Hello, all. Sorry I’ve gone totally and completely off the radar. The first half of the season at work was wonderfully educational and fruitful, and yet so time consuming that it nearly sent me to the loony bin.
I’m back in New York City where it is so cold that I keep expecting a polar bear to push his way into the packed 4 train heading downtown to Union Square. Ok, maybe not, but at least some disgruntled penguins returning from work. It’s a solid 15-20 degrees warmer in Oregon, as my adorable roommate exclaimed over gchat today “It’s even SUNNY! Weee!” This angers me greatly. I am the decedent of tan island people. I wasn’t built for cold. I’m pale and my skin is dry.
Anyway, the two weeks before and after thanksgiving in the opera world, for the one reader I have that isn’t in the industry, is *drumroll* audition season. Almost every single American regional company packs up their artistic and/or general director, flies to the ice-cube-tray formally known as Manhattan and sets up camp in one of the many large rehearsal spaces, churches, or ballrooms throughout the city. I am incredibly and amazingly fortunate in that my parents (read: father) got sick of residing in “the country” (read: Northern New Jersey) and moved into an apartment on the East side. For audition season, I pack up audition clothes, sweats, a few party duds, and my laptop and turn in to a 17 year old again for six weeks. I’ll work for dad once the avalanche of auditions are done and stick some money into my pocket, or more accurately to my jet blue card.
With the influx of all of the opera companies, comes the inevitable arrival of every single budding opera singer with a dream and enough credit to buy them a plane ticket. Everyone with whom you ever went to school, summer program, or apprenticeship turns up with tiny wheelie suitcase in hand and is “gonna make it big.” I hear tales of singers who survived an entire season without ever setting foot in the big apple. 1. I don’t believe it. 2. They clearly did fewer auditions than the rest of us and 3. How LAME.
For the three years I lived in New York as a grad student and then as an unemployed opera singer pushing antique textiles to afford the posh abode far out of my price-range, my apartment would turn into a refugee camp. My roommate would pack up her stuff and stay with her boyfriend for a chunk of time and our living room would turn into a sea of air mattresses, coverlets, aria anthologies, and subway maps. I very happily gave couch or floor space to any and all who needed it as long as they didn’t get all clingy or high maintenance. I’m not your tour guide or mother, just your concierge. The doormen at said super-swank apartment must have thought I was running some sort of long term brothel by the different men (and women!) I would have stay with me for a week at a time, and to avoid harassment by the door Gestapo, would have to sign in.
My first audition is tomorrow. My personal goal is to look cute, be early, and sing well, all of which I am fully capable. Screw them if they’re not into it.
Look forward to far more blog posts in the future about my hilarious exploits around the big city. Funny shit happens here. This is gunna be fun, I can feel it. 
