A slow walk through a hot kitchen

                 On the list of things I would not recommend doing when landing in a brand new destination, is to get off the plane and skip dinner on your way to your New Years’ Eve celebration. “Heavy hors d’oeuvres included” can just mean so many different things. Apparently, at this lovely “social club” in Charleston, South Carolina where the husband and I had booked reasonable NYE tickets, “heavy hors d’oeuvres” simply meant two hours of all-you-can-eat raw oysters. While I used to think of raw oysters as the equivalent of slurping down snot, they are now actually a thing I have developed a taste for as a 30-something. So, I ate some.

Ok, I ate a lot....

          I figured; “Hey, these are full of protein for my hypoglycemic hand shaking”. I lost count at about oyster #8 or 9. Mind you, I did not stop there; I just lost count there. And what goes better with a small boatful of raw oysters on New Year’s than a glass of Rosé Brut? Fatal mistake, my friends. The husband, who is obviously infinitely more in touch with the bottom of his stomach than I, declined to eat more than 3 raw oysters without supplementing by ordering something else from the menu. So it stood at about 11:50, with the live music in full swing and the ball about to drop, that his Wagyu beef tartare was placed in front of us. That’s right; another pile of raw meat for me to contemplate. For those who know me, this would not normally be a problem. I usually request that my beef and lamb take "a slow walk through a hot kitchen", but this time... damn. With nothing but a pile of slimy gifts from the sea and bubbles having gone down my gullet, I thought I was going to vomit right there. I wish I could say that my nauseated New Year’s was caused by wild times, but alas, I am apparently past those. At any rate, after desperately ordering a glass of water, I did not end up throwing up at the bar, or at all in the end. For me, 2015 just came in riding several waves of queasiness. We were out of there and walking in the fresh air by 12:08.

          The husband and I really did have a great trip to Charleston though. We ambled down the prettiest little streets you’ve ever seen, full of cobblestones and scattered with charming porches. It was almost infuriating just how every little corner of the old town is so picture perfect, between the live oaks with the Spanish moss and the historic homes with the gaslights out front. You’d turn a corner and wonder; Where even are the ugly parts of this city? (We managed to find only one unattractive tube of a Holiday Inn on our way out of town.) In this way, the area really plays to my fantasies of living entirely in another time period. We woke up to church bells on Sunday morning, drank the hotel’s sherry offering, and strolled up lanes with architecture that only seemed to reach as far as the art deco period. And since it’s become such a foodie town, we ate updated Southern classics like hipster kings. It was splendiferous.

          For people who are over-extended, (of their own doing, of course), this was the perfect New Year’s Eve long weekend getaway, and just what we needed after the holiday rush. Our last vacation was in July and since we have both had overlapping singing gigs since then, we basically have been going non-stop for six months. So here is an interesting thing: Why were we both momentarily hung up on the like, two or three things we didn’t have time and/or energy for there? For example, I had wanted to go inside the home of the 19th century abolitionist sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, whom I had recently read about in a historical fiction novel. (Incidentally, this is The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd, and it is beautiful and you should read it.) Alas, the home was closed by the time we got there on Saturday and not open the following day of our departure. B had wanted to see the Vietnam exhibit on the waterfront and one more tour where we had just walked through the USS Yorktown, but I was trying to get to the historic home. We just were trying to do too many things, which is very un-southern of us. And the bitch of it is, that had we not known those things existed, we wouldn’t have missed them at all, because we also toured a tea plantation and a historic rice plantation. And you never know what will surprise you as you go. So after my disappointment at the Grimké home being closed, it was on our second plantation tour that B discovered something. It was a building where a Reverend, who was the nephew of the Grimké sisters, and highly influenced by them, had taught the slaves on the plantation to read, which was illegal. Under the auspices of teaching them Bible studies, which was permissible by law, he taught all his "black roses", as he called them, to read! This, as you can imagine, had me all verkempt.

          The thing I constantly learn about travel is that no matter what, I will always feel enticed to go back, but I also know I likely can’t get back to every place I have already visited more than once. Life gets in the way and there are just some places you likely won’t have a chance to return to. This is both frustrating and beautiful. There is something really lovely about the impermanence of a fleeting moment. Maybe we will get back to Charleston and maybe we won’t. I’d like to get back to all the beautiful places I’ve been and fallen in love with, but new places also call… At any rate, we'll never need to go back to Charleston for their raw oysters. We've had our fill of those.

