The Reluctant Receptionist

every year i seem to write a post about audition season and how heinous it is. it’s not just me writing these posts, either: it’s all my singer friends who have blogs. and those who don’t have blogs send me emails about it. and those that don’t have email send me smoke signals. and those that don’t have smoke signals are too poor and i pretend i don’t know them. but seriously, folks, audition season fucking sucks more than…what does it suck more than? i can’t say hurricane katrina (too soon?) or 9/11 (too soon?), because obviously audition season can’t compare with national, world politics-changing disasters. hmm. audition season sucks worse than having your wallet stolen. it sucks worse than having the laundromat turn all your clothes pink (although i did that myself perfectly fine a few weeks ago) or accidentally giving all of your clothes away to a stranger and then giving you her 44 DDD bras in return. audition season sucks.

it’s not really audition season that sucks. the auditions are the part about the whole ordeal that’s not so bad. if we take the advice of all our coaches and teachers, we should treat auditions as “performance opportunities.” i’m still working on that; i’m hoping that maybe it’ll stop me from shaking in my boots/fucking up as much. i should probably just get some beta blockers, though, so i can truly enjoy the “performance opportunities.” what sucks is getting the audition. it’s the forms and deadlines and 8×10 black and white glossies and 8×10 color mattes and resumes and do-not-refer-to-resumes and three signed sealed recommendation letters that will never actually be read.

this morning in the shower, at exactly 8:05 a.m., i remembered that the application was due for the des moines young artist program today. i got waitlisted at d.m. last season, so i kind of wanted to sing for them again. you know, hedging my bets. plus the application was cheap, comparatively: $20, as opposed to the $75 i’m not paying to not sing for music academy of the west. i had everything i needed, miraculously, except for one very important thing: the recommendation letter. of course i didn’t have ira write one—why on earth would i have thought that far ahead?—but i had one he wrote last year. and the application specifies it has to be written within the last two years. where is it? no idea. like, seriously no idea. i thought i knew and then it wasn’t there. so i tore our apartment apart, to no avail, cursing my procrastination and disorganization.

i got to work and texted phong, who, of course, knew exactly where it was. in a place i never even considered looking: in a bag in our bedroom closet. the bottom of the bedroom closet. of course! why didn’t i think of that?

and so there will be no des moines for me this year. the stars aligned and decided that i would be at this desk today, instead of calling phong from home, finding out where the rec was, and leisurely getting it to the post office. you win some, you lose some in this world of young singerdom. and this audition i lost.

putting my money where my mouth is. our performance from durham. george is on the left. i’m the hot faceless guy singing.

are you going to be in baltimore or washington, d.c. tomorrow night? are you hankering to hear some pretty cool new music and a band in a cool art space? do you want to see me naked? if so, you should definitely go here. i can help you with everything except the naked part (that’s later as a special thank-you for coming). i just sent george an email (jokingly…sort of) saying “how dare citypaper leave bonnie and i out of the article!” i’m not even a “local performer.” i’m coming down from the big apple (i wanna do the b-a buenos aries big apple) to sing this show.

that’s right. it’s tomorrow night. HBX, the show that george and i conceptualized over lunch, is now getting its baltimore and durham premieres. and i have to admit—and you know that i never say this—i’m feeling pretty good about where i stand with the music and i’m really excited to go down and get this piece out there. added to that excitement is the fact that i’m going to get to see my baltimore friends, and that phong is coming down from his parents’ house outside philadelphia to see the show. it’s been better for me already knowing that he’s safely back in the united states (as of yesterday afternoon), but i’m pretty much itching to see him. like i got an itch that only phong can scratch. (literally. it’s toward the back of my right thigh and i only feel comfortable with him touching me there.) missing him this last week and a half has kind of made me wonder how i’m going to handle being away in princeton for seven weeks this summer, but i actually don’t think that it’s going to be that long that i have to go without seeing him. i get at least one day off a week, he’ll probably come up some weekends, and it’s only like an hour and ten minute train ride.

