Resurfacing for Air

Well, it's been a whirlwind weekend (like I thought), but I managed to get almost enough sleep. It's already Wednesday, and I'm still having trouble getting out of bed in the morning. I think I'm addicted to coffee again. Stupid caffeine. I'm having tea today (English Breakfast) to start weaning myself off of the demon coffee bean.

Faire is over (yay!) which means that I'm now in CLEAN-UP mode (boo!). Ray is being really helpful, surprisingly. I think I finally explained to him how important it is for me to have a special set-aside place for my dad to stay. He's going to move the pinball machine he's fixing, guts and all, to the garage. But first Ray and Josh have to clear a space in the garage, because now they have all the leather from the faire in boxes everywhere. They're working on that while I'm doing cleanup in other areas of the house. Today is laundry day. Unfortunately, I still have to work this week, so I can't start anything until this afternoon. But things are getting done, and that's good. Ray's even renting a truck for the weekend so we can go to New York and take Amy's daybed that she's been trying to unload on us for a good five months.

Not A-Mused

I've done a lot of work with the Muse for a few years, and I have done my fair share of grunt work for her. I've borne the disorganization, the long drives, the low pay, and just the general thrown-together aspects of these gigs for one reason: I believed (and still believe) in the Muse's work.

But since I've moved to South Jersey, it's been harder and harder to ignore the long drives, made even longer by the fact that I live almost 100 miles further south and the subsequently lower (if you factor in time, gas, and tolls) pay. I actually would have turned this job down (and in retrospect, I should have), but I think the Muse was in a jam and needed me. And, frankly, I was flattered that she felt confident enough with me to put me in charge. To the Muse's credit, she saw this was becoming harder and harder for me, and offered to compensate me for my drive for this gig.

Apparently, this was very important to her business. We were going to sing for a lot of bigwigs, and she wasn't going to be there. So I was in charge of my group, and Pixie was in charge of his.
The day started off somewhat disastrously. I was putting on my makeup when I opened my makeup kit and realized that my fake eyelash glue had gone bad. This shouldn't have been a surprise to me, since I hadn't worn fake eyelashes since the Holiday Swing show in 1998, but I think part of me refused to believe that so much time has passed since then. Suffice to say, though, when I squeezed the glue bottle there was no way I was going to put what came out on my eye.

So I had to go to CVS to get some more eyelashes (I should have just worn mascara, but the Muse had specifically requested eyelashes), and of course I managed to show up when there was one guy working the entire store, and he was alternately running back and forth from the cash register to the photo machine. Consequently, I got on the road 20 minutes late, and had to sit through not one, not two, but three traffic jams.

When I finally got there, I had less than five minutes to put on my newly bought eyelashes, change into my costume (for which I had never been fitted) and get on stage. I believe I already mentioned about the 16-yr-olds in the group. Well, their mothers were there with video cameras, so excited to document their daughters' first venture into professional singing. Pixie had his hands full, with his own gaggle of high schoolers to contend with.

So I put my costume on, which was a Marine jacket with a navy blue skirt. The other girls were dressed in Army and Navy uniforms. All this is supposed to have a USO feel, like the Andrews Sisters. Unfortunately, the jacket was too big for me and there was nothing for me to wear underneath said jacket. I managed to safety pin it so that I wasn't flashing everyone in the room, but I still had a JLo-esque plunging neckline.

Pixie saw me and whistled. "Is this a part of Bush's back door draft? Sign me up!"

While I struggled to glue my eyelashes on, the girls and I practiced a few songs. They had practiced, which was good, but they still weren't performance ready. Oh well! No sooner had my left eyelash been cemented on, when we were ushered into the bar area to start singing.
The gig was only supposed to be an hour, but it was the longest hour of my life. We were stuck between two beverage stations with one microphone hooked up to a garage band amp. The microphone didn't really pick up all of our voices unless we were clustered up right against it, which I suppose was the idea, but it was very hard for all three of us to squish up there like that. On top of that, every time we tried to turn the volume up on the amp, we got hit with some horrible feedback.

The set started out well. We started out with our strongest song, and the three people milling around seemed to like it. The next song, however, was a complete bomb. And I don't mean "da bomb," I'm talking a weapon of mass destruction.

The first soprano, because she was nervous, got sharper and sharper. I tried to follow, but the second soprano, who had learned her notes so solidly she wasn't going to waver. That's an admirable trait, but she wasn't flexible or comfortable enough with her part that she was able to modulate up and follow the first soprano. The second reason this was a problem was that the part she had learned so well was a terrible harmony that had been on the Muse's CD and made no sense.

So here I am with a soprano who has modulated up at least a step and a half, another soprano that's singing a "harmony" that sounds more 12-tone than diatonic, and I'm trying my best to improvise a bass line that somehow will bring the two together. Needless to say, it didn't work, and we fell on our faces.

