The Reluctant Receptionist

i know that you’re all waiting with baited breath to hear how rehearsal went two nights ago, so i’ll get that out of the way first (just kidding, i know you’ve already forgotten, but i’ll tell you anyway): i could’ve really fallen on my ass, but i didn’t. i got through the whole nine-minute aria, only forgetting two lines, and only moderately fucked up the rest of the ensemble stuff. sure, at points i was looking directly at the conductor, mouthing “WORDS. TELL ME WORDS.” we got through the first two acts, though, which clocked in at under an hour. fuck, the way that elspeth has taken her big red pen and exacto knife to the score i think the whole show is going to make it in about an hour and a half. and you know what i say? more people who stage operas need red pens and exact knives. i’ve said many times that i could get through most operas in about 30 minutes and not leave out any of the important stuff, and i stick by that claim. you give me an opera, i’ll ruin it make it go faster.

now, of course, we have to do it all again tonight, as we try to stage the rest of the parts of the show that i’m involved in and do it off-book. why am i blogging instead of studying my score (or the aria i’m supposed to sing for natchez on tuesday)? shh, go to sleep. that’s right.

while things are looking up musically (insomuch as i think that cendrillon is going to be good, and i got an audition for santa fe yesterday, not that i have any delusions that i’ll actually land it), things are anything but looking up financially. i cashed my temp paycheck yesterday, and magically paid october’s bills. i’ll cash my temp check next wednesday, which will cover insurance (COBRA is a BITCHY BITCHY boyfriend and i hate him because he hits me sometimes). where is october rent coming from? since, you know, it’s like october 9th? shh, go to sleep.

seriously, though, things are getting a little scary. the job i’m on ends tomorrow, and i’ve called both my temp agencies and there’s nothing doing in the way of temp work. as i’ve said, i’m the only singer i know who is actually getting any work at all, and i was actually damned lucky to get these two weeks. so, ideas, anyone? i have some craigslist ads out there (no, not THAT kind, pervert) so we’ll see what comes of those.

otherwise, it’s just time to make a sandwich sign and parade around midtown.

it seems as though i almost always forget what it’s actually like to try to learn an opera role. all of the hours of study and head-beating and looking like a crazy person, speaking french to yourself on the new york subway, are like the investment we make to get to go on stage. i know that sounds hokey, but i can’t think of another way to put it.

when i agreed to sing pandolfe this fall, i didn’t really know what i was getting into. i can say that now that i pretty much know the role and it’s too late for elspeth to replace me. when i saw cendrillon at peabody, it seemed like pandolfe was something of a nothing role, a minor character. i have no idea if i was paying so much attention to the soprano or not enough to the baritone or what, but i was dead wrong. pandolfe is a bear of a role, singing an aria, two big duets, and a formidable amount of ensemble stuff. (even more ensemble stuff in our production, since we’re doing it sans chorus. that means “without chorus” in french. GOD i am good at this stuff. i got off easy, though: my family has to double-duty as backup fairies, complete with clinique counter white labcoats and big white sunglasses, so i hear.) this is hands-down the biggest role i’ve sung since macheath during my peabody days, and definitely the biggest role i’ve ever had to prepare on my own.

i know that a responsible singer would’ve brought the role to a coach. i know that i should’ve called nobuko and worked out all my elisions and had her tell me how people always sing certain things. but i just don’t have that kind of money. i haven’t even coached an aria that i’m singing for natchez on tuesday (yes, this coming tuesday. yaaaaaaaaaaaay, audition season!) because i’ve been so broke that i wasn’t sure how i was going to pay rent. (every time i think that, i think the m.i.a. lyrics “i’m broke this month/couldn’t pay rent/had to jump town/and the money’s all spent.” i won’t be jumping town, though.) and when you’re not sure you can pay rent or insurance, coachings and lessons go out the window. luckily, our conductor is really patient and has helped a ton. it’s not like he had to teach me notes and rhythms—i still got that—so i’m not too terribly ashamed. i’m sure that ira, my voice teacher, thinks i’m a total deadbeat since i’ve been to a grand total of one voice lesson since getting back from ONJ. please don’t dump me, ira, i need thou. do you see how theatrical i can get when i need to?

so anyway, we’re in the throws of memorizing cendrillon. tonight we’re off book for all of act one and two, so it’s time to get pushed out of the nest. i imagine a lot of fake french happening. maybe i should wear a beret and have a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. a stripey shirt? i need to be believable, here.