so i probably won’t be posting tomorrow because i’ll be rehearsing with george at the art space (and hopefully eating at the pizza place across the street that i’ve been DYING to go to, and going to donna’s for coffee, and then somewhere good for dinner, and then somewhere good for breakfast saturday…it’s my baltimore food tour apparently!). kel has graciously offered to let us have his bed (hopefully with him in it…zing!). so look out, baltimore. i’m comin’ for ya. and i’m bringing dolly with me.

i’m having a bit of a conundrum when it comes to heartbreak express (heretofore to be referred to as HBX). it’s not that i don’t know it well enough—i do, and, incredibly, i’m not hunting around for notes and sliding up and down a scale trying to match pitch. which made me think during last night’s practice that george has possibly, purposefully made this easier to learn melodically than other things he’s written for me. and i hope that’s not the case because i certainly don’t want something dumbed down for me. then again, i love that i was actually able to learn this in three weeks. so dumb away!

anyway, on to my conundrum. i find—and this has always been the case—that i have to choose between really great vocal production (or as close to really great as i ever get) and “acting.” when it’s the former, i find myself singing completely blank-eyed and floorward. there’s something about looking toward the floor, it seems, that makes that whole creating-the-right-shape-in-my-throat-and-neck-and-mouth thing easier. when i start to “act,” the first step of which is trying to keep my eyes generally at the horizon, which, since i let myself get in a really bad habit, has started to feel like looking up, all kinds of weird things happen. it feels different to sing that way; my breath feels a little less connected; the pingy, resonant sound that i’ve worked so hard with ira to achieve isn’t as easy to get.

i probably should’ve thought about this before three days before the debut. in a way, i’m proud of myself for the way i’ve worked on HBX this week, for the focused, intensive practicing of it i’ve been doing. i actually went through my score and marked action verbs and adjectives to remind myself what my character is doing and when. i want to be like madeline kahn, who, as reported by michael, had written into her score every single quirk and slight of the wrist, down to the beat. i want to have a plan for the way that i’m going to pull this off, rather than doing what i’ve always done and getting out there and assuming i can just wing it.

but for all that to happen, i have to get myself into the text. if i can get myself into the text, line by line, instead of singing a string of really pretty consonants and vowels that mean absolutely nothing, then i can get myself into the character. but as soon as that happens, i stop thinking enough about production and the sound suffers. so this rehearsal this week has me looking toward the future a little, i guess. this is something to work on, i mean. i’m going to sing the premieres on friday and saturday, eating up the text and character and hopefully giving the audience something they’ll remember, and i’ll try to get my singing as best in line as possible. will anyone besides me ever really hear the difference? no, but i’m a perfectionist. that’s why i’m a singer.

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.

as of two hours ago, phong is officially on his way to nippon. “where in japan is nippon?” i asked phong—in front of people—last week. “um, nippon means japan in japanese,” he said. what? i suddenly speak japanese all of a sudden? so i couldn’t find iran on a map and i thought that japan was the size of texas. i’m amurrican. anyway, phong’s off to japan for twelve days starting today. i haven’t been away from him for that long since he moved to nyc, and i’m not exactly relishing the idea of him being gone so long. i mean, not to get all schmoopy, but i miss him when he’s not around. and what the hell am i going to do while he’s gone? it’s bad enough when he’s on call—literally twelve hours after he leaves the house our apartment looks like a tornado hit it (too soon?) and i have to spend upwards of twenty minutes putting away clothes, doing dishes, moving bodies into the hallway.

at least i’m kind of busy while he’s gone. tonight i have another of scott and tim’s cabarets (hopefully this time i’ll sing more than 5 correct words. let’s go 7!); tomorrow night church choir; thursday night i have to pick up HBX again. friday and saturday are unaccounted for, but then i have church sunday morning and my usual sunday things (you know, tina binge; the usual), then we’re already into next week. i leave a week from thursday for our east-coast tour, at which time i have to have we two boys down colder than cold and be able to sing hbx while twirling fire batons and wearing a dolly parton wig. ok, so there are no batons or dolly wig, but that’s seriously how well i need to know it. i do not want any reason to screw this up. it’s not every day you get an opera written for you—much less an opera about a gay dolly parton superfan.

