Picture Pages: May 08, NYC

No story or big writing assignment tonight, just some pictures from the rainy day. (I uploaded them all small, so click to enlarge, if you are so inclined.) (Ok, I don't know why the layout is so weird... sorry. I'm working on it...)

My beloved morning coffee ritual.











What is better than an omelet and a salad for lunch? (Especially when it is made with love by a friend...)

Nick and I played "the headshot game" with the new lens...







...I predict this will be a popular game this summer...
Smile!!








After a lovely afternoon of food and catching up and talk of Purcell, it was back out into the rainy day.

Bhakti Business

I've been updating my Bhakti Project database, and I've discovered that I'm missing email addresses for two donors. LK and JP, both residents of NYC: if you read this, will you shoot me an email? I've got something that I want to email to all my donors before it goes public, a little "thank you for helping make this happen!" My email is listed in my profile.

Thank you! All my other lovely donors, check your email soon...

Flashback

My eyes were drawn to the man settling in at the table next to mine, as it became obvious that he was trying to get my attention. He said, “I know we’re scheduled to have lunch next Tuesday, but I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t start now!” My mind reeled for a long minute, as I looked at this face that was at once familiar and foreign - it was my music theory teacher from my senior year of high school in Atlanta!

It was true: we do have a lunch date for this week! As I prepare to go to Atlanta in a couple weeks to sing with the Symphony, I’ve been doing a little digging into my past, reconnecting with some friends and teachers in hopes of seeing them while I’m “in the neighborhood.” My search for this teacher, JB, uncovered the fact that he is the music director for an off-Broadway show that happens to run in a theater three blocks from my apartment. I sent an email to the producer of the show, and soon after JB and I were planning our reunion. But the universe seems to be on a different schedule! After the shock wore off, we each shared a few tidbits of the past 15 (!!!) years, whetting our appetites to spend some good time together catching up.

One thing I did manage to get across to him in those brief moments, and part of the impetus behind my seeking out my early teachers, is that there were seeds planted during that year that I feel are directly responsible for my being a performer today. High school was weird for me (wasn’t it for everyone, though?) for several reasons, not the least of which being that my family moved right before my senior year. Fortunately, we landed just down the street from the high school performing arts magnet program, and I spent my senior year doing what I’ve loved since I was a kid: performing. Hope Harcourt in Anything Goes, Marianne in Tartuffe (think Moliere, not Mechem), a couple of solos with the show choir, “By My Side” in Godspell. I was in heaven.

I also took my first theory class, led by the above mentioned JB, and a year-long drama course taught by KN. At the end of the year, my grade sheet for my final monologue assignment included a special note, the first time anyone suggested that I seriously consider “a career on the stage.” He ended with the question: “Broadway someday?” He was close... I’m hopefully going to see him in Atlanta later this month, and I can’t wait to tell him that I have his note still, carefully laminated and stored in my SOJ box (that’s Bird Family Lingo: Sentimental Old Junk). You never forget the first person to really believe in you, the first time you think “maybe I can do this...”

Blogroll Update, Spring 08

(I guess I could count this as my post for the day, but I won’t. It’s just housekeeping...)

Full (rather bloated) list here, as always, with these latest additions on the sidebar to the left.

Andrew Patner - Chicago-based music journalist

Blurbomat - Behind the scenes at dooce.com

form meets function - drool-inducign design

Jessica Duchen - Novelist, music journalist; another link long overdue

Melear-o-sphere - photos and thoughts from our photo guru. Oh, he’s a conductor, too.

Music as Weapon? - David, how did I now know you were blogging? Founder & director of Newspeak; check it out.

The Reverberate Hills - another voice from the San Fran scene

Roger Evans Online - music reviews and thoughts on the state of things in The Biz

So Percussion - my Indie Classical crush

Stuff White People Like - Funny stuff.

The Year in Pictures - inspiration and beauty from a NYC photography curator

And I changed the link to my main professional site - ACB.com is terribly out-of-date, so for all the latest visit my .Mac site for a while instead.

