“…and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” ~ Molly Bloom's Soliloquy, James Joyce

         So, although one of my resolutions for 2012 is to blog more often, I have been slightly MIA. This is perhaps because creativity doesn’t flourish in times of happiness. What does one have to say if one is not incensed about something or in a general state of thoughtful melancholy? In fact, I am often quite prolific in January because of the end of the holidays and the bleak New England winter ahead of me. This year is different and if you don’t know why, well then you probably haven’t been on Facebook or talked to my mother recently.

          On the day after Christmas, Brendan mentioned that I should pack a bag for the Cape for that coming Friday, December 30th. It was after dinner that night when he wordlessly turned on his right blinker and brought me to the top of Fort Hill in Eastham and overlooking the marsh and under the stars, he asked me to marry him. I said yes of course. I wasn’t that surprised— we don’t usually take off for the Cape in the middle of winter the night before we have people over for New Years’. But completely and utterly delighted? Yes. It was a day in August when he had first surprised me and said: “I want to show you this place,” and the image of the clouds casting fast moving shadows over Fort Hill has burned itself into our shared memory and we talk about it often. That he chose this place to ask me that question— well, it was great.[i]

          Also great, was calling friends and family that evening to share the news. My parents, amusingly, didn’t answer their phones for two hours, even though they had been made aware of the plan, because they were out seeing the new Mission Impossible movie... They obviously weren’t worried about what my answer would be. That’s when I heard the backstory about how Brendan’s mother and my mother met for lunch in Sturbridge Village to pass off the family diamond. They also apparently each came bearing a tray of Christmas cookies.

          When I called one of my best friends that night, she said: “Oh my God, your wedding is going to be so amazing… Oh my God, your mother is going to drive you so crazy planning it.”

          And my mother already had big plans for the weekend of the proposal. At their annual New Years’ Day “Open House” party, I was forced to hide my ring for two hours so they could announce the engagement. My 103 year old great aunt and family matriarch’s reaction to the news was pretty memorable. “He was supposed to ask me first,” she said. Her daughter told me that in actuality Aunt Mac had “been praying for it” for months. Her comedic timing has stayed well intact over the years.

          Hopefully, my sense of humor will stay intact in the coming months of wedding planning. I must remind myself that my mother’s sometimes zealous opinions not only emerge out of her years of experience in the wedding business, but also out of how excited she is to welcome Brendan to the family. I myself think that I have made a most excellent decision in saying yes. With my head in the clouds, I haven’t been writing much and I may not have responded to each of you for your well wishes. If you sent them, I want you to know that we appreciate every one. We are very much looking forward to our future together. And I’m sure I’ll have sufficient material for blogging for a good while now.
[i] As I said to Brendan while composing this: "Oh God, this is so cheesy— now that I'm done talking about the story itself, can I go back to writing jokes about my mother?"

Timber!

Last year, my mother and I had the brilliant idea of buying a Christmas tree earlier than usual so as to have my friends from Boston help decorate it while they were at our house for Thanksgiving weekend.  This is another of those somewhat rare arenas in which I can be very fussy.  My mom usually throws ornaments up willy-nilly in her hasty, take-charge fashion.  I, on the other hand, contemplate the traditional placement of ornaments in the past as well as the design aesthetics meticulously.  My dad prefers the finished product when I do the trimming and so I have been doing it since I was about twelve, or maybe even younger.  My parents used to work at the restaurant a lot around Christmas, so I got accustomed to doing it by myself.  My brother had very little interest.  Or more likely, since he was a smart boy, he probably knew to avoid collaborating with the “Christmas Nazi” as my family used to call me. 

Having my Boston friends help last Thanksgiving weekend worked out really well, since it usually takes me about three hours to finish it.  With my friends, we wrapped it up in about a half an hour.  Of course, one of them slipped a drink in my hand during the process, presumably in an effort to help calm me down. 

