Keturah's Year In Review

Every year since I began journaling (1984), I've written a year in review on New Year's Eve. Right now I'm sitting in my little room in Miami, listening to a rousing party going on in the main house and feeling a little sad about not wanting to go out, dance, act crazy as we ring in 2006. Mostly I'm feeling contemplative about my future, our world's future, John's future with me. A year used to seem so much longer than it does now. The crucial happenings in my life are as follows:

January: Our country inagurates Bush for his second term as the leader of the Free World. I am shocked and appalled. Also, Iraq holds its first free elections which makes us all think for a brief, miscalculated second, that we might be able to leave that god-forsaken place in the near future. 'Tis not to happen. Meanwhile, I am reeling from falling so deeply in love a few months earlier, and dealing with the tail end of my first separation from John, while working on "Le Nozze Di Figaro" at Opera Pacific. The sets are terrible, Orange County has more rainfall than it's ever had (easily shown by the amount of leaks in the roof at OP - usually right on top of the harpsichord), and my toilet literally explodes in the hotel room in Costa Mesa. Despite, Harry Silverstein and I get to connect again and I choreograph a jaunty little number for Sari Gruber and Kyle Ketelson.

February: I travel to Chicago to work at DePaul University for the second time. This is separation #2 for John and I, but he comes to visit. I connect with my cousins, Melissa and Rita, while staying in their guest room for a full six weeks. They have the most fantastic little dogs: Otto and Zelda, and I am in instantly in love (even though I miss Lucius like mad). I choreograph and assistant direct "Idomeneo" with Harry again. It is wonderful to work with him twice in succession, and Melissa's plumbing works beautifully the whole time. Chicago has a fairly mild winter while I'm there. I miss it terribly every time I walk down the street. I am ecstatic to be able to take John on a sight seeing tour, and we see Lillian Groag's exquisite "Resurrezione" at Chicago Opera Theater. I am reminded that anything can be made into theater.

March: Martha Stewert is finally freed so she can go back to making cakes and putting up holiday decorations!! More importantly, Terri Schiavo's husband is trying to help her find peace while the Florida government is trying to make it very difficult for him. Meanwhile, I'm still in Chicago for part of the month, then fly directly to New York to make my debut as a solo dancer in "The Pearl Fishers" at New York City Opera. This is my third and final Pearl Fishers. I am feeling quite bittersweet about the whole thing. I stay at my friend, Danny's partner's apartment on the Upper West Side and have the most amazing New York experience I could possibly imagine. I tour everywhere. I see Ground Zero, museums, Greenwich Village, the Noguci Museum, and "Don Giovanni" at the Met (with a very grown up Isabel Bayrakdarian). John visits and I am so happy to see him and introduce him to friends. It was so amazing to see all of these people I had history with. I make a resolution to make it New York City more often.

April: The Pope dies and Prince Charles gets married and I am still in New York trying to cram the whole experience into my final couple of weeks. I get home and go instantly into rehearals for "The Barn Owl Lingers," my final performance with Malashock Dance and Company, with whom I've been since 2001 (and the reason I originally moved to San Diego). I am happy to be away from them. It was time to go - sometimes circumstances make that very obvious. What I don't fully realize at the time is that my leaving the company will really be the beginning of the end for me as a performing dancer. Hindsight's a funny thing. John and I move in together (foreshadowing of good news to come).

May: The whole world knows who Deep Throat is as I travel up to Ventura, California with Malashock Dance for my last show with the Cypress String Quartet. I start looking for opera assisting jobs full time. The career shift becomes a full time job. John and I rent a mini van and drive cross country for Memorial Day so that I can take him to the Indianapolis 500 (his second, my 16th). Danica Patrick almost becomes the first female winner of the race. On the way back, we go to my parent's farm and pick up my mother's rolltop desk. Not the most expensive piece but one that instantly reminds me of family and childhood. It's wonderful to work on something that holds so many beautiful memories for me.

June: Michael Jackson is aquitted and I get a job at Florida Grand Opera. John and I begin to think about what that means for us if I'm gone for nearly six months. In the meantime, we go to the regional Emmy awards together and "Love and Murder" wins three Emmys including Best Performing Arts Program! I take a trip to San Francisco to see "Pearl Fishers" in its final incarnation and spend time with my friend, Erin. I love knowing people all over the world.

July: London is dealing with some major subway bombings while I'm beginning my third year teaching movement at the Summer Movement Conservatory for the La Jolla Playhouse. I have terrific kids this year and still maintain communication with a couple of them. I am thinking constantly about Florida Grand and trying not to think about the separation from John.

August: I get to perform again when Allyson Green asks me to dance in "Dancing to Beethoven," a collaboration with the La Jolla Chamber Music Society's Summerfest. The project is very successful and John does a beautiful documentary on the making of the piece. While John is celebrating his 50th birthday, Katrina makes landfall in the Gulf and our government's approval ratings take a downturn almost instantly. Huge amounts of people are uprooted and treated very poorly by an elitist group of government officials. I am officially appalled.

September: I have a little time off. Justice Renqhuist dies and we are faced with the possibility of taking a huge step back in the Women's Movement. I travel to Missouri to stand up in my best friend's wedding. She's a basketcase but we still have a great time and she looks beautiful! My other friend, Margie, gets married in Arizona and I am now officially the only singleton in the group.

October: Saddam Hussein, Scooter Libby . . .lots of news this month. The U.S. death toll in Iraq reaches 2000. The two biggest things affecting me, however, are my cross-country road trip with John to begin work at Florida Grand Opera in Miami, and Wilma, a Category 3 hurricane that scares the hell out of me and makes rehearsing "La Fanciulla Del West" with Lillian Groag a huge hardship! We have a very resilient cast however, and the show goes on with great success! I am missing John like mad by the end of the month.

November: Paris is burning with race riots, we are still reeling from Wilma, and Fanciulla is in full force. I am settling into Miami for the time being, but still feel like the city is entirely toxic. I can't stand going out in the mass chaos that is Miami. I fly home for 48 hours to spend Thanksgiving with John. It's a welcome respite, however short.

December: I take a terrific trip to New York, see my friend in Queens and see "An American Tragedy" at the Met. I am blown away by the whole experience! We start up "La Fille Du Regiment" with mass chaos almost instantly. No hurricane this time, but there might as well be with the amount of chorus time we are cut short. In the best few days of my life, John comes out and takes me to St. Augustine for Christmas, where I get engaged!!

And so, because he is so far away, I sit here in this little room and think "I could be having a good time at a party, but I'd rather talk to John on the phone." I am waiting for him to call and hoping that this New Year brings a little more peace, a little more love, a little more career opportunity, a little more friendship...Resolution? To lose 15 pounds and to start doing my own work whether I have the money or not. To get married and continue to be a terrific partner..

Happy New Year everyone!!

Vivandiere Du Regiment!!

I think this is a drawing of Jenny Lind as Marie, "La Fille Du Regiment" form 1856. Our "Marie" is not Jenny Lind, she is Chen Reiss from Israel (though she does sound like a songbird).

We had our final rehearsal in the rehearsal hall today and will move to the theater tomorrow. This rehearsal schedule has left me unable to think about anything else while I'm in the middle of work (except, of course, getting engaged, but that's another post...). We have very little time to get the chorus comfortable with all of the action they are doing due to union restrictions of chorus time and an unbelievably huge amount of chorus stage work in this production. My whole life revolves around who moves the bench in the first act and who hides behind the harpsichord in the second. Who takes down the clothes line, who hands off the gun, who makes sure that the crate is moved in time, who picks up the sheet music, who, who, who. . .

It got much more urgent yesterday as well.

Our director had a traveling snafu as she tried to come back after Christmas, and was stuck in New Jersey for an extra day. She called me at 7 in the morning and I was instantly up and learning everything I could about the chorus scenes that had not yet been staged. I've never watched a video so many times in succession. As Assistant Director, if the Director is unable to be at a rehearsal, I take over (sort of like the Vice President of the production). Last night was showtime for me. A pretty scary thing when you aren't expecting it to happen.

I watched the video, took copious notes, ran the sequences over and over in my head, and when the time came I felt pretty confident about what was happening. I don't really remember the rehearsal. When you stand up and direct fifty people at one time, the adrenalin rush is such that your body goes into overdrive (and you sleep really well once you get home).

Today was a little more back to normal (whatever that is) with the director back and the principals getting a full run in the afternoon and us spending the whole evening drilling the ROTC work into the chorus men and discussing the emotional content of the opera with the chorus women. We have a great principal cast, which helps. John Osborn, as Tonio, hits those nine or so high notes with such aplomb that everyone on the sidelines is giddy. Tim Nolen rattles around the stage as a gravelly little Sulpice, hitting every comic moment with a sledgehammer. And Joyce Castle, our amazing Marquise, blows me away every day as her performance and timing just gets richer and richer. Dottie (the director) and I were talking tonight about how hard comedy is to put together. People have this misconception that, because a work is light, that it's easy to throw on stage. On the contrary, and these singers have helped immensely in the huge undertaking of making a comic opera work on stage.