something i didn’t know—something, obviously, no one could have known—when i made the extremely well-thought-out and widely-discussed decision to leave my day job at columbia is that, the week after i went to my old temp agency looking for easy, short desk jobs, the bottom would fall out of the economy. it’s so strange to think that i of all people could be affected by a crashing stock market. i mean, sure, i have some investments, but those were all made for me by my parents and grandparents a long time ago. the only reason i know what i have at all is that a few years ago when i finally started having to do (and pay) my own taxes, i was introduced, over the phone, to my financial adviser, a man whose office is back in ponca city and has handled “my money” since before i had a checking account.

this is real, though, this slump: i worked five days last week and am contracted to work five days this week, but the woman i’ve been filling in for comes back to her job a week from today and i’m once again floating around in tempville. ideally, my agency will be able to place me somewhere else immediately, even if it’s just a for a few days. there’s always hope, although that hope is tempered by the fact that everyone i know who’s temping (meaning, really, every singer i know who doesn’t have a big-time real day job) is out of work. i’m the only one of us with any kind of temp job, and they keep saying things like, “what? you have work? i haven’t worked for three weeks!”

i can’t—none of us can—afford to not work for three weeks. it’s not like i’m going to starve to death or be evicted, but i’m also a lot closer to that line than i like being. i knew that it wasn’t going to be easy, this jumping ship and trying to make it as a singer thing, but i always thought it would be hard on the part of me that’s a wienie, specifically the part that says, i have to practice now!? but i just spent EIGHT HOURS AT A DESK! not the part of me that has to pay rent and bills and can only dream of buying a new winter coat. (i’m not getting all little match girl, so don’t worry. i have a coat. it’s nice. but i am an urban homosexual and i want a NEW ONE.)

so let’s hope we can all pull through this. we will. go buy something.

-[if !IE]>->

i’ve been avoiding politics on television for over a month now, having reached my complete saturation level around that time. after a while, all of the politicking and chatter just started to seem so pointless: it’s just a bunch of talking points that both candidates are spouting to try to get elected. i can’t fault them for it; it’s their job. all of this talk will boil down to a worthless pile of syrupy nothing once one of them gets elected, anyway. both candidates have to pander to their base to a certain extent. but that doesn’t mean i have to fill my head with it.

beyond that, it just makes me worry. i know who i’m voting for (ron paul 2008!) and i have since before he got the official nod from his party. as i’ve always said, i goddamned had to vote for john kerry in 2004, so whether i was voting for Hillary (my primary choice) or Barack (no schlep of a second choice) was irrelevant. at least i had a good candidate to choose this time. but since my mind has been made up for so long, i don’t need to hear all of the idiosyncrasies of the road to the white house, all of the he-said/he-said’s and 10-second CNN soundbites. i don’t follow the polls day to day. i just hope beyond hope that america doesn’t vote a rich, old, racist homophobe puppet and his vapid, pandering choice of a running mate into office. if he does, all my friends joke that we’ll all have to expatriate. but, as i’ve said on this blog before, i refuse to leave my country just so that i can have the same rights as everyone else. plus, as i told elspeth yesterday, i can’t afford to live in the united states, much less canada. and it’s so damned cold.

when i got home last night, though, phong was watching the VP debate and i didn’t want to make him change the channel so i sat there watching it with him. we were all hoping that palin would fall on her ass, that america would see what a blundering fool she really is. what actually happened, though, is that she did an incredible impression of fucking george w. bush, her aw-shucks demeanor and rapid-fire tongue wagging (completely content-free as it may have been) mesmerizing the legions of midwesterners and southerners and white people afraid of a black person and fat housewives who have never registered to vote before they had the chance to vote “one of themselves” into office.

george w. bush pulled the wool over all of these fools’ eyes in 2000 and 2004, somehow convincing them that he was just like them, dumbing down his speech, assuring them all that he was a good ol’ boy. my greatest fear is that people who don’t pay attention, people who are so easily bought, will vote for mccain because they want to see a twit like palin in office. because she is “one of them.”

you know what? i don’t want somebody like me in office. i want somebody smarter than me in office. i want someone to lead this country who actually has experience and a clear idea of what their policy will be. if i led the country, god only knows what would happen. but, as usual, i’m preaching to the choir here. i just don’t know what else to do.

