She needs a paraffin soak with that.

I love getting pedicures, and Baby seems like she would be an excellent spa-mate. And then we'd go shopping and eat lunch while gabbing about our husbands.

Pushing through

I'm in a production this weekend of two short Menotti operas, "The Medium" and "Amelia goes to the Ball". In "The Medium," I play a grieving mother who comes to the titular character to communicate with her dead daughter. Baba, the Medium, is a fraud but convinces my character and two others in the first act seance that we are speaking with our dead children.

This opera is unrelenting in its grimness. I don't know what Menotti was feeling when he wrote it, but as he was born in Italy before the rise of fascism and has Baba speak of the horrors she's seen in Eastern Europe, namely torture, murder, disease, famine, I imagine that he was writing about the desperation produced by those who lived through witnessing such events and have to make a life for themselves afterwards.

Baba has a daughter and an orphan boy she is raising and uses the two of them to perpetuate her deceptions. There is a scene where Baba has flown into a rage after trying to get the orphan boy, Toby, to admit that he touched her throat during the Act 1 seance to frighten her. He can't speak, and won't admit to having done what he didn't do, and she whips him, screaming at him. It's into this cheerful little family pictorial that the three duped parents enter again. It's very hard to watch this scene, and, I imagine, even harder to do it, especially as both the woman playing Baba and the man playing Toby are the sweetest people imaginable. Every time Baba has to beat Toby and we then have to enter, interrupting the beating, I see the look in the singer who plays Baba's eyes. I can tell it's hard for her to carry on with the scene after having to put herself in this reprehensible place, that of beating a sweet-faced child, and yet she pushes through. She has an intensity that I've seen in very few people in my life. She's not afraid to go to a really ugly place to make the performance real, and it's absolutely hair-raising. She's been struggling a bit as the music is unimaginably hard, atonal in places, dissonant almost always, but I would take the drama over the right notes any day of the week. It's been an important experience for me. It's pushed me to go to a place in my performing that doesn't feel safe, and it's exhilarating. I hope that I get more opportunities to play a character where I'm not merely the comedic relief.

Actually, I think it's more Pinteresque.

Did the NY Times reviewer just use the phrase "verges on the Brechtian" in her review of the movie "Nacho Libre?" Yes, yes she did. That was unexpected. Now I want to see it. Of course, Jack Black makes me giggle and can sing soul like nobody else.

The perfect response for that irksome co-worker.

Not having children opens up ones personal life to many inappropriate and prying questions, mostly from utter strangers and unbelievably nosy co-workers. I have gleaned some excellent responses to impertinent questions about our childlessness from an excellent thread about this same subject on my favorite Disney forum:

Question: Are you going to have children?

Answers:

1. Alas! My womb is barren!
2. How do you make a baby? We haven't figured that out yet.
3. I was bathed in acid rain as a toddler, so I'm sterile.
4. Why? So I can share in your misery?
5. There are much better ways to contribute to humanity then simply by adding to it.
6. I like to visit elephants at the zoo, but don't want one in my living room.
7. Are you asking if I'm having sex with my husband?

And my personal favorite:

8. I do have a child! He's right h....oh my God! Where's the baby!

Picking up the slack.

As Christian and I are most likely going to die childless and Tina is busy diving and wrassling giraffes, Mark and Shannon have to have enough children to make up for our lack of ensuring that the human race continues past this generation. And a damn fine job they're doing. They've produced the only two children on earth who make me want to have my own.

So, imagine my glee when I found out that I may be sharing a birthday with a new Blewett baby! I make the parents promise to never give combined birthday/Christmas presents or I would report them to Child Welfare. That way, I'd get the kids. It's all part of a bigger plan.

I really want it to be a girl this time. Not that another boy would go amiss, as the first two turned out so well, but I could buy her things like this, and this, and this. Oh, and this. And especially this. And pretty much everything from here.

What, no "sweetie" or "sugar"?