As an aside, I can tell you from experience that I am not as bad as my friend Rita’s father, John Dwan.  He willingly admits that you can find his name next to “anal retentive” in the dictionary.  One year, when I stopped by her house around Christmas, I was asked to help string the tree lights, because her father was on crutches at the time.  He ended up giving Rita’s little brother and me a small lecture about how stringing lights necessitates one person holding them in a neat “bouquet” and the other stringing them.  Too much slack from the bouquet holder would of course cause tangling, so John was regimented about that.  He further specified that the strands of lights had to be placed six to eight inches apart.  I can still see Rita’s ten year old brother obediently holding his neat little bouquet and following me as I worked.  This did not stop John Dwan from following us around and adjusting the lights with one of his crutches…

This year, with our holiday assistants again excited to help with the trimming, my mother went to the local Boy Scouts’ tree sale and simply said: “Give me the biggest tree you have”.  She did not even look at it with the netting removed.  She just strapped it to her car and was on her way.  Well, she didn’t need to look at it.  When we un-wrapped it, we could see that it was a plump and full ten foot tree and it smelled amazing.  Within an hour we finished trimming it while enjoying peppermint hot chocolate and listening to carols.  When it was finished, we sat and admired it. We decided, with its pearl strands and twinkling white lights, that it was the biggest and one of the most beautiful trees the Holden household had ever seen.  And then it fell over…

Well, it didn’t happen right away.  The girls had left to head back to Boston and the boyfriend and I were out getting a drink.  When we returned to the house around 11:00, I walked absent mindedly through the family room and then heard Brendan say “The tree fell down”.  And there it was, grotesquely bizarre, like some sort of crime scene.  I was in shock.  My parents had apparently been sitting on the couch watching the UConn game, when the tree just went down. 

The really disheartening part of the image was the pile of broken glass surrounding it.  My mom had been so upset that she had gone to bed and said we would survey the damage in the morning.  I had much the same reaction and went to bed thinking about the memories potentially destroyed under our once beautiful tree.  I knew the following day would be spent miserably finding many holiday memories shattered.  With two of us having gone to bed in disgust, I was surprised when I heard the vacuum and walked back into the family room to find my dad and Brendan had put the tree back up again. Only a few ornaments had been destroyed!  Miraculously, my mother’s very fragile glass ‘Partridge in a Pear Tree’ ornaments from her childhood had both survived the crash.  Only one of the broken ones was really sentimental.  It was a clean break though, and we are gluing it back together.

So this year has the distinction of being the only year in which we trimmed the tree twice.  My parents were running errands when Brendan and I attacked the re-decoration process in the morning.  The lights were now all tangled and the pearls were bound up with them.  Somewhere in this detangling process, I looked at Brendan and said: “I’m making an executive decision.  Screw the pearls.”  So we charged onward and Brendan got to meet my Christmas Nazi persona in full form.  He really needed work on his ‘zig-zagging’ and ‘nestling’ techniques, but he is a quick learner. 

I think we all learned a lot from the process.  The first, and most obvious lesson, is that you have to weigh down a tree stand when a ten foot tree is involved.  And the second, (and this one is mostly for me), is that no matter how meticulous you are and how steadfastly you hold onto traditions, some of that might slip away from you in the blink of an eye. Still, the important things will find a way of remaining intact.

Downward Snoop Dogg

I tried my first hip hop yoga class this weekend.  Now generally, I find yoga boring and difficult, but this class had the added bonus of also being loud and obnoxious.  Oh well, at least it was long…  

It’s rather unfortunate for my well-being that I not only hate sports, but I also hate exercise in general.  I hear people talk about this endorphin rush they get after exercise and so I keep waiting for exercise to feel like eating a piece of chocolate. This has yet to occur for me.  

Taking a brisk walk in the Public Garden during my lunch break is lovely, but going to a room full of sweaty people to get on machines that go nowhere?  No thank you.  Jogging or running?  No thank you.  Running outside gives me a coughing fit and to quote Liz Lemon on 30Rock while she was mocking the joggers in Central Park: “Look at me!  I'm gonna run around in a circle so I can live longer.”