30 Days

Ok, enough is enough. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I am following the example of several of my blogging compatriots and starting a 30-day blogging program. As I said to B tonight, I hope that writing every day will get things moving again, like a high-fiber diet for my writing. I will post something every day, however asinine or poorly constructed (or brilliant or exquisite!).

I’ll certainly have plenty of fodder. In the next 30 days - in addition to posting daily - I will:
* sing two final performances of Macbeth
* have a couple of voice lessons
* take the train up the Hudson to visit a friend and see a concert
* travel to Atlanta for concerts with the ASO - and a big family gathering centered around the concerts, my cousin’s high school graduation, and my mom’s birthday!
* meet with a couple of my teachers from high school
* pack up and relocate to Virginia for the summer!
* buy a summer car, hopefully with less drama than last year
* take a plane to the Mississippi to visit a friend and see an opera
* study for summer roles and brainstorm for next years’ recitals

If I can’t find anything to write about in all of that, well... it might be time to quit this thing. No, not really. I’ll get it back. But life is different now then it was a few months ago, in wonderful ways, so I guess it’s to be expected that things will shift and definitions will change. It’s a good thing. I’ll try to include more photos with these posts, too, snapshots from daily life, boring as they may be.

Ok. Let’s get started...

One good thing

If nothing else good comes from my working at the Met for the past two seasons, there will be this: I am now out of credit card debt.

Thanks to SBF’s leading by example, I’ve been aggressively reshaping my financial situation over the past few months. I realized two months ago that with a bit of shifting of funds from one account to another, I could wipe out my credit card debt and a) still have enough money in my checking account to avoid the “emergency fallback” credit card trap and b) keep at least one month’s expenses in my emergency fund. When I saw the new numbers on my online bank statement this evening, I have to admit that I teared up a bit.

I did it!!! It feels great. And... I already bought myself a reward, paid in full.

Next steps:
* Build back up to three months in the emergency fund. Next season is a little light on the financial side (not currently contracted at the Met due to conflicting gigs elsewhere), so I may need some back-up.
Take the money I was putting to my CC towards student loan payment.
Make maximum contributions to my IRA.
Put 20% of each paycheck into a special savings account for taxes. This year I got a big refund (also thanks to the Met: I was a W-2 employee there), which will never happen again. I don’t want to be caught unprepared for taxes next year like I was for TY2006.

More on the blogging slump, now extending into May. Today, as I was sitting in a blissfully happy post-brunch daze, someone used the expression “fat, dumb, and happy.” I’m not getting fat, but maybe my current happiness has rendered me a bit less capable of stringing together coherent sentences...

Stay tuned. Or not...

Honor

The blogging slump continues, but I want to say what an honor it was to sing the premiere of Hillula last night. (We’re now considering this the real premiere; last year was really more of a workshop of parts of the whole.) The experience was at once private and public, a new feeling for me in terms of performance. Usually, once I get to performance time, it’s only about the sharing, about conveying a message to the people in the audience, moving them. But last night, I simultaneously wanted to share it with the world (look, hear, see how beautiful this is!) and keep it to myself (so special, so personal)... not unlike a new love. This work has been three years in the making, and last night was both a completion (the work) and a beginning (the life of the work). Judd and spent the train ride home brainstorming about what that life should be, exactly...

Also on the ride home, I did something I don’t think I’ve ever done immediately after a performance: I listened to the recording. I just wasn’t ready for it to be over... of course I heard things I didn’t like, but nothing that I wasn’t fully aware of in performance. A misplaced breath here, a slight chip there... details. But there were some other moments that just took my breath away. Not because I’m such a great singer, but because this piece inspired some of my best singing; Jocelyn, too, had moments of brilliance. I couldn’t have asked for a better, more beautiful, more tuned-in partner in this endeavor. When it ended (all 18 minutes of it), I took out my earbuds and said to Judd, “Thank you. I am so honored to have been part of bringing this to life.”

So honored.

