelette, fried potatoes, coffee. The waiter offered orange juice and I was disoriented to say yes so I had three beverages, including water, which he found very amusing. Feeling more awake now, but only just. The nausea is, at least, faded, and that was the part I was having difficulty with.

Boarding now.


I feel compelled to add that, despite the above bitching and moaning, it was a relatively pain-free journey from London back Stateside. There were no unnecessarily long waits at customs or security, and there was only a minor scare in Manchester where my seat had been changed due to a flight delay and I was interrogated by a man about my business in London as two military men with the biggest assault rifles I have ever seen looked on. Probably not all that frightening if you aren't completely disoriented from lack of sleep.

Next adventure: Florida. Will post updates from the road, if at all possible. 

Putting it together; or, BS reassembles her jigsaw life

After the accident.

It took about five days for the initial shock to pass. Christmas night I watched the Doctor Who Christmas special (of course) and then went to do something else around the house, and happened to pass the television just as BBC America aired the very end of "The Angels Take Manhattan" which is, as anyone who watches Doctor Who knows, soul-crushing. This was the thing that broke through the post-accident brain-fog, and the thing that broke me down. After five days, I finally cried--a lot. It was, I think, a reaction to the realization of just how bad the accident was, and how much worse it could have been. The car that hit my Camry was a Hyundai Sonata, going between 35 and 40 miles an hour; a larger vehicle, or one traveling faster, could have seriously injured or even killed me. My airbags didn't deploy. Somehow, no glass was broken, I didn't hit my head, the most serious injury was the bruising from where I slammed into the driver's-side door.

I've been back in the city now for a little over a week, and it's beginning to feel as if I'm coming out of the stasis I was in during my visit to my parents' house. The holiday season, usually stressful, had a little extra kick this year, because in addition to the fallout of the accident, we also made the decision to say goodbye to Macavity, who had been a member of our family for seventeen years and nine months, after  taking a sharp turn for the worse between Christmas and the New Year. All in all, I have decided to consider this holiday season to be the lowest possible point, from which things can only improve. And, I have to admit, it's impressive that this holiday season finally edged out the year I was seven or eight and Mom had to take me to the hospital on Christmas Eve because of a high fever, after which I projectile-vomited the fluorescent pink medicine the doctor had prescribed all over my grandmother's house. That year, I opened gifts with the family while lying on the floor. That was the year my grandmother bought me a copy of Monica Furlong's book Wise Child and a collection of female-centric fairy stories called Tatterhood, which is, it is possible, are the books which first gave me an awareness of feminism.

Now that I think of it, I don't have that many memories of childhood, but the ones I do have are vivid.

So. I'm piecing my life back together after re-entering the world of the living. My re-entry was, it must be noted, not half-assed in any way: I arrived in town on Tuesday morning, and on Tuesday night a friend and I went to Hansel and Gretel at the Lyric, after which I attended an opera-affiliated networking event at a swanky bar. The next night, I went out with a friend in Wicker Park. And then I didn't leave the house for two days, because being social is work, man.

Speaking of work, I have been doing a lot of it. In fact, work takes up approximately 50% of my life (the remaining 50% is split between sleeping, drinking coffee, and reading books I hated or avoided reading in high school). I will not talk about work here, because work takes up too much of my life already without infiltrating my blog.

I taught at a high school yesterday, which was a nice change of pace from the everyday grind of making phone calls to musicians to talk about other musicians. This time it was sophomores, and the subject was chemistry (a class that, for the record, I somehow avoided in high school). Thankfully, the teacher left a worksheet for the class to do, and the subject matter basic enough that answering questions wasn't too difficult. During my planning period, I read Of Mice and Men because I had finished The Jungle while the students were working on homework during academic lab. The Jungle is an excellent book, and Of Mice and Men kind of made me hate everything. I guess one could argue that both books involve terrible people doing terrible things to other terrible people, but at least the over-the-top call to action at the end of Sinclair's book reminded me of the over-the-top choral endings of Shostakovich's 2nd and 3rd Symphonies, and those always made me smile.

This entry is terribly scattered. I suppose that's the result of my brain being shocked into almost-frantic action after doing so little during the holiday. Well, we'll just have to go with that, I suppose. I have more to say than I had expected.

