That Mushy Time Between Xmas & New Year's Eve

Oh dear. I believe this may be the longest I've gone without blogging. I apologize to my readers and to myself. And I blame Twitter. And Netflix. So many Dr.Who episodes, so little time!!!

My voice is improving little by little. I listen to my voice lessons and I practice, practice, practice. Mostly in the car, since that's really the only time I'm guaranteed to have to myself. I know it's not the most ideal situation but I have to make do. My next voice lesson is this coming Friday. Next Opera Project recital is… ? The upcoming performance is a composer's concert, featuring music of local composers. Then I think the next one after that will be in March. Hopefully I'll be chosen to sing in it. Oh and remember a few posts back I wrote about the possibility of a small part in an opera? Well, that fell through. Not sure if the part is being sung by someone else or if they removed it from the production. But it was nice to have people thinking of me as a possibility!

In professional performance news, someone I know (who happens to be a reader, you know who you are!) has these amazing photos from the performance of Billy Budd in Bilbao. I'm not sure where she got them from - they look like screen caps from a video. With her permission I'll post them here and/or to the Nathan Gunn Yahoo group. Here's a video from the production.

Speaking of Nathan Gunn, two (more) things.

Thing one: My brother and his family went to the family production of Magic Flute at the Met. They LOVED it. Even my brother, who was prepared not to like it, thought it was good. My sis-in-law said that Nathan was great. I kind of wish I had gone with them, even though I saw his Papageno back in April.

Thing two: Even though I'm not "into" Broadway, I still went and got tickets for this. Ann is coming out to join me and we'll be yukking it up in a hotel in NYC that night. Late night, post-performance Ben & Jerry's straight from the container, here we come! Maybe we'll even have spoons this time. I'll try to remember to pack a spork, just in case.

The Songs and the Torches

Whew, finally time and energy to write in the blog!

Once again I'm participating in the holiday chorus at work. We've sung in both cafeterias and next week we'll sing at the conference center. We're singing songs in English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Chinese. The Ukrainian is hard!! It's "Carol of the bells." Look at this video, not only to hear the song, but because the video is quite... entertaining. Luckily we all already know the tune because forget about the words. Most of the time I sort of fudge it. And I know I'm not the only one. Still sounds good though.

I'm trying out all sorts of different pieces with my voice teacher. She gave me a copy of "Ombra mai fu" in a higher key and we're working on that. We're also working on something called "The Green Dog," a very silly one, and a song cycle called, "I Hate Music." Not sure how I feel about that one yet. I think I prefer the older stuff.

In Mars news, Hurricane has been released. It's extremely controversial because it contains many scenes of sex and violence. And as I suspected, our marching scene didn't make it into the short version. Remember I said that we marched up stairs out of a sort of tunnel? I caught a screen shot of what they did end up using:

Just a few more seconds and you would see me. Of course, because of the content of the rest of the video it's not like I'd go around announcing, "Hey! Look at this video! I'm in it! No, not that scene. No, that's not me. Uh, no, not there..." If you do watch the video, let me warn you right now that it's not safe for work, kids, relatives or anyone else whom you wouldn't want to catch you watching it.

In other Mars news, I decided that I wanted to avoid waiting in the freezing cold all afternoon on the day of the concert in order to secure a spot up front, so I went ahead and purchased a "Golden Ticket," which is a VIP pass that includes a poster, a t-shirt, early entry to the venue and OH YEAH! A MEET AND GREET WITH THE BAND. And I will, of course, report that experience in full detail afterwards.