Ah, to be called "honey" in a professional setting by someone, oh, excuse me, a SUPERVISOR, as I was so pointedly informed, who has been here SINCE 1988, as we were also informed, to whom I have never spoken and who is threatening to call security so she can rifle around in a faculty office to retrieve a patient chart, and this at the end of the work day when the owner of the office has gone home and thusly has not given permission to enter his or her personal space, and that the chart in question has no urgency attached to it, and could have easily waited until the next day to be retrieved, but, apparently, SHE HAS THE RIGHT TO DO SO.

I do so adore being spoken to as though I was a particularly simple-minded, nail-filing, gum-smacking, too-short-skirt-wearing, 1950's era "secretary" who answers the phone "Whadda want?" who had barely graduated from stenographic school. I especially relish it when the SUPERVISOR tells my boss that I denied the SUPERVISOR access to aforementioned faculty-empty office to retrieve the suddenly very popular chart that has to be found RIGHT NOW as work as we know it cannot proceed without it. I love the phrase "denied access". It sounds so forceful. Especially when what I said was, "The assistant who would know where those charts are is out of the office but will return tomorrow. Can I give her a message?" But my memory must be faulty. What I must have done is physically bar the office with my quivering body, ready to chain myself to the knob and hinges to prevent entrance. Sounds like me.

Just as annoying as any proud parent.

Do I have nothing better to do? Apparently not.

Fluffy

That's all.

Do you live in Washington State?

If yes, go here NOW. If no, do a search for unclaimed funds in your state. Both Christian and Shannon had unclaimed funds.

And can I just tell you how CLEAN my house is? It's a glorious, wonderful luxury.

It's the little things.

Until yesterday, we had utterly catastrophic water pressure in our shower. A tepid trickle, a sad stream, an insignificant issuance. However, my BRILLIANT husband, after seeing the variety of sediments filling our pipes when a blockage caused by basil stems (ahem) necessitated a call to the plumber, he decided to take apart the shower head and piping to see if similar detrius had accumulated therein. He opened the filter on the showerhead to find ROCKS, little pebbles, jangling about in the joint between the pipe and the head, trapped behind the filter. It was like a maraca. I could do a little Carmen Miranda number in the shower.

Anyway, aforementioned brilliant husband cleaned the shower head and OH MY GOD, I had a real shower for the first time in two years. TWO YEARS I TELL YOU! I swear it took ten minutes off my routine. I could rinse without doing a little dance when the pressure was too weak to get all the soap off and I think I actually got all the shampoo out of my hair. Conditioner, too. My hair is so shiny and manageable!

I feel so clean.

If we could just do all these things on one income.

As Blogger was down, I have many mental posts and, if I don't write them down, my head shall explode.

I received unadulterated and will-destroying Disney propaganda in the mail this week. Actually, I was OVERNIGHTED temptation, that's how important I am. I put in a request on the DVC website to be sent their "guaranteed to crush your pitiful resistance" book and DVD, describing in excrutiating detail all the benefits of joining the Happiest Borg on Earth. And what a lovely little package of soul destruction it is. Disney doesn't mess around with people who could possibly be convinced to spend, and yes, this is the right number, $15,000 to join their plot to incorporate every American into the Disney dream. The informational book is hard bound, glossy picture crack. I found myself stroking it lovingly and Christian laid on the floor while eating, reading and muttering words like, "Pretty" and "Oooooh" and "Wow" for about an hour. We then had to watch the DVD, with the requisite wanna-drop-her-off-a-cliff perky blonde popping from location to location in an escalating campaign of subjugation through travel lust. Of course I want to use my vacation points to travel all over the globe! Duh! I, too, could visit the Far East and throw in a trip to Tokyo Disney and Disney Sea while I'm at it. I mean, I can visit over 500 locations around the world, Disney and non-Disney while I'm at it! What's $15,000?? Well, it's everything if you don't have it. Oh, but they have financing! Financing vacations. Never a good way to secure fiscal solvency. But the book is sooooo pretty.

