Another week

The weekend was so busy, but looking back I feel happy because it was full of good things.

The plan had been to leave for New York right after church to sing for a small company at their NYC auditions and hopefully have lunch with JM. Saturday night, however, I started to feel like my head was going to explode because of a little something called seasonal allergies, besides being completely and TOTALLY worn out from trying desperately to look good and sexy for three long hours during my photo shoot with DT. It was a tough decision, and canceling an audition always leaves me with a particularly clinging feeling of defeat, but singing Donizetti over loads of phlegm on top of being physically exhausted just wasn't going to work.

I made the right decision, since when I awoke on Sunday, it was much worse to such a ridiculous degree that we both had to double up on Zyrtec and ended up such groggy wrecks that we could hardly hold our heads up.

Thank god I ended up with Sunday free so that I could go and see "The Audition" at one of Baltimore's most ghetto theaters in Owings Mills. What a funny crowd it was-- we were among the five people under forty in the audience.

It was an absolutely wonderful way to spend two hours-- I felt renewed by the experience of watching the singers and being able to see so distinctly why they had gotten to where they were in the competition. While I'm no Met National Finalist, I could really feel what they were feeling, and the passion they have for singing is so familiar. It was SO emotional for me! Both of us were crying like little girls without any really good reason. Or at least it seemed impossible at the time to figure out why it made us feel like that.

In watching the different performers and their styles and varying approaches to their pieces and it was so clear: Real people make such powerful performers. It's that magical ability to get out of your own way and just allow the music to take over and speak through you. I think most of us can remember a performance when it happened, and we spend the next ten performances trying to let go and allow it to happen again.