The Reluctant Receptionist

i made it through both of my songs last night without any major lyrical fuck-ups, i’m proud to say (type). i’m sure that you can picture me in the moments before i went onstage to sing, pacing back and forth in the residential hallway behind the duplex that sometimes doubles as backstage. there i am, ignoring the glares of the people who live there, people who pay three thousand dollars for their apartment only to have poor musical theater singers running through their lines over and over and over in their dirty hallway. i was standing back there, literally going through both of my songs on a loop, trying to quickly come up with some sort of device—anything—to help me remember the order of these lyrics. all that i really needed, i have come to find out, was to make myself concentrate on what i was doing instead of thinking, “there’s caryn! oh shit, phong is sitting in the very first row. i wonder how much they charged to get in. there’s austin, sitting next to phong. i like his new haircut.” and then, having been “acting” the whole time—and subsequently thinking about my “acting”—i’m somewhere nineteen miles away from where i need to be to come up with my next line. and so the song goes, “there is laughter in the other room/as the bottles crash below/.../.../.../.../.../for you had a thing you can no longer find.” and i’m “acting” like it’s supposed to be like that.

but not last night, ladies and gentlemen. last night i took the stage and was thinking about my lyrics and thinking about what was next and thinking about “acting.” so that’s my big breakthrough from this cabaret: it actually helps you sing if you concentrate. huh. who would’ve thought?

now that i think about it, though, those have been my best auditions, too. the ones where i wasn’t thinking “what is my VOICE DOING?” but where i was focused on the production and—gasp—what character i was trying to portray. so maybe it was a bit of a breakthrough, after all.