Yes, I did spend almost a full two hours creating this

Classical Composers Who Are Severe Hotties:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/operaloversanonymous/11-classical-composers-who-are-severe-hotties-145r2

I'll tell you what to do with your pumpkin spice...

         Ahhh, it's fall again. The season of fall gets a lot of abuse in this blog and it's not even the worst time of year really- just a manifestation of all my summer dreams being crushed and a herald of the frigid, frozen onslaught of a messy work commute to come. I was talking to a friend who shares a November birthday with me and we agreed there is always one day in fall, and it's usually a day in our birthday month, where the beautiful part of the season is officially over. You know this day. This is the day the once colored leaves have all fallen and there is frost on the ground. You're losing feeling in your fingers and you have to suck it up and turn on the heat in your home, and then, and this is the kicker, the sounds of crickets now a thing of the past, on this day, there is a lone crow cawing outside. This became hilarious as we recounted this all-too-real day over dinner this summer, but now it doesn't seem quite as funny. That crow is the harbinger of emotional hibernation. To quote another friend: "#SeasonofDeath".

          I hope in years to come when the husband reminisces on the early years of our love, that he remembers his summer wife. I often tell him during those months to savor things and create a mental picture because I am my best in the summer. My hair is curlier and wild, I can't stay out of the ocean, I want to venture everywhere, and most importantly, I'm not a moody, light-deprived maniac.

          And I know all you fall-lovers out there are going to remind me about pumpkin flavored things, apple-picking, cider donuts, scarves and scented candles. To which I say: yes, I already know about those things because they are the only things that keep me from weeping in my pajamas while listening to Joni Mitchell twenty four hours a day- well, that and the mound of crap I have to do. But thank you nonetheless. Feel free to keep your annoying fall joy confined to the internet. This is what keeps pinterest chock full of slow cooker recipes after all.

          I'm going to pick a bone with apple-picking this year though.  Basically, apple-picking day is like the New England hipster National holiday.  You can put on your scarves, boots, and hats pretend you live in 19th century Massachusetts for a day, or with Instagram filters, 1970's New Hampshire.  (We surely do romanticize this era of our parents' youth more than any other.)  

          I'll admit it.  I've gone apple-picking and shamelessly shared my photos on Instagram and Facebook myself.  There is nothing quite like a filtered photo of apples so glistening they look like part of the set of The Wizard of Oz, and if you can get the sun to glint ever so slightly, it will set the hearts of your 600 or so hipster Facebook friends a aflame with nostalgia and envy.  

          This year, B and I are basically booked every weekend from now until Christmas, so we snagged just a few hours to go apple-picking last week.  This truly is a Massachusetts thing.  Growing up in Connecticut, we would sometimes go pumpkin-picking, and there was a great "Haunted Hayride" nearby, but I never used to feel this annual compulsion for heading to the nearest apple farm.  Turns out, the nearest farm that we could get to with just three hours to spare this year, has become a bit of a tourist-trap circus.  We paid $38 for admission and a very small, tiny really, bag to fill with apples.  Then we had to board a miniature train with a gaggle of screaming toddlers and were dropped off in the middle of a field, and since none of the signs were visible from the train, we found ourselves surrounded by nothing but a bunch of Asian pears.  But no matter, it was a beautiful, unseasonably warm day.  After wandering around for a while longer and filling our bag to a satisfactory level of actual apples, we decided to hit the store to look for cider donuts, which is surely the only other tangible reason people go apple-picking.  I mean, hello?  I can get apples in Stop & Shop.  But there is nothing quite like a freshly baked, warm apple cider donut.

          And then this happened:

          That's right, nearly 40 bones later and not an apple cider donut to show for it.  Fall, you are going to have to try a little harder to convert me to your fan base next year.

         

Here's to Jo-Anna: An oldie but goodie

That's my mom's seasonal mannequin, wearing her eighth grade graduation dress.

          We celebrated my mom's 70th birthday in a pretty big way this summer. As my mom's big decade change approached, I suggested to my dad that we throw her a party and make it a surprise if possible. He thought this idea was ridiculous since she would start planning her own party. He was right.