Tomorrow is the theater, and I will continue to drill the chorus as much as possible to ensure correct timing. We haven't had nearly enough time with anything to give them confidence in their performance.

Timing is everything, and the fact that the rehearsal period for this opera falls during the holidays is very bad timing indeed.

BIG NEWS!!

I've been out of writing practice for a bit. Things get to be too much sometimes what with the holidays and ten straight days of grueling rehearsal at Florida Grand Opera.

Suffice to say, Christmas weekend was a huge blessing. John came over from San Diego and we drove into the chillier air of Northern Florida, spent three nights in St. Augustine, taking harbor cruises, walking among the twinkling lights of the historic city, eating hot soup at an Irish pub on the main thoroughfare, eating cheese and crudites in our hotel room . . .

. . . getting engaged . . .

The moment was so sweet and perfect. We had dinner at Le Pavillon: oysters Rockefeller, rack of lamb, salmon. Waiting for a dessert menu, waiting, waiting, and our waiter brings out a lovely custard, pie, tiramisu, I don't even remember. What I do remember is the huge strawberry on top that bore the most simple, beautiful claddagh I've ever seen.

The restaurant was crowded, John slid off his chair, onto his knee, and asked me to marry him.

Yes.

The waiter asked if I was surprised.

Yes.

I have had some very difficult holidays in my past. Some times when I wish that Christmas would just take its leave and I could go back to my daily routine. This was not one of those years. With sadness I dropped John at the airport yesterday. It will be another month until we see each other. Time cannot move fast enough..

Rataplan Rataplan

Now, what you see above is what a rehearsal room SHOULD look like. If you remember my initial posts when we started "La Fanciulla del West," you'll know why this set up makes me much happier. The maestro can sit in the middle of the room, I have a full table upon which to spread out, I am at a vantage point where I can see everything that's happening and I don't think that singers are going to fall on me whenever they come downstage to sing.

Today was not about fancy sofas and harpsichords, as you see in this picture, however. Today was about military-style marching and drum corps rifle work. I don't think my poor chorus had a clue when they walked in this morning that most of the singing they were doing in this show was going to be accompanied by marching and, sometimes, gun twirling. The most difficult of these formation-style chorus sections, is one that only involves the male chorus in a march and the Corporal shouting orders. The song, for the most part is the word "rataplan" (rat-a-tat in English) sung over and over again, sometimes being shortened to "plan." Every change in the music results, in terms of Dottie's staging, in a different formation, but because the words never change, it's hard to articulate when these changes happen for the singers. One of our choristers asked Dottie and I, "what am I singing when we circle the guns?" as he tried to figure out where in the music he was. The only viable answer for us, because the music is so unchanging, was "rataplan plan plan plan plan plan plan . . ." So frustrating when you are trying to explain where movement happens to a group of non movers. Thank goodness for scores where we can all make notations.

Confused? You should have seen us trying to get the information across in rehearsals.

Dottie added in one bit of heinous ROTC rifle work that kicked a couple of chorister's asses. She taught it to me and one of the stage managers this morning so that we could pull people aside and teach it as the day wore on. By the end of the day, every person involved in this show could be seen in a corner or off to the side trying to twirl their rifle, turn it around, slam the butt on the ground on the right count. As we ran through the number, I was standing on a chair, barking orders, waving my hands around and pointing in the direction they should be marching, mirroring all of them as they did the rifle work. As crazy as all of this movement is for them, this is when I feel the most confident and on my game. This is when I feel I can give the most to the production.

The boys will look great. They just need continual pep talks and encouragement to get through the more intricate bits.

My Candle Burns At Both Ends....

I feel somewhat like the poor, deflated Santa in this picture, about the holidays, about my work, about my being so far from home.

The construction is still going on in front of my house, which is the first thing that puts me off every morning when I wake up with a headache from the jackhammers thumping and the concrete breaking. The other night I came home and they had completely blocked off all access to our house from every street. I parked in the middle of the street on the other side of the "caution" tape and lugged my bags over someone else's yard to my apartment. My landlord was home and excited to see me. "I was waiting for someone to come home so we could move our cars together." She led me out the door and I followed her in my car around the block to the caution tape blocking off our side street. She pulled over, got out of her car, walked over to the caution tape in her suit and tennis shoes, pulled scissors out of nowhere, and cut through the tape. We drove on through and parked along the side of my house. We weren't in the way of any of the work, and I delighted in the rule breaking! It felt a little like high school all of a sudden.

The construction is not the half of it, however. We started rehearsals on Tuesday for "La Fille Du Regiment," a Donizetti comic opera about a French girl during Napolean's campaign in 1805 who was raised by a regiment of soldiers and then, being found by her aunt, is taken into a rich home to be domesticated. I don't particularly care for the opera. I think it's a bit trite and sing-songy. There's one aria, "A Mes Amis," sung by the tenor, which is beautiful (mostly because of all the impossibly high notes he sings and holds), but everything else seems rather dull.

We have a great cast, and Dorothy Danner, our director, is an absolute delight, but the schedule (once again) is a nightmare. Despite being unencumbered by hurricane madness, we are trying to cram the entire opera into ten days of rehearsal before the Christmas break begins. I'm not sure how this is going to happen, though we've been plowing along rather nicely with several exhausting three session days. Opera rehearsals are generally done in blocks of three hour rehearsals, twice a day. According to contract, singers can only rehearse six hours a day, so this schedule allows any one singer to be at the entire day's worth of rehearsals. A three session day makes scheduling tricky because you have to make sure you are staggering scenes in such a way that every singer only works six hours. This comes down to some massive logistical juggling for Sherrie Dee and I, which puts a damper on the rehearsal process a bit.

The other thing about this show that's difficult is that there are huge chunks of dialogue. There are a lot of operas out there with dialogue (Die Fledermaus, Carmen, Magic Flute, etc) but this one just seems to have so much, and it's all done in French. Most of our singers are pretty good with their french, but a couple have been sweating bullets over these dialogue scenes. I'm proud of them as I listen to them rattle off in one of my favorite languages - especially when I see them going over the scripts with tension crawling all over their foreheads. We have a dialogue coach, Sandryne, who is really sweet and patient with them, so I'm sure that helps.

Anyway . . . we're working for ten days straight to get this show on its feet. I get a break, finally, on Thursday. It can't come fast enough for me. John is coming in from San Diego on Tuesday. Rehearsals will go faster when he is around to curl up with afterwards!

Instant Karma's Gonna Get You...

I understand the need for funds in order for the people of New Orleans to rebuild their lives, but despite the "hearfelt" sentiment and explanation in the blurb about this tour, I think Gray Line Tours New Orleans' newest tour is still about as tacky as it comes.

We're Screwing Ourselves

This government of ours. This government voted in by only a marginal majority (1% if I remember right) is committed only to isolating us from the global community. They did it in the Middle East by going to war with no U.N. support and now they're doing it in Canada by remaining at war with our delicate environment.

Montreal is showing us, once again, that the President's priorities have nothing to do with our future.

Clinton Says Bush is "Flat Wrong" on Kyoto

Oh, to remember the times when Clinton was our president. . .

Fond memories . . .

Thank god for him speaking out against Bush's asinine ideas concerning the U.S. involvement with the Kyoto Protocol and the greenhouse-gas emissions damaging the U.S. economy.

More Messes in Miami

So they've been doing some major construction along my little street for the past four or five days. Yesterday they moved quite close to our house on the corner and I figured there would be a giant hole in the ground in front of the house when I got home from work. When I pulled in, however, they hadn't passed our drive yet, so I parked there, thinking they either wouldn't be working the next morning, or they'd start a little later.

Silly me...

At 6:45 in the morning, I awoke to the dulcet tones of a giant backhoe (see lovely photo above) digging its claws into the pavement. I looked out the window, which is right above my bed, and saw that they had moved even closer to the drive and they had placed this massive concrete block over part of the driveway, making my exit a sticky one. (See below photo).

So I jumped out of my warm bed and threw some sweats on, slipped into my Birkenstocks and ran outdoors to move my car to the side of the house so that I wasn't stuck in my home the whole weekend. Being half asleep, I misjudged the distance between me and the concrete block, and ran my tire right into the corner, slitting it open. Fortunately, the kind gentleman at Goodyear in Hialeah told me that it was just a "flesh wound" and I should be able to drive around on it with no problem.

Be that as it may, I am still incredulous at being woken up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday by a group of loud mouthed guys digging out a storm sewer ditch. The street is mucky, these idiots are running around in shorts and tank tops, no hard hats, with cigars sticking out of their mouths while they climb down inside these holes and help guide three ton concrete blocks into their proper resting places. In the meantime, they've knocked down several branches off of the tree you see in these two pictures and don't seem to care.

It's not that I mind them having to do construction work. Having been through Wilma, I certainly understand the importance of having a working storm sewer. It just seems that this loud, obnoxious, inconvenient bit of stuff is simply the latest in a large pile of straw being laid atop this camel that is my existence in Miami.

