Well. This is awkward. I'm sitting here in my living-room couch and I honestly can't think of anything to say. I've been on an "austerity budget" for some time (keeping in mind, of course, that "austerity" in my case allows for an occasional trip to the cinema, since I mostly live off romaine lettuce, avocados, and homemade bread) and, consequently, not many adventures have come my way.
Here's what has come my way: the Midwest summer heat. When I was in Italy in June 2010, I wrote about the heat, about sleeping with the third-level balcony window open even though it meant being picked half to death by mosquitoes. This summer, I am not in Italy and there are no mosquitoes, just the overpowering humidity and a strong breeze that does nothing to ease the heat. This time, however, I have an air-conditioned apartment built halfway underground. I'm going to consider that a win.
This heat makes me feel lazy, sleepy, unmotivated. Everything feels like a stream of consciousness, events and thoughts and conversations (mostly with the cat) following one after another with little connection between them other than temporal proximity. I just wrote the words "temporal proximity." That alone should signal that, where my brain is concerned, it is quitting time. If it weren't for Google Calendar, I would get absolutely nothing done.
So, here we go. A placeholder until the words come back. And here's the piece of music currently occupying most of my available brainspace: Don Giovanni--or, at least, a trailer for the new recording featuring some of the badassiest classical singers working today.
Well, then, as threatened ages ago, I skipped town for the duration of the NATO Summit, which, as I saw on the news, was equal parts riot (in the area immediately surrounding McCormick Place) and deserted (everywhere else).
As a matter of fact, I found myself in Orlando, Florida for a week, navigating all the typical tourist attractions on my own, even swinging by Universal's Islands of Adventure for a day, since how on earth is someone so unrepentantly geeky as me supposed to pass up the opportunity to visit fake-Hogwarts? It was hot and humid--in Florida! imagine!--and, as such, I drank gallons of water, did multiple passes on any Disney ride with a short enough line (air conditioning is golden, even if it means riding a slow-moving cart through the most terrifying moments of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), and even passed up the chance to see Micky Dolenz perform at Epcot (to be honest, Micky, m'dear, I'd prefer to remember you the way you were, and I certainly won't wait for two hours in someplace with no shade for nostalgia's sake).
(As I was finishing that last sentence, the timer went off on my bread machine, and I had to wander to the kitchen to knead the dough and set it out for a second rise on the stovetop. Consequently, I have lost my train of thought. Where was I?)
(Ah. Yes. Florida.)
The excursion to Orlando combined my old love of traveling alone and my new love of traveling off-season--and, of course, airports are the worst, but everyone hates the awkwardness of going barefoot through O'Hare security and having to repackage shampoo and conditioner into travel-sized containers, so I figure my adventures with air travel can be inferred by the reader rather than stated outright--but I digress. Traveling alone. It is the best. No passive-aggressive shilly-shallying is necessary in order to make dinner plans and, for that matter, restaurant wait times are significantly reduced when seeking a table for one as opposed to, oh, four or five. None of the hassle of coming up with a daily itinerary which can be agreed upon by all members of the party. No fighting over the TV remote at one in the morning when you want to flip between a replay of the day's Rays game and the latest Game of Thrones episode. And, of course, on the day when it was hellishly hot and even the combination of coffee, water, and the two doses of Tylenol Extra Strength I purchased at Epcot's Germany pavilion failed to make a dent in what may have been the Worst Headache Ever, I was able to head back to the hotel and sleep without having to explain anything to anyone. Because it was just me.
By the way, grown-ups and potential Disney travelers, I can tell you from experience that, although Epcot has a reputation for being the most boring of the four parks in Orlando, it is also where they keep the booze. While my only hands-on experience was grabbing a glass of prosecco at the Italy pavilion while waiting out a rainstorm, I saw more than a few margarita stands, and not just in the Mexico pavilion. Have at it, lovers of delicious alcoholic fun and parents of unruly children!
But every vacation inevitably comes to an end, and so it was with the complete panic that marks my existence that I realized, upon checking my phone after lunch on my last day in Florida, that my flight had been rescheduled to depart two and a half hours earlier than I had planned. And, oh, I ran--well, drove, and then walked with great haste, and then cried a little when the ticket agent couldn't find my reservation. Because I am BS, and my life is chaos, and this sort of thing is a fairly common occurrence.