          My mother called me up and said she wanted to have a party, she wanted it to be at the Lodge- the restaurant they formerly owned- and she wanted it to have a rock 'n' roll theme. I said; "Great!", but because I had this crazy idea that she shouldn't be the sole person planning her own party and that she might like a surprise or two sprinkled in there, I told her I wanted to try and take care of much of it. Apparently our wedding last year wasn't enough party-planning masochism for me. Let's add some of that stress onto this year too! So invitations went out to family and friends, and at my urging, included a note that 1950's and 60's attire was not required but encouraged. (Some of the invitations came back or never made it to their destinations because Paper Source doesn't like to put ugly "extra postage required" markings on their non-standard envelope size... but I digress.)

          Semi-planning a party with my mother is an interesting process. I would come up with an idea to surprise her with and she would intercept. No sooner would I think: I'll get a bunch of vintage 45's to use as decor than my mother would call and say she pulled up the old 45's from the basement to use as decor. I'd think I'll order a cannoli cake from Eddy's Bakery and she'd call to tell me she ordered a cannoli cake from Eddy's. You get the idea. At one point I said "Do you want there to be any surprises here?" So while people were thanking me for organizing things, I'd tell them not to give me too much credit. It was more of a 50/50 process.

          Most of the planning went off without a hitch, but the weekend of the big day was, we'll say interesting for me. I didn't have to worry about food or presentation or anything like that because Martha and the Lodge employees had that all well in hand and my mother had of course, already selected the buffet menu. My friends Molly, Rachele, and Jamie generously offered to help me set up the flower arrangements and my mother-in-law generously contributed a dozen vases for said arrangements.

Hitch #1: The day before I head down to CT, I tell my mom that I'd bought a fabulous new, but vintage style ivory lace and green satin evening dress. At this point my mother says: "Oh, I just thought I'd wear one of my comfortable jersey dresses." So yes, the guest of honor, who had the idea for the 1950's and 60's theme, who also owns approximately six closets full of vintage buys and old prom gowns, wanted to wear a 21st century knit jersey dress to the party because you know, "comfortable"...

I just couldn't... nope.

          By the time I'd reached home however, she'd either sensed the frustration in my voice or realized the errors of her bizarre logic and had laid out several beautiful 1950's wardrobe options to choose from for herself.

Hitch #2: We had a surprise slideshow planned full of photos of Mom through the years. Through a mis-communication, it wasn't quite clear if we had any way of projecting it. Keep in mind, all this is happening while my mom was flitting about baking things for out-of-town guests because you know, sitting still on one's party day is not an option in her world.

          So we were sneaking around on the front porch trying to investigate the situation. My dad returns from the Lodge to tell me that there is bad news. And this part is SO my dad. While I am on pins and needles wondering about the status on the projector, he leads with "So two things. First, the guestbook does have lines in it." And then he proceeds to expatiate on the completely benign details of that situation and when I interrupt him for the second piece of bad news, he says; "Yeah, there's no projector". You might have led with that one, Dad.

          My husband saved the day on this one. B quietly made calls to every rental place in the tri-town area and scored us a projector and even went down to the Lodge for the guy's arrival to make sure it was set up and ready to go. Crisis averted.

Hitch #3: Some of our great family friends were hanging out with us all that day and were a huge help as well during all of said minor glitches. After much planning about what time we would need to be ready, everyone agreed that we'd all need to be ready by about 3:30. The first car would head out first to set up the flower centerpieces. The next group would head out 15 minutes later because the photographer would be there early to take some posed family photos. It was at about 3:00 that everyone in the house decided to sit down and watch the end of the Clint Eastwood movie they'd started the night before...

          Every time I emerged from my room with another addition to my ensemble, there they all were sitting exactly where I had left them in their regular old street clothes. Apparently, the literal cliffhanging scene of this film was very engrossing. For me, it was like one of those anxiety dreams where no one realizes the timeline you'd set up and you can't get your dress on and the clock is ticking and no one seems to care but you. I wish I could say that that was the first time I felt that way with regards to my family's virtual clock but alas. Someone is constantly waiting for someone else because it's in the last two minutes that everyone loses all sense of time. The last minute is designated specifically for one or two people to start losing their minds with panic.

