Happy Birthday to me…..!
Though we scream and kick and holler about growing older, I for one prefer it to the alternative.
I love and have always loved since I was a child the presence of older people. People alive when things to me where more authentic, clothes were hand stitched, and food not so preserved but healthier. When class was being polite and well spoken, and you cared about one another. “Hail Fellow, well met!” was a basis of thought and a matter of being… the world seemed gentler with an edge, danger was still danger but it wasn’t a video game where people or creatures are destroyed for points. People were truly creative because they had to be, nothing was easy. Curiosity, and respect was a rigorous discipline, it was the mark of a good person. Respect for authority and a belief in someone more intelligent to teach you, was a great promise often kept, and being wrong didn’t make you stupid, it just meant, happily, you didn’t know it all. Being nice made you a person of character and not like today, where it seems as if you are thought of as a chump. It was never perfect, there is no perfection outside the first few seconds of a butterfly springing from out of it’s cocoon… no time period is without drawbacks. All I can say is in instinct……Beware a bored populace, where everything is immediate and nothing is set aside to get the mind towards things of beauty and introduced to a higher thought or culture.
So here come I celebrating my birthday, grateful to God for that, for all and I truly mean all of my family and friends, they are a blessing, a window for my soul to see better and best the world and events around me…. to cultivate curiosity and applaud a sense of gratitude for all the blessings abundant around me….. of that I am forever grateful…
and last but not least, a return to singing….!!!!
More to follow on that, happily.
But about that, there must be this….
A commitment to following through now to the bitter end the struggle with numbers, scales do not lie, and not hiding in those numbers any further. I will be performing no matter the case, so I must decide how much I want to believable in what I do…..
Like it or not, theater and movies have invaded an art form that needs distance, for impact of thought and vision and sound. Voices need to have space to bloom, as do ideas….but that is not the course of today’s guardians…. so how do I make an audience suspend their disbelief and come with me on a special voyage of music and poetry and song, and do what all good theater people do, “Tell a story” ……because opera is the grand buffet of theater, it has it all… so, the truth is, so must I…. for what I have left to give, and in honor of what I have given and will give… I must try….
Here we go! …. come with me…. fight for this art form not in a passive way, but loudly, and full of pride…be not the undertaker and decry it’s all over, it’s dead… no one wants to go to a funeral…
Be the one that says with their life, with their love and joy, this is a great and powerful emotion I give you… this is a brush with the eternal I help you glimpse, a chance to touch the Mona Lisa, something rare, because each singer and their message is that, like a fingerprint……no tricks, this is magic….!!!
On this my birthday, 2014 wish me well, and stay in touch…. much more to come.
Time, is the handsome man in this portrait, and the young lady is all of us, rather than fight it, enjoy the ride, this passage of time, and no matter what, give, give,give……