A student in one of my classes yesterday had a birthday. He turned sixteen, and I realized that there are students in high school, which is damned near adulthood, who were born either the year Monicagate happened or the one before it. This is the first time I have been aware of a group of people who, for the most part, have their own thoughts and ideas and are well on their way to being independent human beings, who are too young to remember a major cultural event I remember reacting to (and, for the record, my reaction at the time was, "Really? You're calling his leadership into abilities into question because of that? Really?!" I was a precocious twelve-year old). It occurred to me, as it sometimes does: I am nearer to thirty than twenty, and I don't feel any older than 22. Is this a thing that happens to everyone, the feeling that there is a huge discrepancy between the age one is and the age one perceives oneself to be? Either way, it's a strange moment of self-awareness for someone who still occasionally gets carded while buying tickets for R-rated movies (which did happen in November, when I bought a ticket for Lincoln).

Speaking of R-rated movies, I am currently half-watching a pre-rehab Robert Downey, Jr. movie called In Dreams and I have no idea what's going on. I'm less lost than I was during The Expendables, but still . . . 

I think I've said about all I want to say for now, though. In the future, there will be book talk! There is a truly terrible book I've been meaning to write about but I needed to take a couple of months before going back to it, because it may be the worst thing I have ever read. Hilariously so. More on that later.

Winter is coming; or, BS's continued adventures in narrowly-averted disaster

To be filed under: things that could have turned out much worse than they did:

I am writing about this, first of all, because my mother asked me to. Last night I was in a car accident in which both cars were totaled. Thankfully, no serious injuries were incurred, either to me or the driver of the other car, but the experience shook me pretty badly. Everything happened very quickly, and I went immediately into shock, so my memory probably isn't to be trusted completely, but here is the sequence of events as I remember them:

Some friends from book club (more on that later) and I had made plans to hold a holiday party, and as my apartment is both large and centrally-located, I volunteered to host. The whole event was thrown together very hastily, so I had decided to drive over the grocery store after work. The weather was, as everyone who was in the Midwest last night knows, terrible: freezing rain transitioning into wet snow flurries, low visibility, and extreme darkness. As it was rush-hour, I decided to take a side street rather than the heavily-crowded intersection of three streets, where cars were backed up at least two blocks to the south. I paused at a stop sign and inched into the intersection to see whether there was any oncoming traffic, but I didn't see anything so I went through the sign. I didn't see the other driver until just before she smashed into the passenger-side front door of my car, so I must have missed seeing the car approaching because it was obscured by some larger vehicles to the right of the intersection. There was a loud metallic crunching and scraping sound and the sound of breaking glass, my glasses flew off my face, and I was knocked toward a row of parked cars. I don't remember much from the next few seconds, other than that I somehow managed to avoid hitting a parked car and pulled my vehicle to a stop in the oncoming traffic lane.

I had bought a six-pack of beer at the grocery store; in the collision, the bottles were shattered and beer was soaking into the floor-mat. I remember being very afraid that the police would think I had been drinking, since the car reeked of alcohol. Someone driving by who saw the accident pulled over and called the police, who sent a State Trooper to take witness statements. A friend who was going to attend the party at my house took a taxi to sit with me as I waited for the police report to be written up, and another drove over to pick us up after the car was towed. Apart from the very few vivid memories I have of those horrible two hours (listening to the rain through the gap created by the smashed door, a pedestrian stopping to ask for directions to the Oglivie train station, explaining the concept of the Assassin's Creed series to the friend who waited with me as the State Trooper prepared the accident report to distract myself from the fact that I was sitting in a totaled car waiting for someone to come take it away), the entire experience is very much a blur.

I have only been in one other serious car accident in my life, when I was 17 and backed my Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight into an irrigation ditch during a blizzard, then crawled out of the door and up through the snow to sit on the side of the road as I shook and rocked back and forth. It doesn't feel real. The only confirmation I have, the things I keep going back to to re-ground myself in reality, are the photos I took of the damage as I waited for the tow, the fact that my car is no longer parked on the street, and a soreness on the left side of my body where, I assume, I was slammed into the driver's side door by the force of the impact. The woman driving the other car was not too badly injured; her airbag deployed, and the only injuries she suffered (at least, that she told me about) were scrapes on her face and some bruising on her chest from the force of the bag hitting her. Opa's Camry, which my family bought from him when I was finishing high school, is most likely finished. Mom says that the fact that my injuries were so limited must be due, in part, to the fact that he is still keeping an eye on me, even now that he's gone. I don't know that I believe in an afterlife or that the people we love continue to watch us after they're gone, but what I do know is that this accident could have been much, much worse than it was, and that the fact that no one was badly hurt is a small miracle. And, oh, there are the tears I've been waiting for the last 24 hours. I suppose that means the worst of the shock is over, and I can start to process what has happened.