          On this day, I just kept returning from whence I came shaking my head. When my friends arrived to the house a bit late, they apologized and I assured them not to worry. No one here had felt any sense of urgency whatsoever. Then there was the typical mad dash out the door and my mother insisting loudly that I help my dad's so that his outfit would not resemble Larry David too much. This time, it was perfectly acceptable for him to channel Buddy Hollly at least, since he was planning on wearing an old plaid jacket which my mother had actually made him to fit in with the retro theme.

          In the end, the actual party went off without a hitch, I'd say. People appeared in fabulous costumes, the food was delicious, the dance floor was hoppin', the slideshow was a hit, and the speeches were plentiful and heartfelt. My mom is a very generous friend and overall inspiring woman after all. She's inspired much of this blog with her eccentricities and big heart and we wanted her to have a great celebration. B noted how the next day, my mom said she could hardly fall asleep that night because she remained so amped up at all the fun she'd had.

Below are some of the fab images from the evening in all their retro glory:

Jo-Anna, woman of style, put that vintage dress over that under-layer.  They weren't sold together.

Yes, that plaid jacket is actually a fabric that my dad picked out at one time.

When my little cousins showed up for photos in coordinated poodle skirts, we actually broke into applause.

One does want a hint of color

          During an interesting work lunch hour conversation the other day, I got thinking about a couple of things that I'm grateful for having been raised with. This mainly came up because of articles about the desperate and terrible backstabbing in the social spheres of suburban moms . Why is this relevant to my life currently? Well, it's not really, but B and I would love to own a home some day, and if my mother continues to give us so much stuff, we are going to need more square footage than we can afford in an increasingly expensive city. I found myself recently asking my cousins which Boston suburbs their friends live in where they do not want to kill themselves. They actually came up with some ideas, so that is heartening.

          In the article linked here, (and there are more of its ilk, according to my co-workers) the narrator moves from Jamaica Plain, (where I live currently), to the greater Boston suburb of Wayland after her twins are born. She then catalogs the deceit and one-upping that take place on the regular in her new town. Everyone has a distinct persona and caste in her perceived social strata of the suburbs.  She writes about new moms in this generation being away from their families and needing to seek out support systems for themselves and their children, which is fair enough, and there is a big theme here of women feeling judged more than ever before on their child-rearing decisions.  But while I understand that she's doing an exposé on these social groups, it seems she was already clearly fascinated by their intricacies. To me, it seems she was in the mindset of fitting in and/or making a name for herself ahead of her relocation.  This all requires more energy than I could muster for people with hierarchical social agendas.

          In my mind, when you fall victim to shallow and competitive social circles, there's a prerequisite for that: it's called giving a shit. You can only fall prey to people's judgement if you care too much about it. I'm not excusing how these other women behaved, but I suspect that had this woman stayed in Jamaica Plain, she would have felt judged too- it just would have been based on what organic market she chose to shop in for her children, and what yoga studio she went to. Sometimes people are going to judge you anyway, and your only choice is not to care. I have good friends whose hearts I can take with me no matter where I choose to move.  And I believe a community can always be made without the harshness of a Mean Girls mindset.

          And here's where Mother's Day comes in for me this week.  For escaping this particular brand of caring, I can take almost no personal credit. The accolade in this case can mostly go to my mom. I may not have been exactly on board with her fashion or social choices as a child, but I can safely say that my mother, probably partially consciously, but mostly just because of her living example of eccentricity, contributed to self confidence in her progeny. When she showed up at my elementary school to pick me up in vintage fur coat, beret, knee socks, and clogs, she may have only had an inkling about the example she was setting. But while some other moms in my suburban Connecticut hometown wore their matching designer sweatsuits to attend coffee and the gym together, my mom was too busy to give a crap. 

