When one decides to go back to school while still maintaining a full-time performance schedule, AND becomes an Aunt all in the course of one year, things like blogging tend to fall to the wayside. Now that I have some, 'free-time' I thought I'd get back into it and do my best to update this here blog.
Being back at school this past semester has been an eye-opener. For one thing, I learned that as much as I thought I had a handle on scheduling my life, I found myself seriously lacking in this department as of late. Negotiating a professional singer's schedule is hard enough: our gigs are booked years or months in advance and through the course of our experiences in the business, we recognize how long it takes to learn a given role. What happens then, when you're assigned a 20 page paper and never wrote one before?! Does this take days, weeks, months? Yup. In the course of my Spring semester (pun intended) I discovered that while some papers write themselves, others can go on, and on, and on...Towards the end of this academic year, I realized that learning a subject is one thing, and writing about it is a different beast entirely. On page 65 of my tomb of a thesis, I was given a great piece of advice: "Wind it up." We can't do it all, be the final word on a subject, or even seek to be the very first person to discover or relate an issue in a document, all the time. Sometimes our passion for a subject (in this case, physical injury in professional opera singers/non-laryngeal) can overtake our lives, both professionally and personally. So, I'd like to take this opportunity to say to all my friends:
I'm sorry I haven't seen you in months. I miss you.
Now I find myself in sunny South Carolina, for the Spoleto Festival USA, in Charleston. This environment is so wholly different than what we North-easterners have been experiencing for months. This town is warm and friendly, the buildings are utterly historic and charming, and of course, the beach is mere minutes away. The picture featured in this blog is of the "Pineapple Fountain" in Waterfront Park. Last night I had a front row seat to a breath-taking blood-red full moon, rising over the Charleston Harbor. Ahhh. Working on an opera as dark as The Medium is made emotionally tolerable by this picturesque southern town- did I mention the food? Wow. So far I've sampled the She-Crab soup, Shrimp Po-Boy, grits, BBQ sauce of many kinds, and local micro-brews. All yummy stuff, and I still haven't had my big Southern breakfast yet...I'm willing to take suggestions.
Quick plug: performances of Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Medium will begin on May 28th, and run through June 10th, so if you find yourself in the Charleston area, I recommend you come to this amazing show. See http://www.spoletousa.org/ for more information...
