Last Night in a Hotel Room for Months!!!

I'm at the Wyndham O'Hare, a mile away from the airport so I can skip over there in the morning and fly away from a month of hotel rooms. It can't come soon enough. I'm very tired of sleeping in these generic rooms with little cards all over the place telling me to hang up my towels and comforters I'm not comfortable sitting on and questionable internet access, ugly (or no) art, suitcase sitting there just itching to get messed up because I don't have the time to truly unpack....

But it ends tomorrow when I move into my apartment in Coral Gables and make myself comfortable in an uncomfortable city.

I've had several days with my family. My mom, dad and little brother drove up from Missouri on my last day of rehearsals so that we could see each other while we're all actually in the Midwest. I stayed at a hotel with them and we had a wonderful couple of days laughing and telling old family stories. I also finally convinced my father to let me buy the whole family breakfast this morning which was a big thing. I took them to the Original Pancake House and had a lovely brunch. I've spent many lovely Sunday mornings in that establishment with friends and family and it was great to revisit.

They dropped me off at the Wyndham on their way to visit my Grandmother downstate. I walked up to my room all alone and felt such a supreme sense of loneliness. There's something about being by yourself in a hotel that pulls that out of you. I wandered down to the hotel bar and had a Guinness and stared at everyone talking to each other. This was one of those hotel bars with a little too much smoke, bad decor, bad service...filled with all the local go-to girls (as in "for a good time call"...). It was wholly unsatisfying so I came back up here and did a little work.

Work will be easier tomorrow when I don't feel so uprooted. Thank god for my family time and John time that I had over the last two weeks or all of this would be much harder. As it is, I just keep thinking ahead to May.

I think I can, I think I can....

The Quality-Free Inn

I do not recommend the Quality Inn in Richmond, Virginia. It is an especially hard transition from the Courtyard Marriott in Fairfax, with a fireplace in the lobby and free cookies and down pillows.

My safe doesn't work, my toilet seat is chipped and I had to have my bedding replaced this evening when I pulled back the comforter and found a load of black hairs on the mattress pad. Lovely.

Be that as it may, Richmond is nice in that I get to see some friends I haven't seen in years. I had lunch with a friend I danced with San Diego who's been gone for almost three years. She took me to a lunch place and we spilled all the dirt and laughed about our lives. She looked terrific and I was ecstatic to be sitting across from her, falling into old good times so easily. Connections are connections regardless of how long you've been apart.

I had a second dose in the evening when I had dinner with a very good friend I'd been relatively out of touch with for almost nine years. We ate pasta and got giddy with each other, talking about how amazing it is the way life goes, the paths we find. Our paths have diverged but we are still the same and we still have the same ultimate goals, they're just more well thought out now.

I am amazed at the friends I have; their brilliance, their insight, their ability to lift my spirits and make me laugh even when I'm lonely and upset and in a crap hotel room on the opposite side of the country from my husband. I am so lucky to have shared passions and secrets and love and laughs with so many great, talented folks. Thank god for them, every one.

The pictures are of my lovely hotel room. It is cruel to go from such a nice place to such a skeevy place. I will be happy to start working again in the morning so I have something to think about other than what the suspicious stain is on the comforter. Fortunately we are lighting at the Landmark at 9am. I'll be there with coffee (lots of coffee).

Life is hard but good. It's the amazing people that pass through it that make it that way.

Last Night in Fairfax

The picture is sunset on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. My view as I was driving back from New York City. The sun was unbelievable as it sank. I watched it dip down, looking as if it were melting into the roadway ahead.

Doesn't look like that here now. Cold and covered in ice and windy. The ice storm really ravaged the place last night. The roads aren't actually too bad but it was scary looking last night with the light pole out my window blowing around as if it were going to snap in half, and the American flag in front of the Lone Star ripping half off of its pole so it blew straight up in the air, whipping around wildly in the driving snow.

Today was yet another day at the hotel waiting to go to Richmond. It seemed like it would never come, but I am leaving at 11 tomorrow with our SM so that I can have lunch with an old friend at 2pm. I didn't do much of anything today, sat at a desk erasing and rewriting score notes, sat on my suitcase to get it closed after packing everything away, moved the coffee table over by the window so I could do a solo can-can, hopping around on one leg and kicking the other in the air, doing a vaudeville box step in canon with several missing chorus boys and waltzing with an imaginary partner to the tunes from "Merry Widow." It will be nice to have people to work on for that project; I'm sure those walking past my window had a good show.

Had dinner and watched a movie with some friends tonight. One of them rented a car for the day so we could get away from the hotel area. We drove until we found a mall, circled around it until we found a suitable restaurant, and sat in the front for a while after we realized it was so busy because it was Valentine's day. How quickly we forget about holidays when there's no one to share in it with you. All of our significant others are across the country or down the coast, and so today was just any other day for the three of us.

It was a good night. It's a blessing to have people in the hotel that I know and like lest I would truly go stir crazy.

On the road tomorrow!

The Touring Life

Sitting in a Courtyard Marriott in Fairfax, Virginia, the first stop on our mini-tour here at Virginia Opera. We've actually closed here; I leave for Richmond in the morning. The suitcase life is not a favorite of mine and this has been tough because I don't have my own transportation and the hotel doesn't have a restaurant. The room is comfortable enough though, and I've been catching up on sleep and work and salsa dancing, but that's another story.

Fairfax is a difficult place to put in the show because it's a concert hall and has only fixed line sets for its rail. Everything that's flown in takes an age to come in and out so the SM and I had to change all of the fly cues to make things arrive or exit when they actually needed to. For all of the trouble and a brand new crew, the show went surprisingly well. I was a bit worried and still buried my head in my hands on a couple of the slower set movements, but the singers were great and the audiences loved the show. The singers tell me that they love singing in this house so that's the good part of this leg of the tour, though I can't say I'm sad we're through it.

Richmond is at the Landmark Theater. This place is huge and old-fashioned, with the dressing rooms on balconies overlooking the stage. 3500 seats I think which is pretty much a barn. I hope the houses don't seem too small. The pic is backstage. Tape lines (and big red words) help singers and supers find their avenue out of the wings when they are facing down blinding side lights and "in-the-moment" nerves.

It's been a while since I've written. Once I got back from New York and started my trip to Fairfax, my business factor was raised by thousands. The tech process when you have one day to put up a whole show is daunting, and I had some drainage going on so I was trying to lay low whenever possible. I started feeling much better on Sunday and so went out and enjoyed myself a little the past few days. It was nice to leave the hotel room and have some raucous dinners, some dancing, some laughter. The loneliness in a hotel room is astounding after a week. I can't be a hermit when I'm traveling; I'll descend into myself something horrible.

New York was a total whirlwind. I saw friends, ran around in the eyelash-freezing cold, and got a job at New York City Opera. I'll be assiting Lillian again in the fall and will get to work with some great people. It was a terrific end the quick trip and I celebrated with a happy dinner with a friend before I drove back over the frozen New England landscape to Norfolk.

That's the good part of all of this travel: I've got friends in every port. It's so nice to see friendly faces in strange cities.

Tomorrow, friends in Richmond, Virginia. Next week, friends in Chicago!