"I thought we were going to be accompanied by the CD!" hissed the second soprano. It was true; at our only rehearsal, Muse had promised a boom box with one of our CDs playing in the background. I had always been against the idea, because I thought it was tacky, but this girl had been counting on it, because that's how she'd learned her music. Either way there was no practical way of putting a boombox there because the power outlet was taken up by the amp. But Muse had not even left us a boombox anyway, so the complaint was kind of moot.

I took the song off our set list at that point and tried to move to something more simple. Luckily, the room started to fill up and the crowd noise drowned out the pitiful amplification we could come up with. Some people complained that they couldn't hear us, but it took all I had not to retort, "Be thankful you can't hear us."

To be fair, the sets got better the more we rehearsed...er, repeated the songs. By the end of the hour, the girls were quite confident and wanted to end with our best song, which is what we started with. I agreed, and I guess one of the girls got excited and stopped singing her line. Everyone tried to compensate, and instead of ending on a strong note, we sort of fizzled out. Almost everyone had gone into dinner, though, so nobody really noticed. The mom was still there with the video camera, however, smiling and waving. "Do you want a copy of the tape?" she asked me. What I wanted to say was, "No, lady, I want the master so I can destroy all evidence of this evening's existence." What I actually said was, "Oh, you don't have to bother with me."

I couldn't get out of my costume quick enough. Pixie and I went out for coffee and a bitching session. He had a similar problem, but at least he had a pianist to keep them on key (sort of).
When I gave Muse a full report the next day, I focused more on the good than the bad. I still love her enterprise and believe in the work that she does, but this was just too much for me. I told her so, and she understood. It was a very nice conversation, actually. So I wish her all the luck in the world, but I'm kind of glad to have moved on.

Blaaaaaahhh

I am so tired. I had a rehearsal in Yonkers last night with Muse's group, and it turns out that the other two girls are 16 years old! There's nothing wrong with high schoolers, except that they don't know quite as much, and their attention spans are fairly short. There's no way in hell we'll have the music memorized, which makes me feel better. I volunteered to bring my folding stand so that we could put one book of music in front for all of us to look at.

They're both smart, hard-working girls, which is a plus. One of them even plays the piano, which is even better. And they have good ears. But that stupid practice CD ended up being our detriment, because while I recognized that some of the harmonies being played on my practice CD were ridiculous and totally discounted them, the second soprano learned them really well. So we ended up having major problems...I couldn't find my note AT ALL, nor could I find any tonality. It was really frustrating. I told Muse I remembered the harmonies from when I did it back in the Girls' Chorus, and could we just do it that way? She was like, "I had no idea you knew what they were." I'm like, duh, everyone's done this (but I didn't say that). I just wrote out the parts while we were having dinner and handed it to the girl who plays the piano and told her to practice it.

Friday Pi-Day

I'm home right now waiting for the landscaping guy to come and give me an estimate on some work to be done to our yard. Basically, I didn't have enough time or energy to take care of the backyard and it is now a big huge jungle. I'm going to try to get him to completely remove the shrubs on one side of the house so I can start from scratch next spring.

Yesterday was okay. I had church rehearsal, which went okay, but I'll tell you, the altos are not doing nearly as well as they did last year. And V. doesn't really rehearse us properly. His idea of rehearsing is to run through a piece, and then it's rehearsed. Only the week that the piece is going to be performed does he stop and work on stuff, but by then everyone's already learned the mistakes, which makes it too late.

I'm doing this gig soon with the Muse in Westchester County. She sent me some music and a CD that she had put together, and when I got it in the mail and listened to the CD, I was kind of confused. First of all, the music on the CD was just the alto part out of an SSA harmony (which, if you didn't know, is not very melodious at all), and the music she sent me was, like most of the stuff she does, a piano/vocal score with only the melody written in. So I'm supposed to guess where my part fits in. I wrote to her and told her that this was a lot of work, because basically what I was doing to learn the music was transcribe my part into the music. Sheemailed me back and said that she never intended to make the music learning more work than we had originally talked about (what does that mean?). She insists that all I have to do is listen to the CD and memorize the words and I'll be fine. She also insists that my notes are in the accompaniment and I should find them just fine, but she's only about 80% correct. Dude, I don't WORK like that. Argh.

Naps

I got so much sleep yesterday. Not only did I sleep in AND get to bed early, I had a 3-hour nap in the middle of the day. I'm so glad, because I think I really needed it. Both Ray and Jill have colds, and if I'm going to avoid getting sick, I need as much rest as I can get.

