::Cement and Senior Citizens
5:34 p.m. - 2004-10-13
Some interesting things have been happenning lately.
First, I want to share this story with you. I actually saw this with my own eyes yesterday:
I was sitting in a resturaunt on my lunch hour. The resturaunt is on the corner, and outside there are men working on the street. There are signs everywhere that say, "Crosswalk Closed," and orange cones surrounding the work area. Just as the men working have poured fresh cement and finished smoothing it (literally about two minutes later) some jerk comes marching across the street. He actually went out of his way to go around the orange cones and signs and he self importantly strode right into the fresh cement! He sunk right in, almost to his knee! He stepped out, looked back indignantly at the wet cement, and then turned and marched off the rest of the way down the street covered in wet cement!!!! It was too much. I was laughing out loud in the resturaunt.
Anyhow, this is what has been happening with me. I'm working very hard to be ready for Merola. I set up a great schedule for myself and laid out specifically what I wanted to accomplish in every practice session from now until then. I was exhausted last night, and although I did practice for a while, I felt like I wasn't getting much done, so I finally gave up about 9pm and just went to bed. I thought that I could work on the things that I didn't get to today at lunch, and so I went into the courtyard in the back of my office and started warming up as I often do. About 10 minutes into it, the voice of some woman that I couldn't even see came out of somewhere and told me that I was disturbing the senior citizens in her focus group. She condecendingly added that she used to me a musician, herself, but that my "lovely sounds" were disturbing them.
I guess she was trying to be polite, and honestly, while I'm not really in public, I can understand that there are other offices nearby and I don't want to disturb anyone. But damn, I really needed to practice!!! I got control of myself, though, and I came inside and got some chracter work done on several of my arias, so I was actually pretty productive with the time. But it's so frustrating when the voice is feeling good and you want to sing and get some good work done!!!
I had a great audition for a different church gig in Los Altos. The set up is great - I am a soloist only; I don't sing in a choir at all, and I don't have Thursday rehearsals at all. All I have to do is show up one hour before the one service, run everything with the organist, sing, get paid $100 and go home. The greatest part is that they are considering splitting the job between two solosits, so I'd only have to sing every other week, and I'd have someone to cover for me when I need the week off! Isn't that frickin' great? I sang fantastically and there were several people there who all asked me questions afterward, and they were all gushing about how great my singing was. I am subing for them in a few weeks, and I suppose they'll let me know about the position after that. Hurray!
This is completely un-related, but I love the Swing Rays, from Bloomington, IN, and I wish that they were still together. Their CD rocks.