We're surrendering and hiring a housekeeper. In the two weeks that I've had off of singing, the last thing on earth I've wanted to do is clean. Yes, work at taking care of other's needs all day and then clean and cook and do laundry when I get home. It will be an unimaginable luxury to come home to a clean house. With the two of us working so much, it just isn't feasible to come home and vacuum, dust, mop, and our house is suffering. I usually clean on Saturday mornings, but I've been way too tired and, on my few days off, I want to knit or go to the movies or sleep or do anything but sweep under the bed. Now, if I weren't working a day job, I would relish cleaning. I actually really like making my house neat and pretty when I have time. But, when I don't, it can go hang because BookWorm is more important, dammit! I CANNOT wait to have someone else clean the baseboards of the kitchen. And the stove. They're going to have to have artillery to clean the stove as we can't use oven cleaner with the birds in the house. The heat and the drippings have probably combusted to create life hitherto unknown which will require small arms to destroy. But, I won't have to do it. Ha! I just have to make sure I'm not home when she's there or I'll walk after her with a duster and ask her if she really thinks the entertainment center is clean enough.

I think that's all for now. If I'm bleeding out my ears later, I'll know I've forgotten something.

Weighing time at the zoo, Part 2.

And then there were the snakes. Sigh. Wiggle. Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. Cling. Grip. Dangle. Flick, flick. And me, shouting, "Get in the damn bowl! Stop gripping me! Leggo!"
















I love this picture of Frederick's little wistful head.

Weighing time at the zoo, Part 1.

Please forgive the lack of posting the past few days. Blogger was experiencing some technical difficulties but promised to get back to me shortly!

We have taken to weighing the pets as a change as small as 5% in body weight can indicate health problems in animals at the bottom of the food chain. They have to maintain an appearance of health so they don't get eaten in the wild, and only show signs of illness when they're ready to croak, to pardon the pun. We had to purchase a gram scale as the birds are so dainty they don't even weigh an ounce. Fluffy bunnies. The frogs, too, are more accurately measure in grams.

First, the birds, on their handy little scale perch:



















We did, of course, weigh them separately and record the weights, but it was cuter to show them together. Note that they're so small, they weigh NOTHING! Actually, if anything is on the scale when it is turned on, it tares that weight. It'd better for $80.

Next were the frogs, and, as you can see, that was great fun.















There was much resistance and hopping away. Poor chubby trinkets. Squinky, of course, winkled on me.

Gwendolyn was easy and bewildered, and she can be weighed in ounces on the kitchen scale (which we, of course, don't weigh food on, Mom.):




















And, as I STILL can't get all of my pictures to post, see part two for their squirmynesses.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Vapor expands to fill whatever size space in which it is contained. When getting a raise, we increase our spending to match our income. Along these lines, I am convinced that my boobs expand to fill whichever bra I'm currently wearing.

Follow me here. When it's time for me to buy a new bra every three or so years, I've inevitably gained weight, as the march of time and my obsessive love of half and half crushes my sense of self worth and eliminates all urges to maintain any kind of pleasing figure. So, I go shopping, my shirts still fitting, only to find I've gone up a cup size or so. Now, my left boob is a size bigger than my right, and Stacy and Clinton say to fit your largest part, so I get a bra that fits the left boob. Well, now that I have a bigger bra that fits, my boobs, being the clever glands that they are, stop holding it in. They relax. They spread out. All of a sudden, my shirts don't fit. I cry when I see my reflection in mirrors and windows. Are they REALLY that big? At my costume fitting, I shriek, "Tighter! Tighter!" to the dresser lacing my bodice, "Flatten them out!" I watch as, while wearing the new bras made of slightly flimsier fabric, buttons pop and strain where there was no strain last week. Everything else still fits. There's just a gleam of nude nylon in the gaping buttonholes.

I have a plan, though. And no, it doesn't involve anything taxing. Sheesh. Have you met me? I'm going to start buying smaller bras. If the breasticles can expand, they can compress. I'll start marketing them as condensers. No minimizers for me, they aren't aggressive enough! They'll be reinforced with steel mesh, forming a perfect shape with my boobs. And they won't bounce! No bouncing boobies. I'll be able to walk down stairs without pain and without gaping passerby. People will stop telling me to get a reduction. It's my own plan of reduction. Reduction by force.

I think I'm on to something.

Because I bare my privates at your aunties.

I have a theory that there are really only two kinds of people in the world. There are those who like British comedy and those who don't.