Eat Food

I was tagged for this meme twice, by Alex & Tim, so I guess I need to get out of my blogging slump and get to it. (Looking in the archives, you can see that every month for the past couple of years I seem to average about a post every other day. This month, I’ve barely got a post every four days... weird. It’s not that there’s nothing going on, I’m just not blogging. Not sure what to make of it, but I think I’ll just let the slump ride itself out...)

But back to the meme. Here are the rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

“Studying cultured human cells, he’s found that “deficiency of vitamins C, E, B12, B6, nicin, folic acid, iron or zinc appears to mimic radiation by causing single- and double-strand DNA breaks, oxidative lesions, or both” - precursors to cancer. “This has serious implications, as half the US population may be deficient in at least one of these micronutrients.” Most of the missing micronutrients are supplied by fruits and vegetables, of which only 20 percent of American children and 32 percent of adults eat the recommended five daily servings.”

This book has absolutely confirmed my eating habits, and encouraged me to be even more diligent. For the past few years, I’ve been eating a diet very similar to the one encouraged by Pollan’s “Eater’s Manifesto:” Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. If all the recent scary news about the food industry has you thinking about your diet, I encourage you to pick up this book. Heck, I encourage you to pick it up anyway. The information about the history of nutrition and the commercialization of food, not to mention the fads of our diet culture, is incredibly eye-opening.

I tag Coloratur...aaah, Melear, Little Ms Bossy, Nick, and Thom.

Off to Princeton in about an hour. Remember to tune in tonight at 8pm for the concert, streaming live at the Princeton music department homepage. Hillula will be the second piece on the first half of the program. Enjoy!

Bullet Points are the new black

I feel like I should rename this blog “bullet points.” I hate to resort to such measures, but this writer’s block is getting out of hand.

* In addition to being unable to write, I haven’t been singing that much in the past couple of weeks. Part of it is an intentional break - the past few months were pretty insane! A little “vocal vacation” is good, but now it’s time for the down time to come to an end. But every time I started to think about singing this week, I remembered this blog post (via oboeinsight). Do my neighbors hate me?! We all exchange pleasantries in the hallway, but aside from the German interior designer who shares our walls, none of them really know that I’m the resident opera singer. If they did, would they shun me? I am aware that I’m loud, but I try to avoid singing in the morning, only doing a short warm-up if I have a late-morning audition, and I never sing past seven in the evening. I rarely practice at home on the weekends. I know that people in NYC have unusual schedules, but I try to stick to a general “working day” framework, assuming that most people will be out of the building at that time. I haven’t gotten any complaints, but now I wonder...

* I’ve updated the biography and added some photos to my ACB@mac website. Check ‘em out! And... I’ve enabled comments, so be nice.

* Here’s the promised Hillula news: The concert on Tuesday will stream live on teh internets!! The concert starts at 8pm and will stream live from Princeton’s music department home page. I don’t know where Hillula will be on the program, but I encourage you to log on and listen to the whole thing if you can. Jocelyn and I are really proud of our work, and I’m sure the other performers and composers are, too. Maybe somebody could live-blog it!! Kidding. Kind of.

* (Other Hillula-related news: I think we’ve decided to seek an endowment for The Bhakti Project. I have no idea at this point what this will entail (other than, oh, a lot of money), but we’re starting to brainstorm and build a team. More later...)

* This weekend is totally full of awesomeness: A date to the Brooklyn Art Museum to check out the Murakami exhibit in preparation for DJA’s big premiere on Sunday. Saturday dinner. Sunday brunch at a NYC institution. The George London masterclass, which is being led by my former step-father (in the operatic sense) Richard Stillwell and my fellow OperaNow! podcast guest Frederica von Stade. And then the Brooklyn Phil concert at Drom. Go Darcy!! Jammed packed with awesomeness, tell you what.

Ok, so I couldn’t quite get to everything tonight. There are three half-finished bullet points that I’ll get posted tomorrow morning before the Weekend o’ Awesome begins. They’re all kind of related: voice lesson stuff, singing stuff, and Terfel-Martineau stuff. (IB: They rock.) Hopefully this brain drain will clear something out and let me get back to regular blogging... heh. No promises.