My nerves are shot here. I am experience more road rage, eating more junk food and complaining more under my breath than I ever have in the past. I am slowly beginning to think that this city is toxic. Toxic for me anyway. Getting out of here will do me a world of good.

Barge Haulers On The Volga

This is the painting I was talking about. I think it's so haunting. It tells so many stories in one image. I think it's hard to tell, but the fourth guy from the left is staring right at the viewer with a look of exhaustion and questioning on his face. I love it. The piece is by Ilya Repin and has the date 1870 on it.

. . .A Helluva Town . . .

I just spent a glorious two and a half days in New York City! There is no ill in the world that can not be cured within me by spending some time in New York. It's been since April when I last stepped foot there and spent the most incredible spring working at New York City Opera. This time I was there for a much shorter period but was still able to do and see so much.

On the fine art front, I went to the Guggenheim to see their "Russia!" exhibit. I actually went straight off the plane. I leaned into the cab driver and said, "Guggenheim please," and we were off. Apparently, this exhibit is the largest collection of Soviet art ever assembled outside of the Soviet States. The exhibit wound itself up the spiral of the Guggenheim's stark walls in chronological order, with the religious iconic art from the 13th century starting everything off and iron curtain art from the mid-eighties rounding out the tour in the High Gallery. I was most enthralled, I think, with the portraits and huge political realism painted during the cold war period, as well as some of the revolutionary paintings from the 1870's. There was one in particular entitled "Barge Pullers on the Volga" or something like that, which depicted a bunch of tough looking raggedy men strapped to huge leather harnesses, as they pulled a ship to shore. The individual expressions on all of their faces were what did it for me, and I found myself looking at their eyes for a good ten minutes. As exhausted as I was after closing "Fanciulla" and getting up at 5am to fly to LaGuardia, I had enough energy to get myself through that exhibit and enjoy everything I was seeing.

On the shopping front, I walked down Madison Avenue during "Miracle on Madison," a shopping fundraiser going on during the holiday season. Christmas music was piped in at every street corner and with the little dusting of snow on the ground I was in a true holiday mood. I only wish I had enough money to purchase one thing for sale in any of the shops on Madison Avenue.

On the opera front, I had a once-in-a-lifetime experience and got to see "An American Tragedy" at the Met. I had nosebleed seats but still had a perfect view of the stage and great binoculars so I could still watch facial expression. As I've come back to Miami, I've realized that the critics haven't exactly been kind to Tobias Picker, and sometimes not to the cast or production team as well. I'm not sure what to say about that other than I disagree. Some complain that it is too much about redemption and not enough about Clyde Griffiths being shallow and horrid. To that I say that the book is also about redemption. Some say it's too long. It's almost three hours (not all that long for an opera). When I got up at intermission I remember thinking to myself, "Wow, that act was really short." When I looked at my watch I realized it'd been an hour and fifteen minutes. The show seemed to speed by for me. I didn't want it to end. People have all sorts of criticism about the music to which I can't even respond. I don't have a technical background in music and can't talk about it that way. What I do know is that I found it exciting. I thought that the high society parts seemed a little musical theater-esque, but then I thought maybe they were supposed to. Everything in high society has the appearance of being tied up in a neat little bow when there are really much darker things lurking underneath. I felt the same way about some of the music. I loved the huge chunks of recitative, I loved the interludes between arias, I loved the one constant high note that permeated through the final scenes as Clyde was beyond saving. I loved the opera.

The performances were great too. I felt like the set, with it's great moving planks, brought out the best in everyone's voice as it sent the sound sailing to the back of the house. I felt like Patricia Racette got Roberta's pain exactly right and the young treble who played Clyde as a young boy gave me goose bumps. I was very happy. . . Plus, there were flurries falling as I walked out of the opera house and the city was alive with Christmas lights and buzz and I just wanted to lay down in the middle of the plaza and let the world spin around me for a few moments while I let the perfectly crafted ending sink in and the snow soak into my skin. I miss living in the North...

On the friend front, I got to see some people I rarely get a chance to have time with. I met my best friend at the hospital where she works and we took the train back together to her house in Queens. I was actually an hour early to meet her because my feet were killing me after walking down Madison and I just wanted to rest in the waiting room for a while and play my Sudoku and rest my eyes. The guy at the front desk was worried about me and how long I was waiting and no matter how much I tried to convince him that I didn't mind sitting, he wasn't buying it. I was infinitely glad when Laural finally came down in her scrubs and coat. We sat on the floor of her living room later and drank beer and ate a BLT and watched "The Family Guy" and looked through wedding photos. I couldn't have imagined a better time.

I had lunch the next morning with Brea, a dancer friend of mine who has just moved to the Big Apple and is dancing with a German choreographer named Johannes Wieland. We met at Lincoln Center and walked until I recognized a place and laughed about other dancers we knew and old stories about ridiculous times. We talked about future and career and love and cold temperatures. We walked to a coffee shop down the street and ran into a line wrapping around the block for the "King Kong" preview and passed Tony Danza while crossing the street, then I held my arm out long as we pressed our heads together back at Lincoln Center for a photograph in front of the ugliest Christmas tree I've ever seen.

I had dinner with a choreographer friend of mine who was there when I started my opera career and I can't imagine not being there to bounce ideas off of, talk to about failure, cry with over nerves and personal frustrations. We shared pasta at a little Italian hole-in-the-wall on the upper West side and caught up on our lives, loves, plans. The thought of him hooking his arm in mine and trudging down the street next to me makes me grin ear-to-ear.

I had coffee with a newer friend who shares both an artist's life and Tourette Syndrome with me. We talked about being creative, surviving critics and production week and new work, and tics. I love talking to him because I feel like I'm not alone and I felt instantly like I could say pretty much anything and he wouldn't think less of me. He is brilliant but unaffected and his power in the arts community does not seem to do anything to his outward demeanor. We sat across the table from each other and watched our tics get worse and worse as often happens when two touretters are together. There's something about the power of suggestion that makes us all start ticing worse than ever when we see the other person doing the same thing. It made us laugh and also put me into a strange sort of ease.

So, now I'm back in Miami starting prep for "Fille Du Regiment," which is a rather insipid opera but I think I will enjoy the process of putting it on stage. Mostly what gets me through my days here is thinking about the fact that John will be here in two weeks. The other thing that gets me through this week is the respite I had over the weekend.

Thank god for art. Thank god for friends. Thank god for New York.

How the Other Side Sees Us

So I was going through some older files and found this quote I had copied down from this blog. This is an offshoot from "A Family In Baghdad," one of the blogs listed along the sidebar, and I think she gets it about right.

Monday, January 17, 2005

It amazes me how some people are still supporting the war on Iraq till this moment.
I just received another hate mail (haven't been getting such junk for a while), from a US soldier I donno where from, but he seemed to like cursing a lot!...i found this part of his message kinda interesting..

Should the American people choose to they could wipe the majority of your disgusting race off of this planet in a matter of days. Go ** **** *** ******. The best way to take peace is with a knife.

I can never understand how can someone think like that. When I first read his message, I laughed, but then I realized that this is not a comedian writing this to entertain me, its actually someone believes in what he's saying... I realized that this is so sad.
I donno who feeds him with this sort of feelings and thoughts, who supports his racism... but anyway, it doesn't sound nice to me when I know that this person is the same one who came 20 months ago to liberate me.
I feel disappointed whenever I read from such a loser who thinks he has a purer blood because he's american.
such a virus can spread around quickly, and this kind of people could destroy their own nation, more people like him and there will be nothing left to be proud of.

The title of this post links to a website called "Iraq Body Count," which details reports of civilian deaths in Iraq since the beginning of the war. The powers that be should be ashamed of themselves, and we should all be ashamed of ourselves for not speaking out more...

Our Fearless Leader

Here he is, our fearless leader, our ambassador to the rest of the world . . . unable to open a simple door.

Apparently, Dubya was trying to escape a press conference in China and botched his exit in front of a myriad of cameras. His facial expression says it all.

I'm so tired of being scared for our world's future...

Home-Grown Ham..

I'm supposed to be at a party right now. One of the women from the wig/makeup crew is throwing a party in Miami Beach and I was supposed to go there, but instead I am here reminiscing about my childhood. I've (obviously) been a ham since I was very young, and my brothers all followed suit. We put on so many shows for my parents, using the hearth as our little stage. This picture is particularly telling in terms of our show style and our crazy ideas about costume and performance. What's with the half-ass clown lips I've painted on? The shirt claims I'm a genius, but I'm not so sure.... And check out my brother's hot pants. We were the height of preschool style back then. I think he's using a Fischer Price lamp post as a microphone. Creative.

I guess I haven't changed much. I still embarrass myself routinely on stage.

It's nice to think about performing when it's been soooooo long since I've been on stage. I'm not ready to entirely give it up. I need to find an outlet soon.

Right now we're still trying to get ourselves moved to the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. The stage management staff took a little "field trip" up there today to familiarize ourselves with the backstage area. I pretty much sat in the stage management office and played with the free wireless internet. It took me about ten minutes to acclimate. If you've seen one theater...