Ice skates swapped out for clogs in this photo

          Aside from the fact that my mom worked fulltime running a business, other contributing factors to her sense of self were that she is slightly older than the other moms, and grew up a few minutes away. So in addition to just being busy all the time, she already had a group of friends in neighboring towns and perhaps a more established sense of self. She also came from a generation that dressed up a bit more, and you would be correct in assuming that as a child, I was perpetually overdressed because my mother remembers a time when you wore a hat and gloves for train travel. The other fact is that she is just a bit odd, that one.* She just likes her vintage fur coat collection and you weren't going to stop her from wearing one- even in downtown New Haven with the threat of Yalies pouring red paint on her. She probably didn't often stop to think that her zealous accessorizing habit, for example, was actually teaching her daughter a valuable lesson, but I'm sure she's aware of it on one level. And the idea of playing subtle mind games or dancing around social topics like the women portrayed in the aforementioned article is completely foreign to her.  She has never been one to mince words. If she loves someone, she will do so fiercely and make no bones about it, and if she doesn't understand someone's particular worldview, she will accept that that's just who that person is and that's fine. Her ability to care about others is great, but her ability to care about others' judgement is not. And we'll give my dad some credit for accepting her weirdness and also not giving a flying poo about what the community at large thought of his somewhat colorful wife, (also, he's had his moments himself...) For all of this I am quite grateful.

Last day of school in second grade.  While the other kids wore t-shirts and things they could run around in, can you guess which one I am?

          So as we approach Mother's Day, this is one big shout-out to my mom. Thanks for not giving a shit, in the best of ways.

*I know, I know, some of this oddness is probably hereditary.  

An Actual Ukrainian Picnic

          So, the blog has a new look.  You can thank Ben Guilfoy for his design help and my mom for that classic photo.  She really does seem to be mastering new technology now.  And by that I mean, she went to Staples and had them scan the photo for her...  

          This is a real Ukrainian picnic, not the kind my family and I always joke about that involves cleaning the whole house; dusting, scrubbing the floors, taking down the curtains, and beating the mattresses and rugs.  The woman on the far right is my great-grandmother, Anna.  This is in Ansonia, Connecticut, not actually Ukraine, but it's with people from the "old neighborhood", (all Ukrainians).  My grandmother is not in this picture but she was about 13 years old at this time.  And funny enough, even though my grandma and I didn't grow up in the same town, this field is less than a half a mile from the house I grew up in where my parents still live.  

          My immigrant great-grandparents didn't have a lot of money, and my great-grandfather asked his wife if she would like him to save up and buy her a pearl necklace like the ones her friends were wearing.  In reply, she said she already had her pearl.  He's the baby right there in her arms- my great-uncle.  Sadly, he was killed serving in WWII.

          I have only vague memories of my great-grandmother, who lived to age 93, but I've heard a lot of good stories about both of my great-grandparents.  My great-grandfather worked in a factory and when he came home in the evening, he fed and played with the kids while she did her sewing.  My great-grandma was a talented seamstress and she said the sewing work she did for others in her lifetime could have filled an entire room.  So, they were a relatively modern two-income household out of necessity.  While her work was technically domestic, she still used it to earn money.  It's funny how we pretend that women always were contained to their own domestic spheres, and that men had no hand in the household, but it was really only after the 1940's, when more women had the chance to replace men outside the home, that people started really getting their feathers ruffled about that sort of thing.  Like so many trends in history, people become upset by change and hold on to some imaginary ideal in the wake of it.  Poverty made it a necessity for women and children to work in factories through the nineteenth century after all, but WWII seemed to make people hyper-aware of this homemaker ideal that probably didn't exist so strictly before.

          From everything I've heard, Anna was a pretty tough lady.  I seem to remember a story about her delivering a baby in their apartment building when the local doctor was unable to make his way over there.  She claimed that the women in Ukraine just gave birth right in the middle of their work in the fields, and when they were done, they would take a bale of wheat back into the house with them so they wouldn't waste a trip.  I think that particular anecdote gets more extreme with every generation it goes down though...  

          But really, after her father died, she had no choice at age 16 but to head to America.  She never saw her mother again but she still found a way to make a life for herself here and loved her adopted country.  She lost three children to disease and war and still managed to carry on.  With the help of my grandma, who taught her parents and their friends in a citizenship class, they all became citizens and were very proud to vote in America.  

          From Anna's account as well, the Ukraine had always been a besieged upon place, shifting between whichever country claimed to own it at the time.  This doesn't excuse the mess over there now of course.  In the face of adversity, I wish the Ukrainian people the kind of toughness my family had, although my hope for the future is that they won't need it.