Those who like British comedy also like:

1. Animation in general and all things Disney, in particular
2. Books and reading
3. The arts
4. Travel

They tend to be:

1. Whimsical
2. Smart
3. Socially aware
4. Nerdy

Those who don't like British comedy like:

1. Pro sports
2. Trucks
3. Movies like "The Fast and the Furious"
4. The U.S. of A.

They tend to be:

1. Very, very literal
2. Limited in their knowledge of world events
3. Traditional in values
4. Very religious

It's my acid test of people with whom I'd like to be friends. If I say, "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy," and the hearer doesn't laugh, they are forever spurned. That, and they have to like cheese. I have very limited requirements for potential friends.

Feeling sentimental.

Christian found this picture of Stanze preening Fritz from a few weeks before she died. She really loved him. If only we could have figured her out. Poor little pooper.

Do you hear that popping sound? It's my eardrums exploding.

I hate this woman. I hate her breast implants and her bad roots. I hate the fact that, while my fabulous singer friends who are talented and amazing slave in crappy jobs so they can take three gigs a year, she signs the largest record deal in the UK ever. EVER. That the record label, who also records some excellent legitimate artists and should know better, is marketing her as a classical singer makes my blood boil. Yes, she went to the RAM. So? This does not mean she has talent. Potential, maybe. But I've heard some Juilliard grads that would make every hair on your head jump out of its follicle and run from the room. Yes, she won some Welsh choirgirl competition 100 years ago. She, according to the BBC, is a prodigy. But a prodigy for what? Her accomplishment of becoming some Welsh soccer team's mascot? She has been praised for her performances of sacred and traditional music, and I can believe from listening to her that she would be an excellent chorister. But the voice is not well trained. She sings miked, she uses no support, her vibrato is thin and out of control, her technique abysmal. I am appalled that her marketing machine will mislead the public into thinking that this is what opera singers sound like.

I am always angered by successes such as this. They dig at my sense of fair play. Why should actual performing singers be told that classical recordings are a dying breed so they shouldn't bother trying to make them? Why is this label calling her an opera singer if opera doesn't sell? Oh, wait, real opera doesn't sell. Dolly Parton songs in Italian sell. Poor Dolly. The BBC called her an opera singer. How can she be an opera singer? Outside of school, she's NEVER BEEN IN AN OPERA. Take a look at this. A great classic success story? Hardly. This is not Carmen. This is Jessica Simpson singing the Habanera, if JS were Welsh and even more of a talentless hack than she already is. This girl was signed right out of school. She was signed for her looks and for her marketing potential. Ironically, I've seen better looking and more talented singers get passed over for roles every day. This girl couldn't carry a role in a performance if it were stuffed into her already overcrowded bra.

But the thing I hate about her the most? She is called a mezzo, and this is what the idiots who buy her album are going to think a mezzo sounds like. Fabulous.

Just get married already, or why I hate Whole Foods.

I had to get mushrooms and Italian sausage for dinner last night and tea tree oil for the vile thrush in my throat from my new asthma inhaler, so I thought I'll bag two birds and my soul with one stone and go to Whole Foods. Now, I'm not fond of WF. I feel that, whenever I walk in, I'm being judged as I don't do all my shopping there as it's outrageously expensive and I don't need all of my food to be packaged by nuns who only wear biodegradable habits and grow all of their own food using only the poop from their free-range chickens as fertilizer. I also am chubby, so I obviously am not an active person, and I don't wear clothing only to be found at REI. I don't drive a hybrid or a Volvo and I'm not a stay-at-home mom living in Ravenna with an activist attorney husband who takes her kids to Gymboree on Tuesdays and grows her own hemp in the backyard. I don't go to the Folklife festival or all the days of SIFF. I don't know the difference between a chardonnay and a Cote du Rhone. So, whenever I go in, I get looks from the skinny, wealthy, vegan, mountain climbing lawyers who ONLY shop at Whole Foods to keep their conscience clear.