The traffic and pouring rain on the way back is what ultimately did me in. I haven't been able to wake up since, and so I am looking at ridiculous pictures of me at 6 years old rather than don something decent and get back in my car to battle Miami's heinous traffic to cross the causeway and try to pretend like I'm in the mood to socialize.

Sometimes I can be a real misanthrope.

Thanksgiving at Terra

Okay...so I had to post a photo of us at our fancy Thanksgiving dinner. Look how happy we are. Ecstatic to be with each other (and not to be cooking..)

Terra Restaurant in San Diego had great service and great food. Check out the link.

The First Rule of Fight Call is "Nobody Talks About Fight Call.."

The Title comes from our Technical Director, Pat Orndorf, making a play on the phrase "Fight Call," by quoting "Fight Club," and it is, unfortunately, a rule I am about to break. The picture is of my boys getting in touch with their tough side during a fight rehearsal while we were still in the rehearsal hall. Fight Calls come after the opening. They exist, in a 15-minute block about an hour before curtain, to ensure that anyone involved with punching, kicking, pulling hair, slamming someone in the back with a pick (it happens...) is completely on their game for each performance.

Onstage, a bar room brawl is a carefully timed, intricately choreographed event. Every step taken, every punch thrown, every bottle smashed to bits against the side of the bar is placed deliberately by the performers. It is an exact science set up specifically to look like chaos. Otherwise, people get kicked a little too hard and punches actually land on singer's jaws. Onstage fights are performed by humans however, which is what makes a fight call necessary. After a couple of days off, muscle memory begins to break down a bit, and it takes a dry run of the movement to bring people back up to speed.

It's rare to run a fight call where someone doesn't completely lose a movement from their musculature, where we don't hhave to go back at least once and run the fight again after making sure each person knows exactly where they are stepping and how they are landing. I also worry, when standing somewhat helplessly in the house, that performers, in their preshow jittery states, get a little slap happy and lose sight of the seriousness of the situation. Oftentimes Nick, our young fight captain, has the singers run a fight over again simply because someone started laughing in the middle. He wants to make sure that they are aware of what they are doing in all seriousness; that the steps didn't land properly by mere coincidence.

I worry about my boys. When I am on stage it doesn't hit me as hard, but when I am in the audience, I mull over so many things that can go wrong and I worry like a mother. These boys are strong though, and every stomach punch, elbow in the jaw, pick in the back, gun butt in the eye that goes right makes me infinitely proud.

We had our final show at Dade County Auditorium last night. I recovered today by shopping and going to see "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," which I must say was my favorite film adaptation thus far. I know a lot of people have complained that the script cut out a lot of important/wonderful moments from the book. I don't, however, see how they could have pushed anything else into the film. It showed exactly what it needed to show. I try to remember, going into the films, that they are NOT the books. They are a celluloid representation of the mind of J.K. Rowling, and for that I am grateful and awe-struck. I thought this film was wonderfully dark and had just the right mix of emotional life with sheer action/adventure. I was especially fond of the Quidditch World Cup and Ralph Fiennes' creepy-as-all-hell portrayal of Voldemort, which conjured up images of Fiennes at his wierdest during the depths of "The Red Dragon." The film set up everything it needed to for the sequels (including, contrary to a lot of personal opinions, Dumbledore's faith in Snape as a reformed Death Eater). I loved it. I was smiling as I left the theater, and that wasn't just because of the free Milk Duds..

So....now that everyone knows I'm a dork....

The show moves to Broward Center for the Performing Arts this week, with an opening on Thursday. We do two shows there, and I'm curious to see how different it seems in that space. I've never moved a show from one theater to another in such a short time. "Pearl Fishers" I took all over the country, but there was always at least six months in between, so we had a full rehearsal period to recover and adapt. This will be interesting to see everything put together and the lights focused and the singers comfortable with the space in a mere three days time.

In other news, I miss John like mad. We had a terrific Thanksgiving at Terra Restaurant in San Diego. We also talked and laughed and loved each other as much as we possibly could in the mere 48 hours we had together. Separations are so difficult to handle when you have so much love and affection for the other person. I am looking straight through the next few weeks to his arrival in Miami in mid-December. The knowledge of his travel here is what will keep me going through the beginnings of "Daughter of the Regiment."

I'm off to spend a little quality time with my cat. I'll keep everyone updated on the changeover as we work through the week.

Waiting for John

I'm in San Diego. It feels strange to be here after almost two months. I feel like things have changed in the city; the climate has changed; the feeling here has changed. I don't know. Maybe I'm getting used to Miami (Gawd!! Don't say that!).

What hasn't changed is my home and John. It's such an amazing thing to see a person you love and care about so much standing at the bottom of an escalator with flowers in his hand after you've been traveling for eight hours solely to see him. I was ecstatic to finally wrap myself into his arms after what seemed an eternity.

And now I'm waiting for him again. His boss planned a meeting for this morning . . . no one is too happy about it, the day before Thanksgiving . . . and so I am sitting in his office writing a blog and trying to pretend that it doesn't matter to me that the mere 48 hours I have with him is slowly ticking by while he waits for this meeting to begin, his boss is running late, in the other room.

Nothing every goes exactly as planned.

The flight last night was very turbulent. One of those experiences where you actually think about all the things you didn't do in your life now that you're about to die. The plane was rolling back and forth and we were falling on top of one another and even the big linebacker boys sitting behind me were whimpering. Just a little bit.

I had a book of "Sudoku" puzzles with me. These are wordless logic puzzles that have you searching for the proper placement of number 1-9 on a grid. A huge craze in Britain, Sudoku will always remind me of Anthony Michaels-Moore and the Fanciulla cast in general. He brought a book of these puzzles in one day and by the end of the rehearsal, the entire cast was gathered around him trying to solve one of the grids. After that, every day was Sudoku day. There is not a moment of rehearsal where I could not look over to the chairs on the far side of the room and see at least two singers holding a pencil poised over the book with their eyes bugging out. During the sitzprobe, when they weren't singing, singers were surrounding Anthony on the back of the stage trying to figure out where the numbers went. "La Fanciulla Del Sudoku..." it was an opera-wide obsession.

Anyway, I had my own book that I picked up at Miami International, and I was trying desperately through the flight to concentrate on placing the numbers correctly. I guess I thought that if I worked hard enough on the puzzle that the turbulence would go away. That keeping my mind limber would ensure my safety somehow...

I'm here now, so maybe it worked.

I also read "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer on the first leg of the trip. This is a memoir by a journalist (Krakauer) who was a member of the Mt. Everest expedition in 1996 that met with huge disaster when a storm came out of nowhere and stranded many of their team members above the last camp. 12 people died and the book details the experience from the point of view of a member of the expedition. It's heart-wrenching (gut-wrenching) and, while giving a pretty good journalisitic account of the experience, also shares with the reader an incredible sense of helplessness and survivor's guilt that Mr. Krakauer (and others) are still dealing with. At the outset, the story didn't really seem like my cup of tea, but the writing style really grabbed me and I suddenly found myself more interested in mountain climbing (summit seeking) than I ever thought I could be. It's a painfully human story of a revelation of mortality and a drive to succeed beyond rationality. Pick it up.

That's all for now. As soon as John is done I'm going to hole up with him for two days and be thrilled with my existence. Then it's back to the horrors of Miami. Thank god I like the poeple with whom I am surrounded.

Where I'd Rather Be..

In less than 24 hours, I will go from hanging out with these guys:



To hanging out with this guy:



I'll give you one guess where I'd rather be.

Don't get me wrong, the guys (and girl) in the top pic are great! They are my sanity, the people working on this current show. We went to a South Beach bar after the matinee yesterday and talked and laughed and I was happy that I get along with so many in this god-forsaken place.

But John is in San Diego and I'd trade one for the other any day of the week.

Like tomorrow, for instance. I'll trade here for there tomorrow! I don't think I can arrive in San Diego soon enough.

Happy Thanksgiving to Everyone! There will be more tales of opera madness to regale (and hopefully time for more political rants) when I'm back from two days of respite.

Embarrassing Oneself for Fun and Profit

Why do we do it to ourselves? What kind of people are we, those who expose everything they have to the public night after night? We set ourselves up for defeat, for ultimate embarrassment. Who are we?

Last nights performance was, as Sherrie Dee so succinctly put it this afternoon, "a night of dropsies." Everything fell: teacups fell off of tables, guns fell (bounced rather) off of beds, and apparently people were falling left and right, though I noticed none of that from my station in the back of the house.

It was not until I came back stage for the first intermission and saw one of our singers laughing hysterically as Tim Kuhn tries to fitfully tell me a story of miscalculated footing that I realized anything had happened. Apparently,one of our named miners took a step backwards during one of the fights and realized after he'd stepped that there was no ground behind him. He fell right off the platform and ended up spread-eagled between the top platform and the deck while still trying to sing and pay attention to the action. He was bright red and trying to breathe through his laughter. The rest of us, at first, were worried that he had injured himself, and later joined in the laughter with him as the moment rang familiar for any of us who had spent time on stage.