I can't say that life has been too thrilling since I returned to Chicago, although summer seems to have arrived, signaling the beginning of three months of constant skirt-wearing. I work, I sleep, I have strange dreams which are probably brought on by the heat (last night: I had recently become a vampire and was distressed at the fact that blood, which could be purchased on tap at any neighborhood bar, tasted like watered-down V-8 juice), I yell at my cat for sitting on the kitchen counter. Most of my Chicago-based friends seem to be either out of town or busy with Grown-Up Responsibilities, so I have taken to re-reading the A Song of Ice and Fire series and marathoning episodes of How I Met Your Mother.
One new thing in my life--opera-related, of course, because when is it not?--is a sudden interest in singing French arias from the Romantic period. I don't know if other musicians are like this, but I tend to favor music from different stylistic periods according to a seasonal schedule. In the spring, of course, it is Baroque opera, where everything is fresh and energetic and awake after the long months of cold, dark, moody winter (German and Italian verisimo, usually--lots of Strauss and Puccini). And in the summer, I just want to sing in French. My current fixation is "Adieu, notre petite table" from Massenet's Manon, although next week it could be "Ah, je veux vivre" or--I don't know. Whatever. For right now, it's Manon, who is possibly the most amoral fictional character I have ever loved.
And, to be honest, at this point I've run out of things to say, and I'm just waiting for my bread to finish baking so I can go to sleep. Twenty-five minutes to go.
I truly did mean to write a follow-up to my most recent post. And, then, of course, life delivered me a swift kick in the ass. Because that is what life does.
It is a running joke between my friends and myself that my life is infinitely blog-about-able. And, more or less, that is true. The trouble, however, with having the sort of life which is continually filled with adventure is that there never seems to be enough time to write any of it down. The only solution seems to be to jot things down quickly as they are happening, and move past the stories that pass to quickly to be recorded. That being said, I do tell a lot of stories to my friends and family, and most of them are the sort that are too strange to have been made up. For example: on St. Patrick's Day I met some friends at a bar and was propositioned by a young man in the most ungraceful way possible (Do people really say "DTF" outside of the Jersey Shore? Really? And does it ever work?) before going home with his gay brother-slash-temporary-roommate, who cut my hair. Upon telling my father this story, he informed me that "I've come to expect that this is the sort of thing that happens on a regular basis in your life, so I've stopped worrying about it."
The fact is that, for about two weeks, it was hot in Chicago, the kind of hot that makes me nostalgic for Italy in June (with or without the infected mosquito bites). It may not be a big deal to people in Texas or Florida or below the Mason-Dixon Line in general, but those of us up in the frozen North generally expect to be shivering in our winter coats until well into April. Those two weeks of 80-plus-degree weather caught the entire city by surprise and between the weather and the impending holiday (St. Patrick's Day, during which the whole of reality shifts sideways and drunk becomes the standard, sober the exception), people did some crazy things.
My roommate, for example, informed me that she was moving out two months before our lease expired.
Without going too far into the situation--about which I am still fairly emotional--I will say that my roommate's sudden departure forced me to make a lot of plans very quickly. With rehearsals for Elijah increasing in frequency and free time becoming more and more scarce, my life devolved into chaos in a hurry. This past weekend, that chaos reached a climax: we gave four performances of the show, I competed at the National Association of Teachers of Singing competition, and most of the furniture in my house was packed up into a moving truck and driven back to Michigan. And then I came down with the epic cold virus making its way through the Elijah cast.
One of the most important things I continually forget about performing, particularly with a small cast, is that if one person in the cast gets sick, no matter how many precautions you take (handwashing, Vitamin C, sleep, fluids), you. will. catch. that. virus. I woke up Monday morning feeling as if I had swallowed a handful of razorblades. I have been sleeping on the couch because it takes too much effort to climb the stepladder up into my loft bed. Because I have a loft bed. Because I am an adult and because I can. I have also gone through nearly an entire box of Kleenex over the past three days, which is making me very glad that I decided to buy the three-pack of Kleenex boxes the last time I got groceries, before I got sick. As previously stated: I am a grown-up. BOOM.