A Degree in Calamity; or, BS's continued adventures in narrowly-averted disaster

Every performer, I have been told, has a recurring nightmare in which one finds oneself in the middle of a performance for which one is thoroughly unprepared.

This nightmare scenario just happened to me In Real Life.

In early November, I applied to participate in NATSAA (the National Association of Teachers of Singing Artist Award), a biennial competition requiring vocalists to prepare an hours' worth of repertoire meeting a series of requirements relating to language, stylistic period, and composition date. The District competition was scheduled to take place on the 25th of February, allowing ample time for the competition's organizers to collect and review applications and make preparations for the event. This is, for the most part, what happened. 

Until the informational e-mail sent out in mid-January was eaten by the internet. This e-mail included, among other details relating to the event, the vital information that singers were to provide their own accompanists for the District and Regional auditions. It never arrived--was never even filtered into my Spam folder--so I did not receive this information until February 22. Three days before the competition. 

At this point I feel that it is important for me to point out that this type of crazy random happenstance is fairly typical of my luck--if there is a pit in the cherry pie or an eggshell in the brownie batter, that slice of pie or brownie usually finds its way to my plate. So, really, given my history, I probably should have expected something along the lines of an e-mail containing crucial information disappearing into the vastness of the internet and reached out to The Powers That Be much earlier. However, I did not. Instead, I waited. And then I had a crisis.

In the end, it took me all of about four hours to find a pianist--and, thank goodness, I found one who was  both willing to and capable of learning a recital program's worth of incredibly difficult music (Ravel and Marx and Barber, oh my!) in a span of 24 hours. We ended up winning Districts and, although I didn't win Regionals, the judges were very positive and encouraging. And so, NATSAA, I will see you again in two years, when I will no longer be the youngest competitor by a margin of 4-5 years.

My mother, who was a witness to this entire situation as it unfolded (including many tearful phone calls and a particularly harrowing last-minute search for a copy of Handel's Messiah), has offered the following advice: "Get used to it. You chose this life. Also, maybe you should start looking for a copy of the music you need before the day of a competition." Words to live by.

Promise I'm not dead; or, This is mostly a list

I rode the Red Line back north from rehearsal tonight before taking a cab the rest of the way home and had a nice chat with one of the Boheme chorus baritones--I was telling him about how I spend so much time alone, and how for a couple of weeks I was insanely productive, baking bread and cleaning all the things and basically being very housewifely for someone who is neither married nor planning to be, but at some point I was just bored with no one to share ideas with.

Anyway, here are a few unremarkable things that have happened to me since I last wrote anything here:

1. I have knitted two pairs of fingerless mittens and started on a third, which are pink. Pink.
2. As an experiment, I tried Greek yogurt with honey, because I wanted to know what all the fuss is about. And the verdict is: acceptable. It certainly breaks up the monotony of a diet composed primarily of granola and prunes. I am an old woman at 25.
3. I have gotten my roommate addicted to Doctor Who. I started her on the first episode of the fifth series, and she likes Matt Smith. The Weeping Angels episodes gave her a nightmare, which means she is human. In related news, I have cried watching the two most recent episodes of Doctor Who.
4. The Tigers clinched the AL Central Division. I bought two bottles of wine, because it is going to be a long postseason.
5. My mother visited me today--yesterday? Saturday--and took me grocery shopping, because I am, if not destitute, then at least underemployed. At the deli counter, I asked for provolone and the man working there asked me how I wanted it sliced. I was very confused. Um, with something sharp? Into slices? Then he clarified that he was referring to the thickness of the slices. I have never been asked that question at a deli before. It made my whole day feel surreal.
6. While my mother was here, we ate lunch at a diner in Boystown, where we were served by a very friendly waiter who showed me his tattoos (I was impressed) and gave me Halloween costume advice (I was grateful).
7. I spend a lot of time reading in the Starbucks near my apartment because it is one alternative to sitting in my apartment all day watching trashy reality TV. Recently, a barista's name and phone number were written on the side of my cup--I don't even know, I'm pretty sure it was a prank played on the owner of said cell phone. I sent a text to the number pretending to be an undercover CIA agent, because I am a Grown Up and that is what I do when I receive an unsolicited phone number. If anybody knows what "The mongoose has left the henhouse" means, there is probably something very wrong with you, because I made it up.
8. I have never seen a mongoose, or even a picture of one. I only know they exist because of a 1980s cartoon adaptation of Rikki-Tikki Tavi my family had on VHS when I was a kid.