We all have these stories. It keeps theater life interesting and gives us tales to regale as we enter new theaters, make new connections.

The first picture is me, Philip Leete and Michael Mizerany in crazy masks that created many amusing tales for us as we traveled with Andrew Sinclair's production of "The Pearl Fishers" over the last two years. This shot was for the Michigan Opera Theater production, and that's William Burden taunting us at the moment. In San Diego, I carried that mask around in my car for two weeks while we were rehearsing in different studios, which always illicited comment. I've run into walls wearing that cumbersome thing, mixed up downstage and upstage while dancing with the black veil over my face, and, in my most embarrassing moment (caught on tape, no less), I bucked forward in my somewhat blind state on stage, only to goose our San Diego tenor with one of my mirror-covered antlers. He was none-too-happy and I was embarrassed beyond belief. (feeling a bit triumphant about the happening as well if I remember right, but that's another story).

My most laughter-filled theater mishap, however, occurred in the first opera I was ever involved. When I did Akhnaten at Chicago Opera Theater, I was the dance captain for a group of dancers who played both servants and members of the huge funeral party at the very beginning of the opera. I carried the pharoah's heart that was to be measured against a feather on the scales, that were personified by my friend Julianne. She wore a blindfold (fake - she could see through it) and carried plates on chains in each hand that she would hold out to the side to "measure" the weight of the feather against the heart. After the measuring ceremony, Julianne would always fold the plates into her chest and walk ceremoniously off stage left while I closed the box that had once contained the heart and walked off stage right. On the night in question, however, Julianne tripped a bit as she closed in her arms and the heart flew off of its plate. I saw it as I began my trek off stage and turned to catch it and put it back in its box (not the original staging, but better than letting it fall and roll into the pit). I was too slow. The heart hit the stage. Instead of slamming into the floor and rolling downstage, however, it bounced back up into the air (being made of rubber . . .). Julianne, in her utter embarrassment and with quick reflexes, reached her hand out and caught the heart in mid bounce. Note that she is supposed to be blindfolded. As soon as the heart was safe, we both went in our respective directions as quickly as humanly possible and broke into fits of uncontrollable laughter just outside of the sight lines in the wings. The horror of that moment (and the hilarity) lay in the fact that the incident happened center stage while everyone else is stock still. There is no way possible that the audience didn't notice. These are the stories we recount for years after the fact.

Not that these incidents are all fun and games at the time. Injuries do happen. The theater is a dangerous place, and we can joke about goosing the tenor and dropping rubber hearts, but sometimes it goes farther. My immediate reaction to falls and flying props is a pang of fear that something has gone injuriously wrong. Those same masks that caused constant laughter through our run of "Pearl Fishers" also caused our first "horse" to slice his hands open when two of the mirror pieces were not properly sealed along the edges. The ground cloth for that production still bears blood stains from that fateful evening. Bless Kevin Herman, the victim, who still showed up at the cast party later that night with his face covered in smudged orange makeup and his hands bandaged so that he could barely hold a drink (he, who probably needed one far more than any of us).

The same fall that our miner had the other night happened to one of my dancing girls during a dress rehearsal of the "Bartered Bride" I choreographed at DePaul University several years ago. While the other night resulted in hysterical laughter, Katie was not so lucky. She fell off the back of a bench, caught herself in some scenery, and the next thing I saw from the audience was her hoop skirt fly over her head as she cried out bloody murder. I don't even remember how I got up on that stage. I also don't remember if she had a fracture or a bad sprain, but she went to the emergency room and many of us followed suit soon after. I still can't laugh about an incident like that. All I remember is sitting next to her as she lay whimpering on the stage, watching her leg twitch uncontrollably in pain while she apologized for ruining the show. My heart was in my throat but I understood . . . I also blame myself when senseless accidents happen.


This graphic picture shows the worst injury I ever sustained while performing (thus far). It happened during a rehearsal while we were shooting my first dance film, "The Soul of Saturday Night." One of our shoots was at a bar, the Aero Club, in San Diego. I was supposed to sit on a bar stool, catch Michael Mizerany as he leapt in my lap, then rotate on the stool as he arched backwards. When we got to the bar, the stools were not as steady as we hoped. I expressed my discomfort with the action but tried it anyway. As we began the rotation and Michael arched backwards, the whole stool tipped. In an effort to save Michael's neck from hitting the brass rail, I arched to one side, got my legs entangled in the stool and "went down with the ship." My thigh slammed into the stool leg and was bruised beyond belief.

I still don't laugh about that now. I have plenty of other incidents to laugh about. This one, I remember with a bit of frustration and hindsight. Why do we do things we know aren't going to work? Because, like the fact that we get up endlessly and risk embarrassing ourselves, we risk injuring ourselves as well. We want the work to be good. We want it look the best it can look, to show off our skills, to impress, to make people stand up and take notice. We risk our ego, our selves, to create something risky, beautiful, powerful enough to be proud of.

I got up and shot the rest of that film that night without another word. The bruise was added to a list of stories that would later be laughed and gasped at by many backstage audiences. Theater people, like everyone else, are comforted by the pain and embarrassment of others. Perhaps more so, lest we would be unable to deal with our own.

Positive Reinforcement

Here it is! We got a great review from the Miami Herald!

Puccini Would Puff Up With Pride

The singers were wildly praised, especially our three top billed. They deserved it. They've been chewing up the scenery so much it's a wonder they aren't picking splinters out of their teeth.

You know, I try to tell people that I don't listen to reviews; that I don't care what they say. I try to tell people it's all about the process and experience, about my own feelings of the work's worth. I lie. Not that the reviews are everything (popular opinion is important and hell, the experience and people you work with and your own feelings about the work ARE important too) but opening up the paper and seeing that someone has taken the time to compliment you in black and white is a great, great feeling.

I must say, however, that Mr. Budman seems a bit long-winded with his ten-dollar words. My favorite quote:

The chemistry between Blancke-Biggs and Michaels-Moore lit up the stage. Michaels-Moore's dark, imposing sound rang out with stentorian power but also produced the most exquisite, dulcet pianissimos.

Lucius is Real Too

Real life is also my cat, Lucius. We musn't forget about him. He's kept me sane in this awful urban sprawl down here. Every night he lies fast asleep on my desk, every once in a while his paw sneaks around to my keyboard and lands on the "delete" key. I think he's trying to remind me how unimportant work is in the grand scheme of things.

Real Life

I'm down here in Miami working on these fantasies that we put up on stage and I was looking at former posts of mine and realizing that me working on these fantasies leaves my mind in fantasy land. Nothing I do is real, but I have a real life. I rarely talk about my real life even though it's there. I get so wrapped up in this fantasy world of my job that I get tunnel vision. Real life is not my work.

Real life down here is going to a bar with a coworker and getting into a philosophical/theological conversation with two of the bartenders for three hours. It's going to a dive bar with a bunch of the singers and staging crew and sitting on their mural-painted patio drinking Guiness while a drunk guy with a guitar serenades us with alcohol-induced tunes such as "What's My Name? (Michael Jackson!)" and "What the Fuck!" while we sing along and laugh hysterically. It's seven of us going night swimming at 3am under a full moon, running pell mell into the moon drenched water, throwing seaweed at each other and eating gyros as we wrap up in extra large towels - the first time I've been cold outside since I've been here. It's sitting in traffic for forty-five minutes to get to a drugstore to buy pain killers, and then standing in line for twenty-five minutes only to get to the front and find out that the clerk doesn't speak English. It's eating baked Ruffles and spinach dip for dinner. It's jumping for joy when my cat uses the litter box and staring at him worriedly when he spends four straight hours in the shower licking the floor. It's crying for no reason when I'm alone in my room.

What else is real life?

Real life is my parents sitting at their dining room table in the farmhouse they bought on the farm they bought so they could live out their dream. When I visit them I see them smile more than they've smiled in years as my dad feeds their eight alpacas and my mom spins their wool on a hand spinning wheel. They are raising my brother on a farm and there is something wholesome and right about their life that seemed to disappear for a while before. It's calling my mother and having her answer the phone out of breath because she ran in from the barn. (My mother ran!)

Real life is my brother Jacob taking pictures in Chicago. I'm so happy for him up there doing his thing, working in his field, looking and sounding happier. Life is harder for some of us than it is for others - almost as if it's preordained. I want so badly to be close to him and I feel it eking in that direction every time we have the chance to be together. My brother is a terrific smart-ass, a political curmudgeon, a voracious reader, a keen portrait photographer but a journalist at heart. My brother is the most brilliant person I know.

Real life is precious time with my neice and nephew, reading books, crawling on the floor, running at the park. They are my third brother's children and being close to them is the only way I can feel close to him. His and my opinions differ on just about everything there is - even memories take 180 degree turns between the two of us. My affection towards his children, however, is where we can meet in the middle. I would go to the ends of the earth for those two children, no matter how much of my hair is pulled, how much spit ends up on my shirt, or how many times they abuse my parent's dog into barking. Sometimes I even have the ridiculous notion of moving back to Missouri so I have the opportunity to see them grow up.