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.

i made the mistake this morning of reading my friend ellen’s blog. i say that it was a mistake not because it’s a bad read—absolutely the opposite, in fact, because reading her blog is like siting down and talking to her: it’s self-aware and self-deprecating and funny—but because it made me miss her and my summer friends just terribly. i’ve said many times that there were a few people i met this summer that i wish i could’ve just brought back to new york with me, plopped them right down amongst the group of friends i have here because i knew they’d get along, and watch what happened.

reading back through the posts she wrote this summer (i’d never read her blog before because, as i said when i first came back, i totally couldn’t be bothered with blogs of any sort while i was away) was like reliving all of the ridiculous things that we all went through, the trial-by-fire that was spending seven weeks singing a billion shows and living and eating with the same group of singers. most of all, i keep thinking about what it felt like to not have to have a day job, how freeing it was to be doing what i wanted to be doing. i keep thinking about how this summer, even when we were working our hardest, felt like playing for seven weeks. it’s not that i wanted to go on to another young artist program when onj wrapped—i was dying to come home, and another week spent away from phong might have meant an amityville horror-style mass murder (after which i would, obviously, drive to brooklyn, change my clothes, shoot up some heroin, and pretend like i hadn’t done anything).

i just wish that there was a way to make a living doing what i want to be doing (you know, um, singing or something like it). because when that’s all i’m doing, no matter how hard i’m working or how exhausted i am, i’ve accomplished exactly what i set out to. it’s so strange the way that days drag when you’re in an office (specifically someone else’s office, at someone else’s computer), and i just find myself wondering how so many people spend a lifetime doing what i’m doing now. maybe if they’re not just doing this job to make a living they’re more invested, which makes the time fly by. i don’t know, though, because, try as i might, i can’t think of another career i could ever be happy doing. and i’ve thought about it, believe me.

i know what you’ll say. that there are ways to make it without temping; that i should be teaching or coaching or…i don’t know what else is out there. and i don’t have a good reason for why i’m not. so thanks for listening to me bitch a little bit.

the food situation around the office i work in is dismal. thousands and thousands of people work in the few blocks that i’m working, yet there isn’t a single affordable, edible thing to purchase. sure, i’ve seen people walking around with bags of chipotle (pronounced chih-poe-tul by my mother, who got extremely defensive when i corrected her and demanded that i tell her how i knew that my pronunciation was correct. i couldn’t tell her why i knew—i just knew—and so, like most arguments with my mother, she won) and as much as i love it, it’s expensive. and i’m already spending 8 hours a day sitting on my ass in this cubicle (pronounced cue-bye-klee) so the last thing i need is a 1500 calorie burrito, even if it’s filled with delicious homemade guacamole and greasy, wonderful beef and beans and cheese and spicy salsa i’ll be right back.

anyway, since the food situation around here is bleak, i bring my own lunch. that’s made just a little bleaker by the fact that there’s no microwave that i can find in this office. i assumed there’d be one in the “kitchen” my first day here, so i brought leftover pesto that phong had made, only to find that my option was to pretend that it was some kind of pasta salad. i have to play tricks on my mind like that. so i’ve taken to bringing the same lunch every day, a lunch that is shelf-stable, cheap as dirt (because, as much as i learned this summer and as wonderful as it was, i am now nearly broke. and the paychecks i’ve gotten, hereafter to be referred to as “paychecks,” weren’t even enough to cover my storage space rental, much less actual bills or rent or insurance.), and doesn’t have to be microwaved. i bring a ham sandwich with dijon mustard, a plastic baggie of chips (or, today, cheetos), and a quaker chewy granola bar.

as i was eating my lunch at my desk today, so that i can use my lunch hour to go to the gym, i realized something (specifically, while i was stuffing my face full of cheetos): the meal that i’d brought myself was the exact same meal that my mother packed me when i was in pre-school. i don’t mean, like, sort of the same. i mean,

ham sandwich
cheetos
quaker chewy granola bar.

the exact same. she’d pack it in a metal disney world themed lunchbox, which started to take on the smell of its contents after a while. i have a very vivid memory (tied to the memory of making art by blowing paint around a piece of paper and nearly passing out from blowing so much) of eating this exact lunch, but in preschool. if you switch wonder bread out for the whole wheat i brought today, it’d have been identical except for its packaging.

the more things change, the more they stay the same.

i’d completely forgotten how enthralling blogs are when you’re at the office. when i wasn’t working (like, ahem, the last three months) i could barely be bothered to even clear out my google reader, and the blog entries would pile up 900 or 1000 deep, until reader just told me that i had “1000+” unread blogs. this means that in any given week at the office, when i’m sitting here at a desk, i’m sifting through a thousand or more blog entries, everything from my friends’ updates (the only one of which who actually updates, i’m sad to say, is jessica) to techno blogs (which means i can keep up a conversation with near-strangers about the politics of apple computers for thirty minutes.) to gay news and opinion blogs. it’s no wonder i feel that by the time news has reached the television it’s soooooooo five minutes ago.

