Monday, July 2, 2012

What's my motivation?!


This has been a summer of challenges.  I desperately miss my friends who are at various music festivals this summer, living as full-time artists…full-time, non-starving artists.  At this time last year, I was on stage with Jeremy Irons and Helen Mirren.  This year, I’m alone in a studio apartment.  During these challenging periods, I am prone to wallowing and asking, what am I doing wrong?  When do I give up? Am I kidding myself?  However, I’m often neglecting the most important question: Why am I doing this?

In order to find the why, I have to go back to the when.  I have to think back to why I started singing in the first place, and why this is one of few things I’ve tried that I’ve never quit.  I can’t remember a time when music was not a part of my life.   Even in the womb, I was surrounded by music, as my mother was a choir teacher in North Carolina.  As a child in California, I vividly remember my mother brushing and braiding my hair before school while running warm-up exercises with her girls’ choir.  I always loved singing, and even when I wasn’t singing, I was infamous for my piercing, high-pitched squeals that suggested I was a true diva training.  I grew up singing in church, in choirs, community theater, and around the family upright piano.  I listened to my older brother’s beautiful tenor voice singing Pippin and tried to find my own soprano lilt and corner of the sky.   Even through high school, Jeff and I spent hours singing tirelessly around the house.  Why?  Because it felt good.   It was that simple.  We did it because we could and we did it wherever anyone would listen.  It was ice cream for the soul.  I never thought, “Ugh, I HAVE to sing today…” a phrase I’ve uttered more times than I care to admit over the past two months. 

I will never forget the first live musical I saw.  I can’t remember my exact age, probably around seven, but it was Big River at the Starlight Theater in San Diego.  The experience was transformative, despite the cast pausing for planes overhead and the fact that I got so excited I spilled my Kool-Aid Squeeze-It on a woman’s pantsuit, leading to yelling on her part and tears on mine.  I was hooked, though, and grew up adoring musical theater the way I can only imagine normal people grow up loving sports.

Almost ten years later, I saw my first opera.  I saw La Boheme the night before my junior prom, and it just as romantic as going to prom with my gorgeous high school crush.  I cried all the way through Puccini’s masterpiece, and this time, Squeeze-Its had nothing to do with it.  When I heard Musetta’s “Quando me’n vo” for the first time, I clearly remember saying, “I want to do that.”  I knew my friends wouldn’t understand.  I told them I saw Rent.  I almost forgot about that monumental Musetta moment but it came rushing back to me Wednesday night before musical improv class, when pianist Frank Spitznagel was playing the aria at the piano.  Sure, it’s not quite my ‘fach,’ so to speak, but I jumped in and blasted the Magnet Training Center with my own rendition.  Because no one in the room was terribly familiar with Boheme, I didn’t worry about singing the right words or paying attention to performance practices, I just embraced the opportunity to have my first opera jam in years, and even had a Marcello had in mind.   I can’t remember the last time I turned my judgmental brain off while singing, but I know will remember the newfound freedom I felt Wednesday night.

Freedom in performance was what brought me back to improv after so many years of admiring the art, but vowing to avoid participating in it.  My brother and I first started improvising when we were elementary school students attending Arts Between the Tracks theater day camp.  When we weren’t rehearsing for the big show, teachers Randy and Doug taught us improv games, and no game of capture the flag or arts and crafts activity could compare.  Jeff and I would come home from camp and study comedy like it was our job, and write and film sketches that, looking back, were both terrible and offensive!  Jeff and I lived the Kids and the Hall answering machine sketch before it was ever aired and still leave each other unusual messages after the “Eek.”  Somewhere in my life after Arts camp, I remembered I was a naturally introverted person, and lost any desire to improvise in front of an audience.  I still loved the art and went to shows constantly, but whenever performers asked if I would participate as an audience member, the fear of failure came over me and I forgot how to speak.  A ferocious shake of the head got them to move on to a more willing audience member.  It was the combination of improvisation and opera that brought back my desire to perform spontaneously and I am so grateful for the wonderful people and opportunities improv has brought into my life.  However, as opera has given me numerous struggles, I’m finding my confidence in improvising struggling as well.  My desire to hide in the audience is creeping in and I’m finding myself returning to the question, why?  Why am I nervous again?  Why can’t I just play like I did at Arts Between the Tracks?

I want to explore my motivation for all of my regular activities in my New York life. I know why I work; my monthly rent keeps that fresh in my brain.  However, I want to rediscover why I practice yoga.  There was a time when I did it because I loved it, not because I was afraid I would gain weight if I didn’t.  My operatic and yogi inspiration, Priti Gandhi, was the reason yoga became an art form for me, and I need more of her ohm in my home.  Even with the things that have ended, like friendships or relationships, I am looking back at why that person was brought into my life, not why they exited it.  I have enough factors contributing to a life of spinsterhood, I don’t need any extra bitterness contributing to it.

So, until the universe plops a timely fortune cookie or magic eight ball into my hand, I’ll have to continue asking my questions and searching for my own answers.  And each new lesson will be brought to me by the letter Y.


No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

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