It’s a negative energy weekend. It’s now 2:30 on Saturday afternoon and I still haven’t been able to make myself do the things I was going to make myself do this weekend. The must accomplish list is done including studying up on audition sides, a church stewardship committee meeting, and the inexorable tide of back progress notes. But the non-urgent pile of getting some work done on the new book, writing a movie review, and breaking the back on a new legal case remain relatively untouched while I lie here watching old episodes of Bones and staring out the window at the overcast. I’m not sure if the lack of energy is physiologic aging, psychologic coping or just plane laziness. Probably a combination of all three.
I have been in a bit of a melancholic state since returning from New York this past week. Every time I go up there, there’s this piece of me which wonders ‘what if’. I had a couple of opportunities in life to relocate to the tri-state area but I never took advantage of them for one reason or another and it’s too late now. I suppose with retirement I could find a tiny little studio pied a terre somewhere and come and go as I please but I know how I would want to live in that city and I doubt my retirement income would support that. Perhaps its best that it remains something I dunk myself in every year or two to refresh.
My upcoming audition is for ‘Sunday in the Park with George’. I don’t expect to get it. After some score study, it’s pretty clear from the tessitura that Steve did not have bass-baritones in mind when he set the keys. Still, it’s good practice to get out there and put myself up against the better people in town. Sometimes I get cast, sometimes I don’t. I’m competitive but when it comes to musicals, I remain on the B list. I just don’t have the training at a young age that so many others have had. My current voice teacher has done wonders and my technique and abilities are coming back post pandemic lay off but at nearly 62, I’m not going to be winning any vocal competitions. I’m relatively happy with my aging character man niche. I get lots of opportunities and usually have something lined up to work on. I counted it up. Since reinvigorating my theater career as a performer twenty years ago, the count is 11 plays, 29 musicals and operettas, 13 cabaret/revue shows, and 14 operas. I’ve lost track of the number of choral concerts.
I wonder sometimes how much longer I’ll be able to perform on stage. Memorizing lines is harder. My sight isn’t what it once was making wandering around backstage in the dark somewhat hazardous. I can’t move as quickly, get up and down from the floor like I once did, and my balance is leaving me. These are all normal aging things which tell me I’m unlikely to spend another twenty years on stage. I’ll have to retire, other than select projects, at some point. There’s still a lot of shows and roles on the bucket list and some of them may come my way, some won’t. Fortunately, the casting pool in Birmingham for my age and type is relatively small so I have a shot at a lot of things. I’m always up against the same guys. At least we’re all friends and I admire their abilities immensely so I never feel slighted when one of them gets the nod over me. The fact that I get the callback and get in the room to compete with them is enough.
I have to start working on a geriatrics educational program put out by a company that helps people pass board exams. I’ve worked on this before. It generally requires me to go over updated materials on various elder care topics and then video record lectures. The company likes me because I can do a forty five minute lecture in a single take, remain entertaining, digress on a few tangents which demonstrate the practicalities of the material under discussion but bring it back where it needs to be. Comes from many decades of public speaking. The public speaking and lectures on aging I did in my thirties were my training ground for performance. I figured out very early on that if you were going to be speaking about aging, dementia, death and dying, and other such uplifting topics, you’d lose the room in five minutes if you didn’t develop techniques for holding peoples’ attention including humor and a certain charismatic delivery. It was Tommy, after attending a couple of my speaking gigs in 2003, who told me I needed to get myself on stage. I owe that piece of my life. Which is the piece that has kept me sane through all of the disasters of the last decade, to him.
It’s the sixth anniversary of his death this next weekend. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but I, like everyone else, has this distorted perception of linear time due to the effects of the pandemic. It was six years. I’ll be spending the day performing with his beloved Opera Birmingham in their gala concert ‘Opera Unveiled’ at the Day theater at ASFA. That seems somewhat appropriate. I spent a lot of time backstage at the Day with him as he did the wigs for Red Mountain’s summer shows including Les Miz, Mary Poppins (back again this summer), The Little Mermaid, Newsies, and so many others. I can’t walk into that space without seeing him in his blacks and his apron and his mouth full of wig pins getting everyone ready. He actually stage managed the very first performance in that theater when it opened. It was a concert by Angela Brown – ‘A Sistah’s Guide to the Opera’. A picture from a celebratory dinner after the dress is the cover photo on his Facebook page and there are the two of us, Angela, and others caught in a moment of happiness and triumph. I’ve never had the heart to take his Facebook page down. It’ll probably be there forever. And that’s OK with me.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 