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?