          This all being said, I know I need to make exercise more a part of my routine.  Knowing that winter is coming up and I am not likely to trek out for a brisk walk in 4 degree weather is another reason to try to expand my horizons.  I like swimming, but the logistics of it can often be a pain.  So, if I can psych myself out into approaching yoga as a relaxing, meditative, and continual practice, (like, you know, the Easterners who invented it do), instead of a form of muscle work, maybe it will make it less painful, mentally and physically.  If I could see it as a refuge from daily life instead of as a masochistic chore, maybe it would actually work to motivate me to do it.  I actually do enjoy “Freedom Joy Yoga”, which is offered in the same studio and which also consists of a free dance break in the middle of class.  It gives me a chance to break out “The Tree”, a dance move I was infamous for cultivating in college and sadly, beyond.  The Tree involves waving my hands in the air with my eyes closed as though dancing at Woodstock.  Freedom Joy Yoga is one of the few venues at which such a move is socially acceptable.

          So I thought that perhaps hip hop yoga would be similar.  I imagined some fabulous, un-choreographed hip hop dance break in the middle.  There was no hip hop dance break.  There was only an interminably long hour and a half of vinyasa style yoga set to a poundingly loud soundtrack with approximately 50 sweaty people in the room.  Music that is too loud when I haven't been drinking makes me feel self-conscious that I have become an ornery grandma.  To compound my feeling of being an octogenarian, I also never seem to have the right clothes on.  Everyone else looks so put together, but I always find myself leaving the house still searching for my one ill-fitting sports bra and grabbing the nearest sweats that don’t look too much like pajamas.  Yoga pants are expensive if you can only muster the willpower to tolerate yoga approximately 5 times a year.

I was also having a frustratingly hard time understanding what the instructor was shouting into the microphone between the blaring music and my relative unfamiliarity with the terms.  Unable to focus on relaxing my breathing, with so much aural distraction and my pant legs up to my ears, I spent the first half of class wondering when an appropriate time to sneak off to the bathroom would open up.  I generally don’t engage in any activity that prohibits me from peeing for more than an hour and a half.  I drink a lot of water, (I am a singer... with kidney stones).  I found a time to sneak off to the restroom, and was then locked out of the class and had to get help from the front desk to re-enter.  In hindsight, I just should have left altogether, but my sweatshirt was still in there and my friend Rachele might have worried about my disappearance.

When we were in Warrior Two position, instead of meditating or finding my center, I noticed the room’s dozen or so beautiful Tiffany style light fixtures, and couldn’t help but think about how my $15 dollar class fee had gone toward outfitting the yoga studio’s already presumably expensive Back Bay space.  (I also love how the black stones plunked into the sinks of the otherwise utilitarian locker rooms are supposed to dupe me into believing that we've suddenly been transported to Tibet.) The second 45 minutes of class consisted of writing this blogpost in my head, until I began experiencing a pounding, music-induced headache that being in Downward Dog only exacerbated.  Yes, I am the first to admit that music is a powerful drug, and sometimes its powers are not used for good, like this time, when it seemingly refused to aid me in releasing my shoulder tension.

By the time class was over I was a ball of misery— not exactly the result I was looking for— but I can be proud in the knowledge that I tried something new and excruciating.

You gotta get a gimmick...

This upcoming weekend, I am singing an aria excerpted from the new opera Lady Orchid by Dan Shore in a variety show of sorts for Boston Opera Collaborative.  Occurring over Halloween, the program is called Opera Goes to Hell: Sin, Sex and the Supernatural.  When the composer watched me sing the role of Chastity in an informal reading of his opera, he exclaimed it was perfect for me.  The punchline of this is that it is the role of a stripper.

To explain this statement further, this is not my first foray into the portrayal of the seedy, but I have also played my fair share of ingénues.  This character of Chastity is a good blend of exotic dancer by night, while by day she comes off more like a kindergarten teacher.  She is based on a real person featured in the news as part of a murder trial in Pennsylvania.   This combined with the fact that it fits me well vocally is probably the reasoning behind the casting. 