Church is going fine. Actually V. is a lot mellower this year than he was last year. It's probably because the new section leaders are actually good. I have to say, I'm sure most of his frustration last year was the fact that we couldn't tune and the soprano and the tenor were bad readers. So it was a good thing that he cleaned house, in the long run. However, he wasn't very cool about it. He waited until the last possible minute (August) to tell the old people that they weren't coming back, and he had hired the new people in June. However, the new people are REALLY good. It's great to finally work with some good musicians again, you know?

Opening, etc.

Friday was our opening night, and it went really well. I went out and got candy for the whole cast and crew (since it's Halloween time it was pretty cheap) and cards and flowers for the SM & ASMs.

Since Faust is a good 3-1/2 hours, even with cuts, we didn't get done until 11:30. I had promised to go to the Renaissance Faire on Saturday, and I had the option of either leaving Friday night after the show from Philly (which is closer to faire) or leaving from home Saturday morning. Since I was also driving Jill over there, we both opted for plan B. This meant sleeping for 4-1/2 hours, getting up at 5:30 AM, and leaving at 6 for a two-hour drive to faire.

When we got there, Jill, who had slept in the car the whole way, went back to sleep, and I, who had already drunk two cups of coffee to stay awake, was wired and started opening up the shop where I spin (across the road from the leather shop). I stayed up and alert, giving spinning demonstrations and making sales for the whole day. There was a huge crowd, so I never really got a chance to rest. That evening, I went to dinner with Ray and the crew, and by the time we were done with dinner, it was 9 PM. I had been up for way too long, and my body was starting to shake with the need to sleep, so I figured it wasn't a good idea to drive home yet.

But I had to be at church the next morning, so I spent the night at faire, woke up on Sunday morning at 4:45 AM, and drove two hours back home. I got home at 7, just enough time to shower and change and go to church. Now remember, I have two church services, so I wasn't done until 12:30. But there was still no rest for me yet, because I had a matinee on Sunday, too, so I had to get to the theater by 1:30. I managed to get some lunch, luckily, so I had enough energy (just barely) to get through the show. I was done by 6 and home by 7. Once I got home, I showered (I had to get all that makeup and sweat off me) and had dinner, plopping myself in front of the TV to wait for Ray to get home from faire. I was asleep by 10.

I was supposed to go to work today, but I was so sleep deprived that I actually overslept and ended up calling out sick. It's Columbus Day anyway, and Ray has the day off too, so we're going to be vegetables together. I'm hoping to get at least three or four naps in today. :)

Goings-on

Everything at Faire is going well, although I haven't been there for a whole month, so I had to kind of get up to speed with all the gossip. Actually, strangely enough, there isn't nearly as much going on gossip-wise as there have been in the past few years. Or, at least, I'm not as closely connected with what's going on, so I'm out of the loop. Either way, that's fine.

Ray has to go out there three days during this week to work during kid's days, where schools bus their kids in to the Faire and let them run wild. It's almost not worth it to stay open, mainly because all the kids have to spend is maybe $5 each, but I think all the shops are REQUIRED to stay open, so it's Ray's job to go out there and make sure nobody steals anything.

My friend GW from high school just moved to Philadelphia, so I'm going to see him tomorrow, and he's coming to the final dress of Faust (everyone was given 2 tix to the final dress). He was in Taiwan for 2 years with his girlfriend. Anyway, they're back in the States now, and still together, which is good. But now he's trying to find a job, which is tough because he's like a super genius engineer and totally overqualified for any jobs that are available.

Rehearsals, Rehearsals

I've been getting so tired of the rehearsals these days. Wednesday's piano dress was more of the same bitchiness, and it was really stressful! I think what's really escalating the stress, actually is our chorus master, who gives us notes that are really random, I think because she can't think of anything to say. She also gives us directing notes which pisses me off!!!! Does EVERYBODY there think they're the director? By the way, later on during that rehearsal, the director gathered us together and told us we were doing a great job, so that was good.

Luckily I didn't have any problems with my costume, and the wig & makeup department is letting me do my own hair & makeup, so I don't have to wait in line down there. I went to the MAC store and found some good (if expensive) base, so I'm happy about that.

Yesterday's sitzprobe was a little more low key. Although cue-card girl was walking around with her full score, following along and pretending to be a big nerd about it. Then later she started trying to kiss my ass, saying, "I heard you live in New Jersey! Me too." I'm like, yeah, we both live in New Jersey. I guess that makes us best friends. Whatever.

We don't have another rehearsal until our dress on Monday. I've actually got a concert for the Philly Singers on Tuesday morning, so there's one rehearsal for that on Sunday night (weird time for a rehearsal!). But I'm not complaining because that means I get Friday and Saturday with NO rehearsals!!!!!!!!!!!! Yay!!!!!!!!!!! I'm actually going to go down to the Ren Faire with Ray for Saturday, at least, so that'll be nice.