Real life is my best friend getting married. (Married!!!) So many changes to all of our lives. My friend from college had a baby last year. (A Baby!!!) My grandmother had a pace maker put in. People get older whether we want them to or not. We all gain partners and extras and lose the freedom of youth. I watched Laural walk down the aisle and felt the same bittersweet pangs that I felt while holding Tiffany's new baby while sitting on her couch in Chicago. Change is inevitable. It was the same grief I felt both for my cousins, who lost everything they owned in Katrina, and for my grandmother, who finally moved in with my aunts so she wouldn't live alone, and then went into the hospital right after I got down here. I wish I had more pictures of my grandmother. I wish I had more time with her. I wish we'd talked more when I lived in Chicago. I wish I'd had the opportunity to visit my cousins in Mississippi when they were happy there. I wish I'd been able to go to Tiffany's wedding; that I'd taken her out before she became a mama. I wish Laural and I didn't live three thousand miles away.

Real life is regret. It is also joy and laughter.

Real life is John. My John. This man who makes me smile every moment. Who takes away the knots in my stomach and makes me think about the future with calm. He embodies everything I left behind in San Diego to take this wild trip towards my career. He is also the man who encouraged me to go even knowing that it would be equally painful for him. We talk on the phone for hours.

I have never felt so loved by anyone.

That's more real than any opera will ever be.

A Little Quote

This is my family. I found it, all on my own. It's little and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good.

A quote from "Lilo and Stitch" that embodies all of those found families we create in this odd world of the performing arts. I think in order to get by as we travel from job to job, living off of hotel food and spending evenings combating homesickness by sitting at a bar, hoping last call doesn't come until we are too tired to care, we slowly piece meal together a family of like-minded individuals. It's constantly evolving but always there and is absolutely what keeps us sane in this rootless life we live.

Perhaps "little" is not the best word (though I think broken is very accurate) because, as we continue to travel and work, the family grows and grows so that wherever we are we have people we can grasp onto, with whome we can feel a semblance of home.

16 weeks is too long to be away from my real life.

Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhh!

Opening Night is in a mere four hours.

This show has been such a struggle to get to stage. We've dealt with scheduling nightmares, prop hell, food poisoning, twisted ankles and a little storm named Wilma (which, in turn, brought us no electricity, more scheduling nightmares, dark bathrooms, longer hours, missed rehearsals . . .) We are finally here. The season will open tonight.

One of our singers calls me from the emergency room this afternoon with bronchitis. He'd been given a cortizone shot but he won't know for several hours if it will work.

We have no covers.

Fortunately, we have one singer who's been studying the role. So, instead of dressing to the nines right now, I have to go to the rehearsal studio and walk this fabulous man through the role in case our singer can't go on.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say we were doing Macbeth right now.

Full coverage of the opening, in all its finery and pomp, will come tomorrow..

Right now, it's still a madhouse.

Flying Electricians and Other Oddities of the Theater

The photo is a scene from yesterday's level session. In order to fix some scrollers, an electrician was vaulted into the air and got to float around the flies as John Goss, the assistant lighting designer, watched from the ground. The lights look great! The snow in act II . . . not so much. It looked okay while I was at the afternoon session, but everything fell apart during orchestra dress: the snow was falling in huge clumps. It was too heavy sometimes and not heavy enough other times. I know it all frustrates the hell out of Sherrie Dee. It must if it frustrates me, sitting in the audience, at all.

Last night was our first orchestra dress rehearsal (and our last time on stage without an audience). The day was a little off as Lillian was very ill with food poisoning. I didn't think she would even show up but at 7pm, there she was wandering aimlessly, looking a little like death warmed over. Everyone was getting her gingerale and asking how she was doing and generally freaking out whenever she stood up from her seat in front of the tech table. I kept asking her if she wanted to go home and she, hard-headed woman that she is, said that she had to be there for her "kids," and wanted to be able to give notes at the production meeting. I will call her this afternoon to make sure that she is indeed on the mend.

The dress rehearsal ran as exactly that. I always hope for an off run during the dress because it often times means a better opening. Last night there were guns misfiring, sugar glass bottles breaking before they were supposed to, bandoliers sliding up around people's necks during the fights, ladders not working, chairs falling over, you name it... The rehearsal ended and all of us (the singers tired from an off night and myself tired from taking care of business with a very under-the-weather director) retired to Fritz and Franz' (which I think is actually called Fritz' Bierhaus but has somehow adopted the former name by Florida Grand employees) in Coral Gables for some beer and brats.

I was particularly worn out after trying to set bows with the black out curtain in so that Stewart could continue orchestra notes. I'm whispering to 26 chorus members and trying to set them up in lines on a downstage area that doesn't exist behind the curtain. Lillian finally comes staggering back and sets them further upstage and I am infinitely relieved when Stewart finishes up and I can climb down to the front of the pit and open up my voice full throttle. I don't know why bows always stress me out. They should be the easiest thing to stage but I hate the logistics of getting all of these people to their proper places in their proper order...

So, we eat brats and I have a Chivas on the rocks and we talk a lot of shit and have a general good time. Sherrie Dee and our two ASMs, Chelsea and Jodi, were finally out with us as well, so it was a full house and a great way to blow off some steam. Chuck Hudson, who I am assisting on "Rigoletto" just happened to be there since he was down teaching movement classes to the young artists, so I got to meet and chat with him a bit as well. Otherwise, it boiled down to a lot of bitching about the opening night gala, which has many of us outraged.

We recognize that the gala is for donors, but we were all hoping to get to spend a little time together at the function until we found out that stage management and the assistant director were not invited. At first we thought we found a quick fix by having us go as guests of the singers who do not have their significant others in town, but when all of the singers got their invitations, it specifically stated that they could ONLY bring a guest if it was their significant other. It's a frustrating situation because it splits up the group of people who actually worked on the show. Seeing class lines being drawn by an organization (regardless if it's for financial reasons or not) is disheartening and the singers were also angry that they couldn't bring their best friend if that's who they had with them. Dean Anthony, who I was originally going to go with, said that he would still try to walk in the door with me, but I have no idea how it's going to turn out. I don't want to make a big deal out of it but I can't help feeling insulted, and it makes me feel good to know that the rest of the cast and crew are having similar feelings.

So, off my soap box, we are ready to open and I am ready for this to get into run mode so my workload slows down and I can clean up my paperwork without having three thousand things on my plate. I found out yesterday that I got a job at Opera Theatre St. Louis in May, so it's nice to finally have a moment to be able to look into the future. As my college friend, Tracee Westmoreland, once said, "we are continually coming together and falling apart." This is very much the case in my line of work, in my consistency of travel. It is for that reason that we must make the most of the times we have together.

How I Spent My Sunday Evening

So we finished our production meeting following the piano dress rehearsal at 11:30, and I was in my car and home by 11:50. I thought I would work for an hour on typing notes for principals and then get a good night's sleep so we can begin level setting the lights tomorrow morning. So far so good.

At midnight, Sherrie Dee, our production stage manager, calls me up and asks what I'm doing. Lillian Groag, our director, had a dead battery in her parking lot at home. Sherrie had driven her home and was going to jump her car, but they couldn't get it out of the parking place so, no matter where Sherrie put her car, the jumper cables wouldn't reach. She knew I also had jumper cables so if we could just put them together . . .

Almost half an hour later, after jumping back in my car, I end up at Lillian's parking garage, standing in between the two cars, holding the rubber end of the cables at their connection point in my hands. The three of us are exhausted. Lillian is beside herself because this is the second car she's had from this rental car establishment (see link) and the second car to have major problems. I'm trying not to fall asleep while we're charging the battery.

The car starts. We cheer. Lillian gives me a huge hug. I take my jumper cables and go home. So much for getting work done. So much for the three of us being lucid during the lighting session in the morning.

It's 1:18 in the morning here and I have just walked in the door. My bed is looking very, very comfy. . .

The Countdown Continues

Welcome to my home for the next couple of days: the tech table. Basically, a board slung over two rows of seats in the house, I'll spend countless hours here in the dark over the next two or three days with Lillian, Sherrie Dee and our lighting designer, Robert Wierzel. We'll watch the light cues and make sure they're all copacetic and I will try hard not to fall asleep and wait for Lillian to give me notes (and hope I don't have to light walk which requires me to get on the stage and stand in the light for inordinate amounts of time).

I actually don't really mind lighting sessions. They aren't generally hectic and I've always found theaters calming when they're dark and quiet. I love walking into a theater's house early and sitting in the dark, pretending to only half exist. It grounds me and prepares me for the harriedness of the rest of the evening.

Like yesterday, for example. Lots of hectic, harried energy flying everywhere. Trying to get two acts staged in three hours. Next to impossible. I really felt for Lillian, who was beside herself and almost on the verge of rage when it came to the schedule and its scant hours. The singers worked fast though and some of the things we thought would be major SNAFUs turned out to work okay - Minnie's quick change in Act II for instance.