That's all for now, I think. It's almost 4:30 a.m. now, so clearly I can't be bothered with being witty. I just wanted to put it out there: "I am alive! I am not dead! I hope life gets easier soon!"

I'll show you around; or, BS arrives in a new city

So here's a fun little quirk of psychology: since arriving in Chicago, my sense of the Italian language has returned. Thus far, I am unsure whether this has more to do with the predominantly Italian-American population of my neighborhood, or with the fact that the last time I felt so completely foreign in a city was last summer in Florence.

I have been moved into the new apartment for just over thirty hours, and it's strange how completely different to Seattle Chicago has been so far. My neighborhood is small and relatively quiet, about halfway between where the hipsters used to be and where they are going. Walking down the street I see a lot of families and young couples with dogs. I am, at least, pleased to be far from the high-volume hubris of the city's businessmen--I never could stand to hear businessmen talk about themselves and the money that they make, and, at least so far, I have met people my own age. For the most part, I've kept to myself the past two days, and in this way the reticence of the big city suits me: when I feel like interacting with other people, I go to the local coffee shop for an iced chai (the best I have had--ever) or to the organic greengrocer, but for the most part, I am left in peace to read my book.

I did have an interesting interaction with a cab driver last Thursday, however. For whatever reason, I seem to be the person who gets the pit in the slice of cherry pie, the eggshell in the brownie--and the craziest of cab drivers. In Seattle, for example, I once caught a cab outside of the opera house and, leaning over to the open window, asked the driver, "Are you free?" "Thanks to Mister Lincoln, yes," he replied. Well. Yes, please, let's have a discussion about the history of slavery to go with my overpriced twenty-minute drive back to the north side, please. Other drivers have attempted to engage me in conversation as I sat in the back seat, attempting to impress me with their knowledge of the local music scene once they learned I was a musician by trade, once even during a 4 a.m. ride to the airport. But, oh, this one--she wins the award for Craziest Cabbie, because at the conclusion of this taxi ride, I ended up with a religious tract.

The main point of this story, I will say at the outset, is that I should just learn to shut up, because that is when the crazies descend. I got in the cab. She asked where I wanted to go. I told her. She had no idea where it was, so I, with my limited knowledge of the outer neighborhoods of Chicago, attempted to explain it to her. And then I noticed that she was playing an Evangelical sermon on her radio. Oh. God. Here is where BS becomes an idiot:

BS: Um, who is the speaker?

Driver: Oh, that's Pastor Chris! He's an inspiration.

BS: Oh.

Driver: When he preaches, the dumb speak, the blind see, and the lame walk. [She proceeds to detail the miracles performed by Pastor Chris, and proselytizes to me on the subject of speaking in tongues] Are you a Christian, ma'am?

BS: Um. Yes?

Driver: What church do you attend?

BS: Well. At the moment, none. But I'm a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, and attend whenever I can. [this is, true to my name, BS--but there was no way I was admitting to this woman, who was swerving in and out of Chicago traffic, that I don't believe in a Hell]

Driver: Jesus is coming back, you know. Very soon.

BS: Um.

In the end, I was lucky to escape with only the added burden of the thickest religious tract I have ever been given--actually a daily devotional from last year, but, as my driver assured me, "The word of God is eternal." [Disclaimer: I am not actually an immoral, godless heathen, but I also do not appreciate being witnessed to by someone whose job is to convey me from Point A to Point B in the shortest amount of time possible. If that makes me a terrible person, I freely accept that label.]

And, oh, I meant to write a bit about What I Am Reading Right Now. So here's that:

A Feast For Crows! The fact that I am tearing through this book even though I like it so much less than the previous three volumes of the A Song of Ice and Fire series (A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords). This is partially due to the fact that this book and the next volume were originally meant to be released as one, but the plot and characters got away from Martin and he decided to separate them geographically. It's a cool idea, but all of my favorite characters were relegated to the fifth volume. Nevertheless, there's a satisfying amount of crazy included in A Feast for Crows by virtue of Martin's decision to allow a character who is very possibly insane to dominate the narrative. I'm purposefully not giving away any plot points because I don't know anymore what is important to the larger narrative and what isn't--so, dear readers (all, what, four of you?), please read this series. Please. I would love to talk about it with you.

But, God, I feel dull tonight, and my thoughts are scattered. More thoughts on the adjustment period later.