and so i’m going to leave work in a little over an hour, stuff a sandwich into my face, put on my tight t-shirt (this cabaret is at the duplex, after all), and go try to be a musical theater star again. my voice isn’t really cooperating today, and that’s quite possibly due to nerves. why does singing in front of strangers and friends at scott’s cabaret make me so goddamned nervous? when i wasn’t even this nervous during B&B? good question. but i’m thinking it’s probably the uppers.

first off, a little music news. for the second time in a row, trent reznor has surprised all of us with a new, downloadable album. following up his two-cd, four-chapter ghosts: I-IV instrumental cd, he today released the slip. say what you will about NIN. the fact that a major artist not only released an album as a surprise, but released it digitally and (this time) completely for free—and not a shitty, watered-down version, but with high-quality files that are completely tagged with lyrics and album art—is mind-blowing. that it’s the most adventurous, interesting work that he’s made in ten years, that he keeps pushing the envelope and what it means to “be” nine inch nails and that it still makes me, an extremely cynical, aging pop music addict, excited to hear it is just icing on the cake. so go to nin.com and get the slip. then put on your high-quality headphones (or your boyfriend’s, since you don’t have any) and rock out like it’s 1996.

in other crazy music news, we open beatrice et benedict on thursday. crazy because this has been a major whirlwind. yes, we’ve been working on it for a couple of months, but it’s only the last week that we’ve been going really hard-core. rehearsals have become a little intense, as we all buckle down and try to really pull this together into an impressive show (or, if you prefer, a beautiful, nicely-wrapped, sweet-smelling show. not a stinky product.), and as we’re confronted with the places in the script and the score where our memory or our blocking is shaky. i know that i’ve had a hell of a time trying to memorize the final chorus (which just seems to go ON AND ON AND ON), but that could just be because my attention has been so drawn to the next thing i’m doing, george’s heartbreak express.

phong is playing in the pit for B&B; i’m dorkily excited to have him there, as we’ve never done a gig before, unless you count his friend’s wedding, at which we played a string trio (me on a 3/4 size student cello, as if my poor playing skills weren’t enough of a hindrance). we have the sitzprobe tonight, and i can’t wait to look over from my place with the singers to see him in the violin section, sawing away. my only hope is that people actually come to this performance. i’m a pretty typical new yorker, in that if you told me i had to go to newark for an opera i’d probably stifle a laugh. but please, if you’re in the new york area, come see the show. it’s at the newark public library (take nj transit to broad street/newark) this thursday at 6 or saturday at 3. you won’t be disappointed.

dolly parton’s concert last night was just terrible. such an incredible disappointment that i don’t even know where to begin. oh my god obviously i’m kidding. the word i’ve been using to describe her live performance last night has been “spectacular.” also, obviously, “powerhouse,” “juggernaut,” and “transcendent.” wonderful doesn’t quite seem emphatic enough, you see.

the marquee outside radio city music hall (see the picture i posted to facebook) read “an evening with dolly parton,” and that’s exactly what it was. there wasn’t any fucking around with opening acts (god, i was so worried that we’d have to sit through some glossy nashville start-up, biting our nails and waiting for dolly)—she came onstage at 8:07, blaming us for the delay since it was raining and we couldn’t be seated on time. from then on, it was hit after hit, mixed with extended stage banter, dirty jokes, stories from her childhood. in other words, everything you love about dolly parton. she sang “here you come again,” “9 to 5,” “coat of many colors,” “jolene,” “island in the stream,” i won’t bore you with the entire list, but suffice to say that it was every song you could imagine wanting to hear from every stage in her career (except, interestingly, her snoozefest early-mid-90s). to top it all off, she was in incredible voice, clear as a bell.