My first unsavory character was actually performed in Pennsylvania, when I was part of a chorus of prostitutes in a modern rendition of The Beggars’ Opera in undergrad.  The most remarkable part of this run for me personally, was the night my parents came to see the show.  This night also coincided with the professional photographs that were being taken after the performance.  We were told we had to greet friends and family in the audience in costume.  So, instead of heading out to the pavilion in my street clothes as was the case every other night of the run, I had to greet my parents in a see-through top, purple suede miniskirt and hooker boots.  And of course, my mother insisted on a round of photos.  My dad kept joking about how he was going to make wallet prints out of them so he could proudly show everyone photos of his daughter, the street walker.

This leads me to another story of note.  A family friend was over one time while I was home for the summer from college.  The topic of part time jobs came up.  This friend suggested that I get a job at Hooters restaurant to put myself through grad school, saying that servers there make two or three hundred dollars in tips a night.  While I myself was objecting, we turned to my dad who was deep in contemplation.  “Two or three hundred dollars a night…” he said, “That’s a lot of money...”  Now, on the list of people who should be objecting to the idea of my getting a job at Hooters, one would think that my father would be at the top.  “Of course, you’d have to be careful not to go home with anyone,” he continued.  Let’s face it, my dad the mathematician was just being wooed by numbers in his head. 

And really, since nearly half of my stage career has been made up of playing risqué roles, what was stopping me from taking a job at Hooters anyway?  I might as well have carried some chicken wings at the same time for a lot more money.

“A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it” ~George Carlin

I have lived in the same apartment for six years but have now successfully moved on.  I am a person who is pretty adverse to personal change.  Political change, I am all about, but ask me to relocate or give up anything I have held dear and I am overwhelmed.  The dread that I felt leading up to moving day cannot be exaggerated.  I grew up in the same home my entire life and I’m sure that that contributes in some way to my inflexibility.  In actuality, the moving in with the boyfriend part of this process, once decided, was the easiest part.  It was more the leaving of fond memories and even more than that, the schlepping of the massive amount of crap in my apartment that had me full of dread and panic. I have been doing purges of my possessions all year long. 

You might have gleaned from this blog that along with the normal amount of accumulation that occurs during a six year period, I have my mother, who has contributed a small country’s worth of clothing and knick-knacks.  Going through said things has been no small task.  When friends would come over to help me purge, the most repeated sentiment of the day was usually: “Oh, my mom gave me that”.  My mother herself maintains that she is never moving again. She says the only way she is leaving that house in Connecticut is in a pine box.

Keeping my mom from adding more items to the pile during a move is also a task unto itself.  When I first moved into my last place 6 years ago, it was the same thing.  My former roommate and childhood friend Maura, recalls that while packing up in Connecticut, my mother would ask me if I needed a particular thing and I would say: “No, I’ll never use that” or “No, I have two of those already”.  Then I would walk away and Maura would watch my mother put the item into the car anyway.  I only recently discovered that she had snuck not one, but two mattress covers on my old bed, which explains why it sounded like I was sleeping on a diaper for five years. I assure you— I have not wet the bed since my potty-training years.  This second mattress cover is just the ideological equivalent to refusing another helping of potatoes from my Ukrainian great-grandmother.  “They’re good for you,” she would say as she plopped them onto your plate.  More is more, right?

Now, this time around, I did not ask my parents to come up and help.  With regards to my dad, I knew better.  The last time I moved, my dad was confounded by my mom’s idea that they needed to be there to move me in at all.  While I was indifferent, my mom insisted that they both had to come along.  Unfortunately for my dad, the move happened to fall on one of the hottest days of the summer and on a day when he also was in the throes of a nasty flu.  I remember him carrying a box up the stairwell, covered in sweat and stopping every three steps to catch his breath. That was the day he declared “Never again”.  He rallied enough later that day to regale us all with jokes about all the funny Swedish words in the Ikea instructions, but I knew that for this move I did not have to worry about my parents spontaneously descending.