So, given the chaos of the past month, my current task is to put my life back together. But, hell, at least I have a plan. The gas bill has been switched over to my name; cable service has been cancelled, since I haven't watched TV in almost a month, and I am now paying only for internet. Tomorrow I will switch over the electric bill to my name, and then the apartment is all mine. I am looking for a roommate to take the small bedroom for the summer. If I can set up a voice studio with 8-10 students during those three months, I can afford the place all by myself. And that would be something really amazing.
There is enough to say about the past few weeks, I think, to fill three or four blog entries. Suffice it to say that at the moment I feel very much as if I am living the part of Through the Looking Glass where Alice and the Red Queen have to run as fast as they can to stay exactly where they are, and while I'm not proud to say that I have been flighty and inconsistent and rapid mood swings have caused me to lash out at people who absolutely don't deserve it, I am very pleased to have survived. So far.
First, the good: March provided me with about a thousand opportunities to hear early music. This was due partially to the fact that the Lyric's last production of the year was Handel's Rinaldo, featuring not one, not two, but three countertenors. A countertenor, for the uninitiated, sounds like this or this, and sings roles traditionally written for castrati--and I'll just let you Google that one on your own, because I don't feel like going into particulars about the methods and socio-political reasons behind the rise of the castrato voice in liturgical and secular music in the 16th and 17th centuries just now.
Never one to pass up the rare opportunity to see a countertenor In The Live (as opposed to on a CD, YouTube, or Met HD Simulcast, which is rare enough), I purchased the cheapest, nosebleediest tickets I could find for the first show which fell on a night off from Elijah rehearsal. A friend whose husband was covering the role sung by this fellow had warned me about the "loopiness" of the staging--something about a giant floating harpsichord with balloons attached--and, yes, the soprano heroine did spend approximately half the opera imprisoned in said floating harpsichord, but damn if the cast didn't take some of the most out-there staging I've seen and run with it. Rinaldo Team Chicago: I salute you for your commitment to duty, and while I'm sure it felt ridiculous, it looked amazing. In fact, it looked so amazing that I purchased tickets to see it again the following Friday and, during first intermission, sneaked from the upper balcony to the orchestra level so I could pay closer attention to the staging. The audience, apart from the destroyers-of-fun who walked out after the first act (we didn't want you there anyway), loved it, and, at one point, broke into applause three times during the opening aria of Act II.
Chicago's Baroque Band also presented two concerts featuring Maestro Harry Bicket (the conductor for Lyric's Rinaldo) and countertenor Iestyn Davies, who sang the role of Eustazio--thankfully, I have a friend who keeps abreast of local early music happenings and was able to let me know about this event before it happened. On March 9 we drove down to Hyde Park to see the first of these performances, featuring nearly two hours of Handel arias accompanied by a period-instrument orchestra. I believe my brain shorted out at some point during this performance, because all the description I can offer of this event can be expressed only in the form of an animated GIF:
For a couple of weeks, I was floating three inches off the ground. Handel! Countertenors! Improbably complicated plot devices! Coloratura with back-up dancers! All of this was a beautiful and welcome distraction from the looming sense of dread concerning my impending loss of health care coverage and the US government's apparent growing disregard for policies which benefit the majority of its constituency. Everything was going to be okay, and, with Holy Week coming up, I could at least take a one-off church gig to cover the extra money I spent in March in order to afford tickets to Rinaldo (twice!) and the Baroque Band concert. If I wasn't completely content (and who ever is, really?), at least I was hopeful for the future.
If past experience has taught me anything, however, it is that, the moment you begin to feel as if everything is going to be all right after all, some shock will come to drop the floor out from under you. This sudden sensation of falling is something to which I ought to be accustomed by now, but, yet again, it caught me completely off-guard . . .
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.
It's Business Time in the life of BS--and by "business" I mean busy-ness, which is not the same thing at all.
Unsurprising though this may be, as it's my chosen professional field, music has taken over my life once more. With Elijah rehearsals beginning at American Chamber Opera and both NATSAA (National Association of Teachers of Singing Artist Awards) and NATS (National Association of Teachers of Singing) competitions looming in the too-near future, what I have been up to is singing. And thinking about singing. And learning new music to sing. And listening to other people sing. And planning to go hear other people sing. That is to say, it's nice when your obsessions and compulsions complement each other: my current obsession is opera; its related compulsion is seeing operas. It all works out very easily, you see.
