At home on the stage

Hi friends,

I'm revisiting this blog in the 2nd of my 4 month stay in Nashville, TN, while I work with the fabulous Nashville Opera.

I'm writing this because, now finding myself away from home for the longest stretch of time in two years...  and I'm only half-way through...  I'm wrestling with the dreaded feeling of "home-sickness".

This is strange, because when I go "home", I actually go back to New York, which I have yet to really adopt as my real home.  But New York is where I have the most concentrated amount of friends and loved ones, where I know where to get the best (and cheapest) bagel and where the heck to get my boots resoled (or re-souled).  It's where my bicycle is and where I know bartenders at local watering holes (I was a bartender myself, so met many in the business...  I'm not just a bar frequenter!).  So I find it strange to really feel home-sick.

There's another really visceral reason why I think about this now, and that's because the students that I sing for 6 days a week (mostly between the ages of 4 and 11) keeps asking me if I get home sick!  Let me explain: I am a part of an "opera outreach" production with Nashville Opera, where 3 other singers, a pianist and I go into elementary schools and perform an operatic rendition of Little Red Riding Hood ("Little Red's Most Unusual Day" by John Davies).  It's a charming piece and my colleagues are talented and funny, so the students love it.  After the performances we often do Q&A sessions with the kids, and we get a myriad of questions...  Here are a smattering of typical questions, and some of my favorites:

"How do you sing so LOUD?!"

"Is it hard to play two characters?" (I play Granny and Little Red's Mom, with a quick costume change.)

"How did you get your underwear OVER you clothes?  I tried that, and it didn't work."  (Don't ask.)

And, inevitably, some insightful and/or sensitive kid always asks, "Do you miss your families when you're gone?"

And the answer is, yes.  My parents and 2/3rds of my brothers don't live in NYC, but I consider many of my friends in NYC to be family.  And perhaps New York is distracting enough that I'm never lonely.

I'm not yet a singer who is constantly on the road, so these are issues that I'm slowly starting to wrestle with, but I find that another answer I always give the kids tends to answer the loneliness question as well:

"What's your favorite part of being in opera?"  The answer I can give them... "You."

When you're on stage, there is a connection that you have with people, especially with children who are so easily entertained and are able to get wrapped up in our alternative reality with us for 40 minutes.  These kids believe our story as much as we have to while on stage.  And the hugs we get after the show, though they may carry germs, make this loneliness a little less pointed.

I started off this post wanting to write about how much the stage ends up feeling like home, but I realize that what I really want to say is that an audience can feel like your family... if only for 45 minutes.

Unless you scare them, because then they probably won't want to be your family AT ALL!  ;-)