A few thoughts

It's much too late for me to even be awake, given that I've got a full day of work tomorrow followed by rehearsal followed by more work, but I just wanted to get one or two things down before I sleep so I don't forget them by the morning.

First: I purchased a copy of Dave Eggers' new book, A Hologram for the King, at least a week ago and have not yet cracked the cover. I see it every day, because it is sitting on top of the fabric-cabinet which doubles as the table on which my laptop sits. So why, instead of reading this book, whose release I so highly anticipated, am I rereading Pride and Prejudice for the thousandth time? I had a theory the other day, which I shared with my barista who, it is entirely possible, thinks I am a crazy person: I am hesitant to start reading this book because I am afraid of finishing it.

Let me explain: there is something very special about the first time you read a book. There are several first-time reading experiences that stand out to me immediately: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Gone with the Wind, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, The Woman in White . . . before you have read a book until its pages are dog-eared, before you know every line of dialogue, every description of a sunset or a bridge, before that book becomes an old friend, every page is an adventure. And, with some very special books, some remnant of that sense of excitement remains, and there are still things to discover long after the pages are yellowed and torn where you have folded them over to mark your place (shamefully, I admit to mistreating my books in this way on occasion). There will, however, never be anything like the experience of reading the first part of Heartbreaking Work for the very first time, where, at seventeen, I learned for the first time what it felt like to laugh and cry simultaneously. After years of resisting delving into what I had pre-judged to be an overly-wordy romance about awful people doing horrible things to each other, I was amazed to discover that Gone with the Wind dealt with a young woman coming to terms with the fact that the world in which she has been brought up to thrive no longer exists, and trying to carve out a new existence despite the resistance of those around her who cling to the old world--particularly relevant today, when a generation which has been brought up to believe that education is the key to success and financial stability finds itself crushed under a mountain of student loan debt, often having to put off the supposed hallmarks of adulthood (marriage, children, home ownership, a steady job) while struggling to pay the bills. But I digress, going off yet again on a topic that could fill its own overly-long blog post.

. . .

. . .

. . .

Days later


Well. I say "days." It could well be a week, for all my ability to mark time by sense alone. Between work, rehearsal, learning new music, sewing, preparing for auditions, &c., &c., &c., I barely remember what day it is without looking at my Google Calendar, in whose half-hour increments I measure my life.

A centipede just crawled across the wall below the windowsill where I keep my Jane Austen novels and the baseball Jim Leyland signed for me on my 25th birthday. This is not an uncommon occurrence--the centipedes, that is. It is a basement apartment, after all, and I don't mind them as long as they continue to prey on any smaller insects who wander in and stay out of my immediate vicinity.

I haven't got much to say, but I thought that I ought to finally post this, as it's been sitting around for ages. In the meantime, until life calms down (will it ever? we can only hope), I will leave you with a video of the first flashmob ever to make me cry:

My life goes on in endless song; or, BS takes a moment to breathe

Tonight, on the way back from rehearsal, I stopped by CVS to pick up a soda for my roommate, who is exhausted by unpacking and was craving. I grabbed one for myself, and only noticed when I took a sip a half hour later that it was Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi. 

Then, I went to make a salad (my one meal today was consumed at the family-owned Italian restaurant down the street as I sat with the staff, watching the Euro 2012 Final and exclaiming rude things in Italian at the screen). As I cut into the avocado I had bought earlier today, I noticed that its flesh had gone brown.

The fact that these are the two biggest disappointments  I faced today may be a sign that, for the moment, my mood is in an upswing. 