I do feel a little sorry for the people who follow me on Tumblr and Twitter, especially those who aren't musically-inclined, because I've been spamming YouTube links of my favorite singers lately. Then again, my roommate, who I finally wheedled into seeing a Met HD Simulcast with me (first Faust, then, upon her insistence, The Enchanted Island) seems to have taken very quickly to Joyce DiDonato and Luca Pisaroni, so at least I'm in no danger of being smothered in my sleep by a housemate sick of my constant cries of, "Jonas Kaufmann's hair! My god, his hair!"
Don't even try to act surprised that I included an illustrative example.
It is true, though, that I am experiencing a resurgence of love for opera. To be fair, I was never really indifferent to it, but the sudden ease of its access (performing with ACO, being able to attend the Chicago Lyric Opera, finally learning about the Met HD Simulcasts) has caused me to fall in love all over again. Since October, I have seen two live performances in which I was not a participant (the Lyric's Lucia di Lammermoor and Aida) and three not-live performances (Anna Bolena, Faust, and The Enchanted Island). I have been listening to the Sutherland/Pavarotti/Caballerecording of Turandot on the bus--this is mostly due to the fact that the first act is terrifying and I am afraid to listen to it at home alone when it is dark (I had the same problem with Poe's album Haunted).
This process of re-discovery leads, naturally, to a lot of Feelings, which can sometimes be difficult. I realize that in our society it is, for some reason, not cool to be enthusiastic about things, but when I go to the opera to spend four hours sitting in the dark having all these emotions forcibly drawn out of my body, slowly, and I leave exhausted and wired all at the same time--after seeing Anna Bolena I walked home from the movie theater, two miles in the cold--I can't help but let some of it spill out. It's like falling in love, except the honeymoon phase never ends. It's amazing. I am unapologetically enthusiastic about opera. Do I want to curl up inside "E lucevan le stelle" (here, if you've never had the pleasure) and never leave? Yes. I could live in that damn aria these days.
It makes me sad sometimes to think of how many misconceptions there are about opera, even among my friends and family. Here's the thing: opera isn't boring, or outdated, or "too long" (well--most of it, but for the sake of argument, let's ignore Wagner for right now). Interestingly, a lot of people who tell me that they can't sit through an opera because it's too long have no issue with watching a football game, which is the one place I can think of where thirty seconds can last for twenty minutes. Opera isn't always depressing, although I'm perfectly willing to let Mario Cavaradossi or Salome break my heart on a regular basis. It is okay to enjoy yourself at the opera; it is even okay to laugh. This is something I recently re-learned as I laughed out loud through a good portion of The Enchanted Island or giggled while showing my roommate YouTube videos of Leporello's Catalogue Aria from Don Giovanni (one of my favorite recent performances of which can be seen here). The best part of opera is that it not only depicts the complete range of human emotion, but makes you feel those emotions, too: giddiness, despair, terror, hope. I often feel that the entire second act of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor is written to feel like a nightmare you can't wake up from, and that the audience is dragged alone for the ride like Lucia, almost carried to the altar for a wedding in which she doesn't want to be a participant. It's no surprise that Lucia goes crazy, since the constant spinning in the music, the gradually accelerating tempo, and wildly distorted recalled melodies make even the audience feel disoriented.
Incidentally, today I was feeling especially positive after my voice lesson and as one the baristas (a friend of mine) was taking my order, she said, "You look really happy, is there a guy?" I laughed. "No, no guy. There's almost never a guy, really. Just opera."
First of all: I am not going to make any jokes about the Apocalypse. I am sick to death of the word "Apocalypse" at this point. Since I am, in general, very interested in eschatological scenarios, this is a clear sign of how saturated our culture has become with end-of-world predictions of late. The world will not end in December 2012, and if it does, at least people will stop talking about how this is the year the Apocalypse is going to happen. Finally.