and so i’m back here in office-land for a second day in a row. as temp jobs go, this one really couldn’t be better. there’s stuff to do, so i stay a little busy, but none of it is hard or physically taxing. then again, none of it is sifting through excel spreadsheets or mindlessly filing. still, i got home at 5:30 last night completely exhausted, with just enough time to eat the dinner that phong made us (who’s the housewife now! i’ll see you in hell, billy, but i’m going to have some fun before i get there.) before i had to run out to cendrillon rehearsal in astoria. i can’t tell you how much better it is rehearsing in astoria than in hoboken (or, gasp, newark). not that hoboken isn’t lovely, but i don’t have to buy a separate train ticket for these rehearsals.

i tried not to fall on my ass too violently, but this was our first music rehearsal. this role is completely new to me (as in, i haven’t even sung it with a piano, much less had a coaching on it because i’ve been unemployed for three months and coaches don’t take payment in chocolate chip cookies, even the most delicious ones made with love), and i had to get up there and sing it in front of everyone with a conductor for the first time. did i completely fail? no. but it was sort of a personal crash and burn, as you musicians will understand. anyone else would’ve thought, “feh, that was fine,” but we can never live up to what we really wanted. so i left rehearsal vowing to practice even more (don’t ask me where that time is coming from, since i’m working again and am in rehearsal every night from now until curtain) and sing more spaciously and not be scared and not fall back on old habits, blah blah blah. singery bullshit.

the fall has me feeling all the things i usually feel in the fall. it has me nostalgic for college, for the security that we had at depauw. it’s made me nostalgic for dinner every night in the dining hall at longden, when everything was paid for, when the biggest thing i had to worry about was hiding my smoking from amanda (she honestly thought i’d quit, only to find me sitting on the back porch smoking a benson and hedges 100. why was i smoking a benson and hedges 100? i have no idea, honestly. nor do i know why i smoked for ten years.) and going to theory class at 8 o’clock in the morning. i look back on it and think, if i could add phong into that whole crazy time, it would be the best time in my life. at least, nowadays, we all still have each other to get through things like three months of unemployment and figuring out where the money for my insurance is coming from.

it’s hard for me not to over-romanticize college. sure, i had no real responsibilities, but i also went to a crazy, tiny, liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere and was one of three gay people. so i think about that, how it actually was, and it balances out my need for a make-your-own waffle from the dining hall.

wow, that was, like, the longest weekend i’ve ever taken. may 30th to september 25th. really? really. i’ve somehow woken up and am back at an office, albeit it’s an office where i have my own cubicle (actually, it’s someone else’s cubicle. someone named lesley who will be on vacation until mid-october and so i’m here doing her job.) instead of an office that i share with five other people while i’m not sucking up dust in the projects of new york city (and the bronx).

this summer and early fall has been an incredible whirlwind. i know that sounds so cliched, but i don’t know how else to put it. in the last three months i’ve quit my job, sung the summer festival at opera new jersey, been to wichita and provincetown, learned most of the role of pandolfe (i know, i know, singers. it’s not my voice type, i’ll never sing the role in real life, and it’s lucky as hell that it’s only with a piano accompaniment in a house that seats 150. but when your friends ask you to sing a part and you’ve got nothing else going on…), and spent the last three weeks fretting over my unemployment. somehow, i was completely unfazed for the whole of august. wes, in fact, decided that it should be called “funemployment” and that’s exactly how i treated it. i practiced a shit ton and played housewife, happily doing laundry and having dinner ready for phong when he got home. and i did it all in a silk nightie and furry slingbacks.

now, though, it’s fall. it’s time to start sending out young artist applications. i’ve already sent two, in fact, which means that i’ve somehow gotten my shit together. i’ve even made a recording to send along with applications, though i’m too poor to pay courtenay back for my half. which brings me to my next point: this summer was incredibly fun. i learned more than i ever could’ve hoped for, made new friends, spent time with friends i already had, and got to have days full of quality time with the man i love. (oops, yeah, i’m gay.) and, just as i expected, it basically broke me financially. so here i sit, a temp again. it’s not so bad, though. there are free coffee drinks in the break room, and it looks like i’ll have time to work on applications and memorize some music.

and, best of all, i’m back with you.