So, last night, I got my few items and waited in line to check out. The girl in front of me took an age as she wanted to pay with credit and then get money back from her debit card, even though there was an ATM a foot behind her. So, of course, they let her, and I finally got to the checkstand. I had set my basket down on the floor in another basket, but I apparently put it in askew. The tall, thin, expensively-togged very pregnant woman behind me fixed the basket and then me with a contemptuous look and began unpacking her cart. Panty liners made from unbleached cotton, frozen fruit bars guaranteed kosher and organic, flushable and biodegradable diapers, fifteen kinds of strange root vegetables, unfiltered apple juice. Now, I noticed that she wasn't wearing a wedding ring, and there was no dent, which all ring-wearers get when not wearing the ring at that moment. While I don't believe everyone should be married (Kevin and Britney, hello?), what is it about the specific demographic that shops at WF and buys unbleached cotton panty liners that makes them disdainful of marriage? I CANNOT TELL YOU how many people I have met living in this very absurdly image-conscious city who have children and homes together but are not married, and all of them are just like the basket-straightener. To a one, they make statements to the effect of, "my commitment is between me and my "partner," not me and state", "I don't need a piece of paper to validate my relationship", etc, to which I say, yes it is, and yes you do. If you own property and have children together, that piece of paper means that you have a legal and binding contract to each other, that you value that person enough to state in front of the government and community that you hold to them. I have always found it so ironic that these people are so committed to the environment that they won't use plastic grocery bags, but they won't give their spouse the protection afforded under the law to have health insurance and equal property rights. I think it's especially ironic that these are the same people who look down on folks like me who are married and don't have children and buy processed cheese food.

I have always believed it's an easy out. Those who don't make the commitment legal do so because they want to be able to dissolve the union easily, by merely dividing the CD collection and make arrangements for alternate weekends with the kids. It's the entitlement, the lack of wanting to be involved in anything that would make them sacrifice anything of themselves. Houses can be quickly sold, children will grow up, move out and go to an expensive college about which the parents will endlessly brag. But a divorce is forever a brand that will taint their edginess with normalcy.

I'm absolutely going to get lambasted for being so intolerant of this very irritating and pretentious demographic because it makes me sound so horrifyingly conservative. It's really the only area of daily life about which I am fairly conservative (never politically, just socially). But it's my blog and I'll drink Tang and not Odwalla if I want to.

All the time in the world.

I was discussing with a co-worker a young singer who has an amazing voice and should be watched as I JUST KNOW her career is going to be epic. I was thinking about this singer as she's had what seems to be a pretty charmed life. Wealthy family, beauty, talent, the kind of life that makes for a very unhurried and unworried person who knows she has the time and means to pursue whatever she wants. Of course, she's also a very hard worker and has made her opportunities, but the conversation got me thinking about what I would do if I had the means and leisure to pursue any path I wanted.

Would I still sing? I don't think I would care nearly so much. Why would I have to if I didn't feel the desperate need to bring something valuable to my life? So much of my desire to sing has to do with a desperation to instill my existence with meaning, to not let my dumbass day job define me. I MUST have that flip side of my life that lends interest to my person.

However, if I had means to lead whatever kind of life I wanted, I think I would be more interested in the things that keep me at my job, i.e., the money to travel, to read, to knit, to cook, to keep my pets, to have a home that I love. These things drive me so much, they keep me working very long hours. I wonder if I would still want to have a singing career if the every day life I would lead if solvent could give me the kind of contentment having a goal does. But would it? Am I so shallow? Do I only sing because I want to be seen as interesting, cool? I know I love it, but is it a vanity fest? Is it that important that I tell people at work, when they ask what I'm doing over the weekend, that I have the opera so they don't think that THIS JOB is the only thing I have in my life? If I wasn't at work and there weren't any people to impress, would I still want to sing for its own sake, or am I just trying to not sound pathetic?

Of course, these are all ridiculous questions, as I'll always have to work, but can open, worms everywhere.

Props to my peeps.

Finally, the extremely deserving girls I know, love and sing with are getting their rewards for years of hard work and sacrifice. There are FOUR of us who have been cast in local productions over people who have been more favored in the past, and I am so proud of my friends. One such friend will be Beatrice at Tacoma in November and the other two I'll share once they say it's OK. They both got very exciting and fun roles, however, and will kick ass. Please give your time and money and support all of us and the opera community in general. I'll post details as the dates get nearer.