“If you want to be a great receptionist, just get a degree in theatre"

          At the risk of coming off as new-agey or "woo woo”, this post is about one’s path or one’s calling. It’s about the idea of a job vs. a career. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately for myself, but also something my friends and colleagues seem to have on their minds as well.

          Just what defines a career? I think of it as the thing that we work toward and define ourselves with. I think, for myself, that my reception position is my job, but my passion— the career that I work toward— is my singing, (and perhaps more and more these days, my writing). In a chat with a friend who is actually a published writer, he said he didn't consider his writing to be his career. His nine to five job is for a local newspaper. He didn’t think the writing, which is not his main source of income, was his career, even though it is more fulfilling for him and he considers it his passion. So if we do other things for income, or get caught up in other causes, does this mean we aren’t our passion somehow? It no longer is part of our personal definition? Why do we devalue all the things we do accomplish just because they aren't included in our idea of the dream? We all do it. For a long time I’d see a friend with a traditional traveling singing career and think; That’s the way it’s supposed to be. But just because we aren’t sitting at a typewriter in a beach house living the supposed life of a novelist, or showing our artwork at a gallery opening, or backstage prepping for a Met performance, we aren’t successful? Sometimes I think our “calling” is much deeper than that. It can bend and flex with our lives and our spirit.

          I have so many singer friends who do amazing work singing, teaching, fundraising, and marketing opera and classical music in Boston and beyond. On a regular basis, they are an important cog in the larger wheels that expose new audiences to what I consider to be one of the greatest expressive art forms. These colleagues are doing that whether they are the performers, rehearsal pianists, stage techs or administrators. They are doing this even if it takes place after their nine to five jobs. Some of them truly work their tails off with their combined weekly activities. For so many of us though— and this is the way of the artist— this isn’t good enough. That drive to constantly create and improve can sometimes be our worst enemy because it can make us unaware of all the good we do already.

          Just the other week, several friends did an amazing concert at a local church. The program had great singing and playing and a wonderful musical variety. It had its light-hearted, entertaining moments and its incredibly moving moments. And because they are professionals, they were paid as part of a recital series. Was it Carnegie Hall? No, although one of the singers has sung there. It was a small church even, but I know for a fact that several people in that room had never heard live singing like that before, and they were really delightfully surprised, as well as captivated.

          Another friend was recently quoting a famous tenor in a masterclass. While a student at BU, this friend remembers said tenor telling students that, there was no way of telling, they may all be lucky and make it as opera singers full-time. (And there were likely few singers in that class that day who suspected they might not make it as full-time, in demand performers.) But he also said he knew opera singers who were in finance, education, HR, development, and the list goes on. He emphasized that these people were always opera singers even if it didn't become their main source of income someday. There are unlimited examples of this in artistic history. The composer Charles Ives was a high-earning insurance executive in Connecticut. His colleagues, I would guess, probably had very little idea of the impact and influence he was to have on American classical music and the American canon, all in his spare time. Phillip Glass was a plumber and Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams were physicians. I’m sure they had a rigorous schedule for creation and it makes me wonder when they slept of course. We can’t forget that accomplishment does take hard work after all, but our everyday triumphs, however small they may seem at times, are worthy.

          I worked with this fabulously talented and experienced conductor in Italy. He had an unbelievably deep understanding of opera’s music, language, and text. He conducted without scores in fact, because he had committed the major works so perfectly to memory. He quite memorably reduced most of us to weeping puddles with poignant, illness related stories the first time we staged the final act of Bohème. One of his other stories that I found very moving was about his own early career. One night he was talking to a group of us young singers at the local café. We all knew his uncle was a very famous conductor— a favorite of Maria Callas’. He was talking of his struggles as a young man to get work. He had since gone on to conduct at every major house in the world except the Met and LaScala, but at that time, things were looking bleak. His uncle told him; “Talent and skill are like a gem in your hand Joseph. You have a gem in your hand. I know it. I have seen it. Just because the world may not ever have the chance to see it does not mean it is not there. You will carry it around with you your whole life.” I think we get to choose every day whether that gem is a heavy burden or whether it is a shining light.