That's not to say that life is not completely overwhelming. Having finally found a roommate to share the (relatively inexpensive, but still inconvenient when paid out of one's minimal income) rent and bills, I cleaned the apartment to allow her some space to move her things in. Moving is always messy, and one always seems to have so many more belongings than one needs until they are removed from their cardboard boxes and put away. Movers are also very messy--the amount of dirt tracked in as they unloaded box after box after box actually rendered one floor-runner basically unusable (bought at Goodwill and easily replaceable but still, gentlemen, wipe your damn feet) and left me itching to vacuum the floor. My knee-jerk reaction was panic. However, after 24 hours or so had elapsed, it became clear to me that my new roommate is potentially the most organized person I have ever met, in addition to having more energy for unpacking and sorting than I had ever imagined possible, and is getting on admirably in a situation that would have reduced me to a useless puddle of anxious tears within half an hour. I expect that my previously-spartan little apartment will look considerably more lived-in (in a good way, a way that says "people actually live here and have real-people lives" rather than messy) by week's end. Even in my room I have managed to set up a small workspace that doubles as a sewing table and home office. 

And, oh, am I sewing. A shop in my hometown, owned by a high school friend, has agreed to sell some of the purses I make, so I have very suddenly found myself needing to treat sewing as a Real (very-part-time) Job. As things are still being unpacked however, there is no place at present to set up an ironing board. Tomorrow I ship out my first two bags, with plans to make as many more as possible during our five-day break from Don Giovanni rehearsals and send them home with Mom when she visits.

Don Giovanni is also taking up significant brain-space at the moment. I blame the combination of Mozart writing obnoxiously catchy melodies and having to repeat those melodies so frequently in rehearsal. I've always had an affinity for this opera over all of the others Mozart wrote, mostly because it gives me so many Feelings--I've got a whole other blog entry locked away in my brain concerning the characters and how the trap with Giovanni is to fall back on convention when it comes to characterization rather than letting the characters sort of develop themselves--and, to be honest, I would say that characters like Leporello or Elvira or Zerlina or even Giovanni do a fair job of asserting their own personalities, desires, motivations, quirks, &c., and the best thing to do when portraying one of those roles is not to try and impose your own limitations on them. There are so many angles from which to consider Don Giovanni, and even twelve years after the first time I watched it, I am still fascinated by the intricate ways in which the characters interact (but mostly Elvira and Leporello, who put up with more of Giovanni's shit than anyone else in the show), and I still start shuddering when the statue begins speaking. Every. Single. Time. Because a damn statue comes to life. And that statue is vindictive as hell (uh, literally). And that is terrifying.

"So why then, Bee," you may be asking, "when your life is hectic and full of crazy, did you take an interview for a part-time barista position?" 

The answer: masochism. Obviously.

But--and this is the strangest thing--I know that I am busy. Intellectually, I am able to look at my GoogleCalendar (the fact that I rely on GoogleCalendar to remind me that I must, twice a day, eat something, Bee, you are not capable of photosynthesis, is probably a good indication of just how busy I am) and say to myself, "Damn, there's not a lot of free time there." But, as I experience everyday life, it is the busiest days and weeks when I feel the most free and easygoing. I suppose this can be chalked up to momentum, to the fact that when I have so much to do my thought process speeds up and it is as if the events of my day go by in slow-motion. With that in mind, knowing that I feel the most centered and comfortable when I have a set of goals to achieve in a specified amount of time, why the hell not try to find a second job, one that can keep me from having too much time to think (which inevitably leads to overanalyzing, which often leads to panicking about Who am I and what am I going to do with my life?!) after this show wraps?

And, of course, all this positive thinking could go to hell tomorrow. This is another thing I know intellectually. But right now my cat is ridiculous (especially when she tries to intimidate my roommate's cat by hissing, which is more adorable than menacing), there is someone to talk to, my monthly financial burden has just been slashed in half, Dave Eggers just released a new book, and it is thunderstorm season in Chicago. Yes, life could definitely be worse.

When the words won't come; or, BS really hasn't got much to say

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.

Sumer is icumen in

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.

Thank you and good night.

And after the earthquake there came a fire!; or, BS's continued adventures in calamity

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.

The Heights and the Depths, pt. I; or, the triumphs and trials of being BS

Well.

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 . . . 

( . . . To be continued . . . )

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.