Tuesday, November 29, 2005

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.

Sunday, November 27, 2005

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.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

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.

Monday, November 21, 2005

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.

Saturday, November 19, 2005

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.

Friday, November 18, 2005

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.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

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.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

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.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

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.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

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.

Saturday, November 05, 2005

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.

Friday, November 04, 2005

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.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

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.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

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.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

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.