That was until my mother called the morning before and said: “Now… you can say whatever you want, but I’m coming up tomorrow”.  When such pronouncements are made, it is best not to argue.  It’s like the time she came to visit me during my semester in Rome.  The second time she visited the apartment she barreled right in, fixed a dangling curtain, and then cleaned the whole kitchen.  My roommate emerged from the kitchen in shock and said: “Katrina, your mother is doing the dishes.  I tried to stop her but I couldn’t.”  Resistance is futile.  And so long as she doesn’t try to re-organize things, you will be okay in the end.

A slew of friends came to help move, which was wonderful.  One of them heard me refusing a set of blue and white dishes from my insistent mother.  The conversation went something like this:

“Helen was getting rid of these and I thought they were lovely— like toile”

“They’re fine, but I have three sets of dishes as it is”

“For parties?”

“Nope, I’m good.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t use them?”

“Yep.”

“Not for a big dinner party?”

“Nope.”

“What am I going to do with them?”
         

Brendan’s family also helped move that day.  Brendan’s favorite part of the move-in took place when his mother, looking at my mother’s car, asked her if we had really gotten everything out of it.  He and I know better that her backseat is always down and there is almost always random furniture and a toolbox in the back.  My mom looked at her confused and said: “Yes, why?”

It has now been over two months, and yes, I have found a plethora of redundant cleaning products that somehow got past me during move-in.  During unpacking, roughly one out of every seven boxes belonged to Brendan.  Each time I happened to open one of his, I would exclaim; “Wow!  This one is yours!” 

My Ukrainian genes seem to be kicking in as I get older because I have now said to Brendan several times: “But what if the Queen comes over?”  (In actuality, he is the neater of the two of us).  As far as domestic co-habitation is concerned, it’s treating us well, but that is perhaps another blogpost for another time.

Yesterday I bought some new picture frames and couldn’t remove the remnants of the price tag on the front.  That’s when I discovered a jar of paint thinner under the sink covered in my mom’s handwriting: “Paint thinner- good for sticky stuff, etc.”  Thanks Mom.

Ramblin' On

          I had a whirlwind tour of sorts a few weeks ago. In between a wedding in Pennsylvania and a recital in the same state, I took the week in between to visit and catch up with friends and relatives that I don’t get to see very often. Being a traveler and houseguest has its own wonders and challenges.

          Sat, Sept. 10th, 2011: I no sooner opened my mouth for the "Ave Maria" at my college roommate’s outdoor wedding ceremony, than the bride Amanda’s chin started to tremble. Several times in college, I watched her unexpectedly weep in front of the television, and infamously, she would cry every time she watched “Ghost”, despite the fact that she had seen it hundreds of times. (I told her later that day that I was proud that my singing elicited the same reaction in her as a Hallmark commercial.) Fortunately, a few bars into the song, a helicopter flew directly overhead to distract us. As often happens in these situations I had to maintain composure as the caterer waved frantically at the sky in back of the crowd, pleading in vain for it to fly away. Good thing I had planned for 2 verses.

          Monday, Sept. 12th: Once Amanda’s lovely and fun wedding was over I headed to Philly for a few days to visit my friends Emma and Adam. I slept surprisingly well, probably due to a very good mattress and my own room and bathroom. The “making myself comfortable” in their home thing presented only one significant problem while they were at work. Emma received the following email from me during her workday:

          Soooo, you may want to pick up eggs on your grocery run today. I know, you are thinking that you have a new carton of eggs, but it’s a long story.

          P.S. Where do you keep your extra paper towels?


         Thursday, Sept. 15th: Now, at some point after he finished a few gigs, the boyfriend was supposed to also head south for a presentation at Penn State and then come see my recital at Muhlenberg. When I’d asked him several times ahead of the trip when he was coming and if he needed a place to stay, he had said he didn’t know yet. So, when two days before he said he needed a place to crash, it became evident that the leg of my trip that he would be joining was not at Emma’s house, but at my cousins’ house in New Jersey.

