Friday, February 26, 2010
49 Minutes of Yum
The tv show Maverick began three years before I was born. Now it's on Netflix. Grab your bankie and a glass of wine, arrange yourself near the fireplace, and watch a 30 year-old James Garner deliver the goods.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy
Placido Domingo is 69 years old and singing baritone, because he can. James Morris is 62 years old and singing "bass," because James Levine lets him. James Levine's cummerbund wraps around his neck as he conducts, and the Met's orchestra is one fine and elegant organism. I don't know what to think of the Simon Boccanegra I heard tonight, but the next time I whine about feeling old or having to leave my comfort zone, I hope I remember these old dudes and their never-say-die 'tudes.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
How Can I Keep From Singing?
I ask myself this question every time I'm scheduled to do a solo. I had hoped I would lose my voice before today's recital, but no dice. Even two weeks of PFPSD (post-food-poisoning stress disorder) wasn't sufficient to keep me from croaking my way through "Qui sedes" from the Vivaldi Gloria.
I began taking voice lessons at age 47, a tad late in the game. But I gather that many women take a leap of one sort or another in middle age. (Having a baby at 43 wasn't enough, it seems.) The trouble is that I know exactly how I want to sound and how I perhaps might sound if I had been blessed with sufficient talent and had started training 30 years sooner....and then there's what I am able to accomplish -- absent the talent and the training.
So I blunder on and, ham that I am, get up in front of people and attempt to "sell" whatever I'm trying to perform, which is usually of the classical persuasion because that's what I listen to and love. And almost inevitably, I fail to meet even my own ever lower standards. What's changing is my attitude. I still have the capacity to feel utterly miserable after a performance, but little by little I am gaining a tough titty approach: if people find me objectionable, well, let them get up here and try it.
I've had what I call phlegm-o-rama all winter. I barfed my lungs up for a night in Italy earlier this month and have had stomach issues ever since. I croaked not once but several times today, but I soldiered on and acted as if. People were kind, and I chalked up another performance in my effort to s t r e t c h myself.
But the question is always there in the back of my head: is what I'm trying to do gutsy? Or pathetic?
I began taking voice lessons at age 47, a tad late in the game. But I gather that many women take a leap of one sort or another in middle age. (Having a baby at 43 wasn't enough, it seems.) The trouble is that I know exactly how I want to sound and how I perhaps might sound if I had been blessed with sufficient talent and had started training 30 years sooner....and then there's what I am able to accomplish -- absent the talent and the training.
So I blunder on and, ham that I am, get up in front of people and attempt to "sell" whatever I'm trying to perform, which is usually of the classical persuasion because that's what I listen to and love. And almost inevitably, I fail to meet even my own ever lower standards. What's changing is my attitude. I still have the capacity to feel utterly miserable after a performance, but little by little I am gaining a tough titty approach: if people find me objectionable, well, let them get up here and try it.
I've had what I call phlegm-o-rama all winter. I barfed my lungs up for a night in Italy earlier this month and have had stomach issues ever since. I croaked not once but several times today, but I soldiered on and acted as if. People were kind, and I chalked up another performance in my effort to s t r e t c h myself.
But the question is always there in the back of my head: is what I'm trying to do gutsy? Or pathetic?
Saturday, February 20, 2010
My First Nebbish
The year was 1981. He was a radio announcer at KHEP FM, 101.5 on your FM radio dial. I hated hated hated the sound of him and thought it would be a blast to clap eyes on him and interview him for a class I was taking from the local newspaper arts critic -- and you can imagine what a tough job that was in Phoenix, Arizona, then or now. So I went over to the station, which was in what is now a barrio, and I met this short skinny Eye-talian looking guy wearing black wingtips and a Pierre Cardin tie. And he let me sit in the studio while he did his show, and he was very funny and I left with a major crush. I saw him again in 2000. He seemed much shorter, he was definitely stouter, and he dyed his hair. Things have a way of working out.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
How to Feel Old
Spend Saturday working for The Man. Spend Sunday cleaning out a storage closet containing documents that go back to the 1920s, photos of your 23 year-old niece as a baby, notes of encouragement from your mom who's been dead for a decade, photos of and letters from and about the grandmother who died at age 26....and a 1999 Wallace and Gromit calendar. Tell your six year-old that you can't re-use a calendar, then eat your words. 2010 features the same dates on the same days of the week as 1999, including Easter.
See notations from 1999 that might as well be ancient Hittite for all the present meaning they contain. Remember the April of that year, when you finally told the deadbeat husband to remove himself, and he did. (And the April four years after that, when the present non-deadbeat husband joined you to welcome the boy who's now six.) See the notes from September 8, 1999: "51 lbs/tomatoes." And from the 12th: "6 lbs raspberries." The raspberries are long gone. The will to grow enough plants to produce a 51-pound, one-day harvest of tomatoes has long since morphed into motherhood and myriad other preoccupations.
Shit. What a way to spend the weekend.
See notations from 1999 that might as well be ancient Hittite for all the present meaning they contain. Remember the April of that year, when you finally told the deadbeat husband to remove himself, and he did. (And the April four years after that, when the present non-deadbeat husband joined you to welcome the boy who's now six.) See the notes from September 8, 1999: "51 lbs/tomatoes." And from the 12th: "6 lbs raspberries." The raspberries are long gone. The will to grow enough plants to produce a 51-pound, one-day harvest of tomatoes has long since morphed into motherhood and myriad other preoccupations.
Shit. What a way to spend the weekend.
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