We had some gunshot issues (the offstage shots were so loud that we ended up banishing the prop guy to the ends of the earth to make the shots sound distant. . . I think he might be shooting the gun in the parking lot). We had some entrance and exit issues in Act III which resulted in a lot of chorus men wandering around with a somewhat vacant, yet troubled expression playing on their faces.

We had a baton issue that had nothing to do with anything...by the end of the evening, we had released all of the singers and we were working on a moment when the cabin door is supposed to swing open on cue. All of us were a bit slap happy being that it was 11 o'clock in the evening. Lillian, Doug Kinney-Frost, Andrew Bisantz and I were hanging over the pit looking down on Stewart Robertson and Sergio, our repetiteur, and Stewart was joking that he could make far-away gunshots with his baton. He braced one end against the lip of the pit and starting twanging the other end to make a vibratory sound, when he fractured the whole thing in half. We all burst into endless fits of laughter as Andrew said, "That'll teach you to play with your baton." Such a ridiculous thing to laugh about but none of us could even breathe. That's what happens when you spend long hours in a dark building trying to do impossible things with lights and voices.

Like I've said time and again . . . we laugh to keep from crying.

So, today is our first dress rehearsal, which adds a whole new dimension to the rehearsal process. Everyone will be in costume which will suddenly render them unable to do any of their correct blocking or acting. Costumes and makeup are a huge adjustment, especially when they involve odd hats and big coats that no one is used to wearing. I am feeling lucky that we got to work with the real pieces for Minnie's changes last night. Otherwise, I think Act II would descend into madness.

In other, non-opera news, I'm feeling like society down here is back to normal, at least in my circles. There are still street lights down, but I bought milk and cheese at the grocery store a couple of days ago and every place I go has lights and air conditioning. I only know a couple of people without power and, for them, I hope constantly that their lives will get back to normal soon as well.

I couldn't sleep last night so I got up and watched "Melinda & Melinda," that latest Woody Allen film. I thought the device (two playwrites talking about taking a story and changing it into a comedy or tragedy) was fairly pandering, and I didn't find the comedy side all that funny -- I thought both stories were pretty depressing actually, even though the comedy has a "happy ending." However, the performances were pretty good. I love Radha Mitchell (Melinda) in everything she does, and Will Ferrell actually did a nice job as a married man who falls in love with Melinda and can't figure out how to get out of his relationship. I was also fond of Brooke Smith as the sensible friend. She gave a really, well, sensible performance. So that's that. It didn't sing for me, but I didn't hate it.

Otherwise, I'm missing my boyfriend, John, terribly, and glad I have my cat here to hug. This disparate life is necessary for me right now but not my ideal. As much as I've fought it in the past, I really do need roots to bring me down to earth.

Movin' On Up..

We made it to the theater. Finally. It was so nice to cut my drive time in half and pull into the Dade County Auditorium parking lot yesterday. As you can see by the photo, the set was already loaded in and enhanced. The lighting designer (in the white shirt onstage) was wandering around the stage focusing instruments and Chelsea and Jodi were, as always, going through prop hell as they made sure everything was in its place.

At 4pm we had a gun test. Lillian showed up with a headache but was excited to see the firearms as well. We had this idea that Minnie should enter with a shotgun instead of a pistol to make a really grand entrance. She shoots the gun up in the air to scatter all of the arguing boys. Bruce had gotten an acquaintance to come in with several shotguns. He was quite a character with his handlebar mustache, rainbow suspenders, and bags of guns. We were excited to see him load the double barrel. Chelsea and I were salivating.

Unfortunately, the shotgun was so loud that it shook the rafters and sounded like we had released a cannon from the stage. Patrick Hansen, Doug Kinney-Frost, Lillian and I were thrown back in our seats and Patrick commented that we would be dealing with several patron heart attacks if we went that direction. We settled on pistols for all three of the onstage shots, though the 1/4 loads that we had seemed wimpy after hearing that hand cannon explode the flies.

We got through all of Act I last night, though it makes me fearful that we only have three more hours to stage and we have two more acts to get through. I think Lillian was right in saying that Act II will be an absolute nightmare. Everyone was working well yesterday, though I am always so disheartened to see singers fall back into old mistakes once they switch to the stage. I thought maybe it wouldn't happen as much this time since we had the whole set in the rehearsal room, but people were still coming in early or late, sitting too close, using opera claws and forgetting tiny adjustments we made in the studio. I think it will be better by piano dress. Making that backstage transition is tough.

Paris is Burning

Unrest is universal. It will continue to get worse if we do not address the problems at the source. Blaming the disenfranchised will only make it worse, as Paris is finding out while their Minister of the Interior, Sarkozy, is calling the rioting youths (before they turned violent) "scum." Azouz Begag, the minister for equal opportunity's comments in the linked article are about right. He says that "in order to create order, one has to first combat discrimination."

Haven't we learned anything from Rodney King? From Katrina even. If we continue to treat our immigrants and minorities as "lesser than," they will, rightfully, fight back.

Ummm.....Duh...

According to the news today, if Alito is appointed a Supreme Court judge, he could "shift the court onto more conservative footing." I love that our journalists are so adept at stating the obvious.

What Are We? Turkey?

From The Human Rights Watch website:

"High-Level “Ghost Detainees” in Prolonged Incommunicado Detention

As this report details, the CIA is holding a number of “ghost detainees” in prolonged incommunicado detention. The most sensitive and high-profile terrorism suspects have been detained by the United States in “undisclosed locations,” presumably outside the United States, with no access to the ICRC, no notification to families, no oversight of any sort of their treatment, and in many cases no acknowledgement that they are even being held.

Human Rights Watch has pieced together below information on eleven such detainees who have “disappeared” in U.S. custody, though there may be more. They have been apprehended in places such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. Some were captured by the United States, and some were turned over to the United States by its allies. Almost all are allegedly leading members of al-Qaeda. Many are reported to have been tortured or mistreated in custody. Some are said to have provided valuable intelligence, some to have lied. The United States has acknowledged the detention of many, but not that of others. In each case, however, the United States has not only failed to register the detainees, but has also refused to disclose their fate or their whereabouts and thus removed them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time."

How can we begin to claim superiority over so many other countries? Money does not buy happiness, intelligence or ethics.

Because I Haven't Been Political Lately

So, this hurricane passed over my head and in the interim, Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination and we have Mr. Alito to scrutinize now, Rosa Parks died, more people died in Iraq, and Bush is getting criticism for the new plans being put into place to hold back an inevitable pandemic. I'm too overwhelmed with work to speak in depth about all of these things happening in our world, but when my friend in New York sent me this picture, I wasn't going to waste the opportunity to poke fun at our fearless leader.

Right now is the beginning of a full day off before starting up at the Dade County Auditorium. When you spend so much time with people trying to put a show together, you don't want to see any of them for the 24 hours you have to do your own thing. All of us scatter in every direction and get the rest of our lives back in working order before beginning a grueling tech week. Personally, I am going to do a lot of reading, clean house, go grocery shopping, get my oil changed, and spend some time at Nordstrom Rack in Coral Gables. A little shopping therapy never hurt anyone.

I might (ack) spend a couple of hours cleaning up my score tomorrow, but I'm looking forward to a little time away from this little singing Spaghetti Western.

We're Back Baby!!!

Today at 4pm, Elizabeth Blancke-Biggs and Anthony Michaels-Moore were singing their Act II duet in our generator-lit room while Lillian and I sweated in our corner seats and Andrew Bisantz, filling in for Stewert Robertson, was conducting away. Univision cameras had been there today so the window that opens up above to the admin offices was wide open. I'm trying to stay awake and I look up to the dark offices above, when suddenly all of the overhead lights go on up there and then all of the overhead lights flicker and light up in the rehearsal space. Everyone stopped what they were doing and started screeching, screaming with joy and pumping fists in the air. The air conditioning started churning and Sherrie Dee came into the room with a huge grin on her face - almost teary-eyed she was as we basked in our sudden power surge.

The electricty came just in time too as we had our final room run tonight with full chorus and a bunch of administrative staff sitting around watching. The run went as well as could be expected for the first time through and everyone was grinning, laughing and making comments about being able to see the scenery. I was ecstatic, and finally able to fully focus on my notebook as Lillian fired note after note to me. We had our sugar glass bottle at rehearsals for the first time today and Tim Kuhn, our Sonora, smashed it into a million pieces during one of the fights. He hit it against the wall after the original strike and the whole thing disentegrated in his hands. As it were, Lillian and I were covered in shards of sugar glass since the first strike sprayed in all directions. It will be much better when we can sit in the house.

The cast took me out for a drink after rehearsals. They're a good group of guys and a little roudy and loud when they get tipsy. By the end of the evening it started to remind me of my drinking days with Chicago Opera Theater with stupid jokes, constant laughter and a general blowing off of major steam. The difference being that I wasn't drunk tonight (twas not always the case). As I've grown up I've realized how the fun factor doesn't increase exponentially the more you drink, but the headache factor does. This group's been under a lot of stress lately however. Some of the singers are still without power and staying with people until the electricity comes back on in their place.