so robin and i had a wild time. we called our mom at intermission (yes, there was an intermission: this evening with dolly parton was a full two hours of stage time) because we so wished that she was there. it’s because of her that we were raised loving dolly so much, and if there’s one person on the planet that i knew would’ve enjoyed it as much as we did, it was her. she reminded me of the story of when she was pregnant with my sister and feeling her lowest. she felt like shit physically, felt fat, ugly. she dreamed that she and dolly were hanging out, and dolly patted her stomach and said, in her way, “i like that.” from that moment on, our mother says, she felt better about herself during the pregnancy. so you see? we’re practically dolly fans from the womb.

afterward, we agreed that we had some post-performance sadness. we’d built up this show so much since before christmas, and now it was over. and holy shit it didn’t disappoint.

in seven hours (which, i’m sure, will end up being the longest seven hours of my life, if you don’t count the seven hours a day i sit here at this desk, maniacally hitting refresh on the facebook homepage), robin and i will be watching dolly parton take the stage at radio city music hall. it has been a long wait, my friends—we got these tickets before christmas, her first concert being canceled due to back problems (shut up, this is a very serious issue). robin’s coming up from philadelphia for the night just for this event; i’m missing B&B rehearsal during production week. can you tell that seeing dolly is kind of a big deal for us? i’ve talked about this before, of course.

we were raised on dolly, sat down by our mothers with 9 to 5 the way that some kids are sat down with elmo (or, in our day, oscar the grouch). dolly parton is kind of like the zany aunt we’ve never met; our family has a familiarity with her unlike any other star. it’s for this reason, really, that i understand how the people in for the love of dolly (and, subsequently, heartbreak express) go so off the deep end with her. i’ll never make a dolly parton doll or rebuild my backyard to look like her tennessee mountain home or dress up in fairy wings and cry when she doesn’t notice me during a parade (or dress up like her and hang myself, if you’re to read george lam/john clum’s version), but i understand what it is about her that makes those people feel like she’s such a part of their lives.

and so this spring has become very dolly-centric. unlike madonna’s current PR blitz (in case you’re deaf/blind/buried alive, she gave a concert at roseland ballroom in new york last night and has already released the footage. the big news of the show? she actually sang live over backing tracks instead of lip synching. this is why we should congratulate her?), dolly’s come to the front of my consciousness due to no fault but my own. spending my time working on this dolly opera, picking it apart and discussing it with george and figuring out how i’m going to create a character that’s believable and carry this entire goddamned thing by myself. and now seeing her live for the first time since we were children, when we sat in the nosebleed section at oklahoma city’s civic center. just remember: “if i have one more facelift, i’m going to have a beard.” how could you not love her?

i’ve been walking across the park every morning because, frankly, it takes barely any more time than standing around waiting for the bus, missing the bus because it’s too full, waiting for the next bus, then standing around on that bus, crowded in like sardines, waiting for the people standing halfway back on the bus even though the entire rear end is empty to move back so that we can squeeze even more people on the bus and cross the goddamned park already. ahem, sorry, i’ve collected myself. long story short i’ve been spending the first half of my commute every morning walking across central park listening to music. there are obviously worse ways to commute (see above).

but this morning i couldn’t walk because it was shitstorming when i walked out the door. it is still, as i write this, shitstorming and it’s supposed to continue until tomorrow morning. i slogged across the park on the bus, then caught the C train, where i sat down and proceeded to work on the songs i’m singing for scott and tim’s cabaret the day after (the day after) B&B is done. i went to my rehearsal with them last week not knowing the songs at all, and scott had to teach them to me call-and-response britney spears style, and i vowed to be better at them by the time we met tonight. i’m singing two songs: one is a solo that’s a little david bowie/rufus wainwright-ish (because that is majorly my strong suit. just call me the thin white duke.); the other is a duet i’m singing with this other girl who’s vocally trained that they want sung in the style of, for lack of a better word, “classical” broadway. meaning, more operatic than i’ll sing the david bowie song.

listening to this (over and over) on the subway this morning, i got really excited to sing it. and i’m having another one of these moments that i’ve been having lately, thanks to george: getting to learn new music that my friends have written that i will get to perform. i mean, seriously. how cool is it to have friends who are not only creative, but good at what they do? and then to get to have a hand in that creation? it’s a pretty fucking great feeling.