The New Year was rung in quietly at the BS household (that is, in my apartment): Mom drove me back to Chicago, since I refused to celebrate another New Year's Eve in my tiny hometown, and, since my roommate was working late for the holiday, we sat on the couch and snacked on apples and cheese and watched the 2009 BBC Emma. All four hours of it. I didn't get blitzed at some divey bar and I didn't watch the ball drop in Times Square--although at midnight someone in my neighborhood began setting off fireworks--because with every year that passes, New Year's Eve just makes me feel increasingly old. I mean, obviously, in terms of years spent on this earth, of course I get older every year, but now, where I used to be able to stay up till all hours drinking bottles of cheap red wine with friends and talking about which composers we'd most like to invite to a dinner party (Schubert, obviously, and maybe Puccini but definitely not Wagner), now just the merest idea of getting dressed up and going to some club to dance exhausts me. Graduate school, you have robbed me of my youth!
I have made a few New Year's resolutions, for once:
Aided by Wii Fit, Zumba for Wii, and living in city of pedestrians, work out at least 4 times a week.
Eat meals. Actual meals. Made of actual food. A spoonful of peanut butter does not count.
And, most importantly--in the immortal words of The Specials (and Prince Buster before them, and Guy Lombardo first): "Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think."
One thing I have been enjoying, and immensely, is reading. A good friend of mine, Lindsey, occasionally lends me a paper bag full of books she has read and enjoyed, and while in college/grad school I never got around to reading as many of those books as I meant to--although, through Lindsey's recommendations, I discovered several wonderful books I might have otherwise not looked twice at, like Neil Gaiman's American Gods or The Time Traveller's Wife (which was gorgeous, but terribly sad). At the moment, she has me reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog and it is SO FRENCH: the two main characters, whose shared occupation seems to be musing about the meaninglessness of life and the beauty found in simple things, have just had their first face-to-face interaction--nearly two hundred pages in. And I love it! It is a translation, albeit a very good one, and I would like to one day read it in the original French, as well as Muriel Barbery's first book, Gourmet Rhapsody (I have just looked up the book on Wikipedia to determine the correct spelling of Mme. Barbery's name, and, of course, she is a professor of philosophy, which is unsurprising, given the content and tone of the novel). A couple of reviews I came across dismissed The Elegance of the Hedgehog as "pretentious," or of being devoid of actual plot, but I, for one, don't find this problematic, especially when considering the alternative; Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons certainly have a lot going on but, when you get down to it, they are basically glorified self-insert fan fiction, where Dan Brown invents for his alter ego the discipline of "Symbology" (I always think of The Boondock Saints and Willem Dafoe here: "I think the word you're looking for is symbolism. What is the ssssssymbolism here?") and concocts improbable, if readable, stories in which he traipses across the globe with attractive women in whose presence he can display his considerable . . . ahem . . . knowledge. So, yes, with that in mind, I have no issue with reading an introspective, philosophical novel every now and again, between my re-readings of the Song of Ice And Fire series and Jane Austen's comedies of manners. And besides, what semi-intelligent person who paid attention in college writing classes doesn't cringe when someone grossly abuses grammar or selects the wrong your/you're, even when jotting a brief note?
I'm not a snob, really, I promise. I just love words, and I paid attention in school for twenty-one years, even when my grades (Music Theory) didn't reflect it.
But what else? I have been knitting and sewing like a fiend; during the month of December break I finished six projects, and an seventh upon returning to Chicago in the New Year. I have just cast on for a hat that I don't need, and will probably frog in the morning, but I need something to do with my hands to burn off all of this nervous energy. I finished a purse whose main panel features a tsunami print, of which I am immensely proud. It holds, at the very least, two books, my wallet and checkbook, a knitting project, and a bottle of wine, all without becoming unbearably heavy. Soon I plan to begin making headbands/earwarmers like the ones I have seen everyone wearing this season, with a knitted flower (I can't crochet, I'm sorry, it's a personality defect or something) and a button in the back. I do have those buttons I never managed to use in any of my projects . . .
So that's my life. I am busy. The things going on around me often seem surreal, but this is probably due to the fact that grown-up life moves so quickly, and, to keep up, I always seem to be running, running, running, phoning orchestras in Europe and putting the kettle on for another cup of tea before dashing off to a voice lesson or opera rehearsal. After four months of what felt like complete stasis, it is comforting to have settled into a routine and gained momentum. Life is good, for now.
