note to servalan and sebastienne

i was thinking of two songs, actually, and had conflated them in my head -- "Right Here, Right Now" by Jesus Jones, and "Winds of Change" by The Scorpions.

i love google. i said "pop charts 1991" and all was revealed. [swoons from love of teh google]

memo

to: Boots
from: fox
re: botanics "balancing" face wash

"without drying your skin", my ass.

thefourthvine is cool

thefourthvine is cool -- first of all, she's recced my stuff, which is an automatic thumbs-up, yes indeed. :-) but even if she weren't wise, perceptive, etc. enough to recommend my writing, she'd be unbearably cool just for the style of her recs. if i've never heard of anything she's talking about, she can convince me to read a thing anyway just with a rec -- and occasionally just with a title of a rec. honestly. not too many people can make me laugh out loud, but thefourthvine is one of them, and that's cool.

plus, she doesn't know me from a hole in the ground, but she was (or at any rate seemed) genuinely concerned when i was down with a nasty chest cold earlier this term, and that's cool, too.

la la la la laaaa!

i haven't sung this much or this often since high school. i've missed it.

have pestered a Real Choir to let me know if they've got a vacancy and want -- despite the fact that they normally add new members only once a year, the week before the start of fall term; they say you should contact them anyway if you miss that, because sometimes space becomes available -- to give me an audition.

am realizing, also, how spoiled i was when i was singing regularly. my high school chorus was no great shakes, but i sang with the cleveland orchestra for five years -- a year as a child, with the regular chorus and The Orchestra at christmas time and something else as well, i don't remember what; and then four years in the youth chorus, with the youth orchestra annually for (1) dvorak's te deum, (2) durufle's requiem, (3) handel's zadok the priest, hailstork's i will lift up mine eyes (which we did when they decided we didn't have the tenors for bernstein's chichester psalms; it's sort of chichester-lite, and handel's zadok grew up to be the hallelujah chorus), and some stuff from samson et delila; and (4) copland's old american songs and probably some other stuff i don't remember; and also with The Orchestra for some other things occasionally, including bach's st. matthew passion and orff's carmina burana.

but it's not the repertoire that i think makes me spoiled; it's the discipline. i mean, we practiced in that chorus. and when the director was dealing with someone else, we (mainly) sat down and shut up. and when he cautioned us to aim sharp on descending scales, because if we didn't we were bound to go flat, we by god aimed sharp, and sure enough we were on pitch. we were about a hundred voices, and we could tune, you know what i'm saying?

i'm proud to have that sort of formative experience, but it does make other sorts of experiences mildly frustrating sometimes. :-) (that director, though -- the man had perfect pitch, and he was miserable pretty much of the time. i mean perfect pitch, so the tiniest bit off and he could hear it and the thing was wrecked for him. he used to listen to the whole chorus and then say something like "the second altos were about a sixteenth of a tone flat in the third beat of the second measure before figure D; do it again." i mean, dude. but of course there are plenty of people with perfect pitch who don't let imperfection bother them quite as much. i don't have perfect pitch -- by which i mean, if you ask me for an A, i can't pull it out of the air; if you give me an A, i can give you anything else, though, since my relative pitch is good -- but all the same, i think the not-letting-it-get-to-me approach is what i'll have to take in these sorts of situation. mearagrrl, remember Awful S., the clarinetist, who quit my cabaret pit band and then broke whatshisname's heart in the marching band later that year? i'm musically frustrated the way she was, only i'm not obnoxious about it. [g])

also: my hair is getting really long.