Thank god I'm not dealing with that anymore.

The picture is of Fenna Ograjensek setting up to run Act II with her papoose (the prop from hell which Lillian has affectionately named "Little Pooping Horse.") I will be infinitely happier when this thing moves to the theater.

Electricity, E-Lec-Tri-City!

Ever since I arrived home this evening I've been singing the above little ditty from Schoolhouse Rock. I'm sitting in plenty of light in my little home in Miami. Well into day 7 and I finally get it back. All of us at the house were ecstatic. and I am basking in my ability to see clearly.

You can see the difference in this very dark photo. This is the moment the giant tree in the back fell as we all sat in the living room and watched Wilma destroy the neighborhood. Things are starting to recover, however. I didn't know how much more darkness I could take but today has been a turning point for many of us who finally can work after dark.

Rehearsals are still run by generator power. We are working long hours with no air conditioning and a full chorus, so tensions run a little higher. Our chorus is amazing, however, and have worked their tails off this weekend. They are going to be spectacular because they all can act, they all react, and they all are committed to the production. Lillian told the chorus after rehearsal yesterday, "I think Doug (Kinney-Frost, the chorus master) should manufacture Florida Grand Chorus pills and sell them to opera companies around the country. He would make a mint!" Tis' true. We are blessed.

Blessed, but dealing with power issues every day.

Today wigs and makeup was doing fittings and they set their station up right in the doorway of the lobby so they would have enough light to do their work. The pic is of Jeff Buchman getting a head wrap made out of a Publix supermarket bag, so they could get the size of his head for wigs, since they couldn't have their entire stock in the doorway. We sat all over that well lit doorway for dinner as well, which was Greek food from across the street. The best Baklavah I've ever had. I'm not sure if it's because I haven't had well-made food in a while or because it really was that great, but it was making us all happy as we sat along the sidewalk with our styrofoam plates and shoveled warm food in our mouths.

This show will be ready and amazing if we can get into the theater in time. The boys sound great and the end, when they turn into a lynch mob, is truly terrifying. Thank god for the good days.

The Show Must Go On

The generator's working. We are all cranky at the opera, but dealing and continuing to rehearse as much as possible. We are laughing a lot - out of tension - but still laughing. The first picture is of our callboard at the rehearsal hall. A little humor goes a long way.

Yesterday eight of us piled into one car and drove to an electrically charged area to eat at Baja Fresh. We were like high school kids piled on top of one another and laughing hysterically but this is what keeps us sane. Lillian and I are still without power (she is worse off than me taking cold showers still. I, at least, have a gas-powered hot water heater).

This photo is a picture of a ton of us in front of our beloved generator on the first day of rehearsals. From right to left: Bob Heuer, our General Director, Les Greenwald, ?, Patrick Moss, our head of P.R., Patrick Hansen, Jody Gage, brilliant ASM, Sasha Vukovich, Andy Chugg, our sweet artistic administrator (who did "Fanciulla" at Glimmerglass and is having a hard time not doing it now), Vladimir Vukovich, our director of production, Doug Kinney-Frost, our chorus director, Chelsea Antrim, another brilliant ASM, Jeff Buchman, Billy Jackrabbit in "Fanciulla", Sherrie Dee Brewer, PSM extraordinaire!, Ivana Diez, another ASM, Fenna Ograjensek, Wowkle in "Fanciulla", Cassandra (our costume coordinator). We are surviving. We are eating, we are getting work done, our lives are continuing, however stressful and overwhelming. We are living in interesting times, in the Chinese sense.

There are cops directing traffic at the intersection in front of the rehearsal hall. During a break, all of the boys in the cast piled outdoors to get some sunlight while still wearing their gunbelts, with rifles slung over their shoulders and bowie knives attached to their belt. The cops were freaked out and in a frenzy until the whole thing was explained. We are living (all of us...cops included) in a surreal existence down here.

Change is coming. Thank god.

Aftermath

Hello all. I'm surviving in Miami. The pictures above are of the front of my house and my landlord's son, Brian, surveying the extensive damage in our neighborhood. I’ll backtrack a bit before moving forward. Early on the morning of October 24th, Wilma hit Southern Florida as a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane. Though it was not nearly as devastating as Katrina in the gulf, or even Wilma itself in the Yucatan, it has still left an entire city (millions of people) without power, and the poor people of Ft. Lauderdale with not much of anything. This was the worst disaster in Ft. Lauderdale’s history. Some thoughts I wrote down as the hurricane passed overhead:

10/24/05 5:30am

I’m sitting on my doorstep (to the rest of the house). It’s farthest from my front door. The electricity went out for good about 5 minutes ago after flickering on and off for a good hour.

Brian’s playing Monopoly by candlelight with two girls. Their discussions have become more and more heated. I was watching a video of Dave Chapelle with the other three guys at this particular hurricane party when the electricity finally went away. So now I’m in here.

Through the corner of the window on my front door, I can see the trees thrashing around and I know this is just the beginning. The eye was supposed to make landfall just after 6am. and we haven’t even begun to feel hurricane force winds.

I’m almost too tired to be scared. Perhaps that was the advantage of staying up all night.

Every once in a while there are blue flashes of light indicating another wounded transformer in the area. I cannot begin to fathom what the winds will be like when the eyewall passes by us. My fellow hurricane partiers don’t seem worried. They are too caught up in their Monopoly game.

I, however, have no history with this. I have no reference point, and so I watch the trees and wonder how they could possibly bend any lower.

I wonder how much light comes through all of this mayhem when the sun comes up?

I am worried for my cat, who has been sniffing the air like mad tonight. He is maybe smelling the ionization, or perhaps fear and despair blowing in from the West.

The news has dubbed Florida the “Here we go Again” state. I wonder how anyone could live through this kind of anxiety more than once.

8:05am

I’m in my shower. Terrified. Everyone else is screaming through the house, equally terrified. Brian tells me this is much worse than he thought it would be. More like Andrew than Katrina. I’ve never heard such violent wind. It sounds like a jet plane taking off. I can’t keep my cat in the bathroom. 45 minutes ago I walked into the living room just in time to see a full grown palm tree come flying towards the back bay windows. It was “Final Destination,” it was a near-death experience. It smashed into the side of the house and everyone screamed bloody murder.

It’s a constant barrage of thunder against the house. I can feel the whole structure vibrating and the pipes on the toilet are clanking together.

I’ve never been so scared in my entire life.

10/25/05

So today is the first full day of reconstruction (as the news told me while I was basking in the electricity at Sherrie Dee’s house). They have been telling everyone not to expect electricity for a full week, maybe more. I don’t know how to live without it. I don’t have a car charger for my phone so I can’t power up anything until I have lights. I can’t drive to Sherrie’s every day because it took me an hour and I only have a half tank left of gasoline. Once I run out of gas I’m shit out of luck because, if there’s no electricity, the gas pumps don’t work.

Patrick Hansen, at the opera, tells me that there’s a gas pump working over by the rehearsal studio, but every working gas pump I saw on my way around town today is encumbered by a line from hell.

There are trees all over the neighborhood. I had to drive up on the sidewalk to get out of here this morning. I think Miami Springs got it the worst in terms of downed tree (excepting Ft. Lauderdale of course). Yesterday, as the sky cleared and the winds died down, I watched everyone go outside and begin to saw through their broken trees. As it were, there are four down in our yard but Brian wants to wait until his parents get home before doing anything about them.

Thank god my car is fine. (albeit hoping gas will be available soon).

As for the opera… who knows. I worked through a tentative schedule for the rest of the week with Sherrie Dee while I was charging stuff at her place. Then, tonight that got shot all to hell. Patrick called her and said that a generator had been donated to them and they were going to set it up in the morning. They’ve suggested two sessions tomorrow using the minimum amount of people possible because the generator will not produce a lot of light.

We’re not sure what to do about that since everything that still needs to be staged includes everyone. Also, two of our singers (one who is in every scene) were out of town for a few days and now they’re stranded, unable to get into Miami, so we can’t rehearse with them at all. So, we are rehearsing the same damn thing we’ve been rehearsing and hoping to god that the electricity comes back on soon so that we can begin to put this whole thing together.

I’m worried about the generator. About having enough extension cords to hook up all those lights. I’m worried about the fact that the bathrooms will be in the dark and they’ll have to fill them with candles so people can see what they’re doing. I’m worried that the light will not be enough to make that precarious set safe. I’m worried that the generator will not work at all and we’ll lose yet another day of time. We open in 16 days mind you. I’m worried that AGMA will have a fit if we’re rehearsing in subpar conditions (or one of the singers will). I’m worried about Lillian being okay with all of this.

I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. For the time being I’m just trying to roll with the punches, but that’s going to get harder and harder as I grow weary of this inability to communicate and this incessant darkness.