          So Brendan came along on my week as a houseguest just in time to miss a private guestroom and guest bathroom and instead found himself on the pullout couch in my cousins’ basement, surrounded by half-naked Barbies. My cousin Claire’s house is not exactly a relaxing place. With 3 adorable children all under age eight, it’s more of a circus. I was mildly nervous about whether the kids would take to Brendan or not, but within minutes he was throwing them around the living room and Benjamin (5 years old), told Brendan that he could sleep on the floor next to his bed in a sleeping bag. He then told me: “Aunt Katie, you can sleep in the basement…by yourself”.

Other observations made by the children during my stay:

1. “Aunt Katie, why do you sleep so late?”— (they wanted me to play with them at 7am.)

2. It was apparently freaky that I know the names of their grandparents


          Saturday, Sept. 17th: The recital at Muhlenberg was a success! Thanks to the music department at my undergrad, I was able to spend time preparing and performing a recital of art song. The wonderful thing about this genre is that unlike opera, no one can tell you that you can’t sing a certain kind of song repertoire. It is all available for consumption if you choose to make it yours. And on my last overnight stop in Allentown I got to catch up with one of my favorite professors and his family, as well as Brendan and I having our own guestroom once again in their home.

          Sunday, Sept. 18th: Naturally, after singing an ambitious, hour long recital program, my usual inclination is to sleep in and mostly be a useless lump all day. But why would I want to do that? Because there must be something wrong with me, to round off my week of travel and work, I instead headed to New York City for a Sarasota Opera audition.

          And what was my great reward for this busy week? I reached Boston on Sunday night and had a cup of tea in my own living room and slept in my own bed. As my dad always said; “Sometimes the great part of travelling is coming home.”

Bend it like Holden

I am currently wearing my klutziness like a badge of honor in the form of an air cast on my ankle and a pair of crutches.  I was on my way back to work after a lesson.  Somehow, I thought that by walking closer to the crosswalk signal, I was willing it to change from that picture of the hand to the walking person, thus making me on time for my return to work.  It was at this moment stepping forward with my eyes on that signal, that I misjudged the steepness of the curb, twisted my ankle, and fell.  Did it hurt?  Yes, but only for a moment.  Once I started to pass out, it didn’t really bother me.

Let me help restore your faith in humanity Dear Reader, and say that as many as two people on the street approached me and offered me help.  I was pleased to find that the Kitty Genovese phenomenon does not always hold water and that I was not dismissed as a raving, homeless lunatic with her head between her legs in the middle of Copley Square.  With the help of some benevolent strangers I made it back to my office where I was well attended to.  Nothing scares an HR department more than a call from the front desk that someone is “...um, kind of fainting”.

When it proved to be just a sprain after x-rays, we decided not to change our plans to visit the Cape this weekend, and I will tell you why.  For one thing, why should the boyfriend miss out on his family summer fun plans?  Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, we don’t have a couch yet in our new place.  If we had stayed home, I would have been stuck keeping my leg elevated in bed all day.  So off to the Cape with its many couches we went and Brendan’s mother admitted to really enjoying watching him wait on me every evening.  I, for one was very grateful to his family.  If I can’t go to the beach, sitting in a cozy armchair and watching TCM is a close second.  We also had lunch in Provincetown one day, where one of the beautiful drag queens, (seriously, they all have better legs than I do), offered me a wheelchair and a front row seat at the show that night.  While public humiliation has a unique appeal, I decided to take a pedicab back to the parking lot instead...

There are a few ironies regarding this particular fall.  One is that I have lived at the very top of the very steep, and often very icy Mission Hill for years without major incident, and no sooner do I move than I am downtown and have a fall.  The ultimate irony of this injury though, is that I was already signed up to sing “I Could Have Danced All Night” at an evening of Broadway melodies.  The humor of my performance with a crutch was not lost on last night’s audience.  I also sang the duet from Porgy and Bess.  If you are familiar with the piece at all, you know that Porgy is supposed to be the cripple, not Bess.  (Perhaps more importantly, it's not supposed to be sung by white people, but let's not quibble).  

Well, if all goes well and my foot stops looking like Bilbo Baggins’, I will be off my remaining crutch in a day or two.  If not, at least we are getting a couch delivered tonight.