Sick Day Rant on City Opera Coma/I Need a Job

Okay guys, get ready...Sassy Sick Day Statement about NYCO:

I am 25-years young and by May 2014 I will have two degrees in Music for voice and voice performance. Based on sheer probability, I will most likely have no real, taxable income from music after graduating, but what I will have is an ungodly amount of student debt that I'll have to start chipping away at. So here is my proposal: I will get New York City Opera back on its feet. I will be the Artistic Director, the Mommy and the Daddy. I'll breast feed that baby all the way back to Lincoln Center and I'll toss a football with it outside on a Sunday...and here is why:

In 2006 (that's right) I saw my first opera at NYCO in Lincoln Center. My boyfriend at the time got cheap tickets through NYU and we were able to sit right in the middle of the orchestra next to the bejeweled elite of New York City. I had never been more moved by anything the night that I fell in love with opera. We saw La Bohème and I knew what to do with my life, which was more than I could say for most 17-year olds....hell, most 25-year olds.

When NYCO left Lincoln Center my heart broke. I cried as I imagined all of the people who had worked there for decades losing their home, and I cried because I could no longer aspire to it being my home. Since that first night, I had dreamt of sitting in my own dressing room in the New York State Theater, thinking about the 17-year old girl in the audience that I was going to make fall in love with the centuries-old craft as I got ready to sing gorgeous music. I have worked tirelessly to attain that dream for seven years, and I will keep working.

But looking forward financially, I need a job and NYCO needs someone who can balance a check book and flirt with old Jews who have bigger check books. Yes, this is kind of a silly rant, but when I seriously think about it, I would work tirelessly for ONE FIFTH of what Steel's salary was, and I would get the job done. I would stay in my tiny apartment in Harlem and I would eat sardines and lentils and I would make it happen. And you know, I would be willing to bet that many of the people graduating with me in May would do the same thing. Because even though making less than six figures is unacceptable for some people who claim to be in service to the arts, it isn't to me and it isn't to most of my passionate, immensely talented young colleagues.

I am not saying I know anything, or that I know better than anyone, because frankly I don't. And right now I am taking classes from some of the people who worked on that Bohème from 2006, and I'm sure they have a few better ideas than I do about how things in an opera company should and shouldn't work. What I am saying is what I would and wouldn't do. What I am saying is that people who NEED to make more than $300,000 salaries should go work on Wall Street or be corporate litigators. Leave the cultivation of the arts to those of us who WOULDN'T ACCEPT SUCH A SALARY WHEN THE TICKET SALES OF THEIR COMPANY HAD DROPPED 80%, even if we are only 25-years old. 

(::drops the mic::)

Fool-Proof Ideas for Amazing Super-Fun Dates

After beginning the fantastical and mystic journey of living together, some couples fall into a 'funk'. My partner and I spent the first year of our relationship doing long distance; he lived and worked in Montreal and I did my thing in New York. Any time we would see each other, we would spend practically 24/7 together. Having no physical contact for three to four weeks, sometimes longer, was difficult in itself. But what made the "Getting-to-Know-You" process even more intense was that suddenly we were up each other's asses for a week. Not literally. Well, sometimes literally. But not on purpose.

Anyway, Phil and I never got to go through the traditional "dating period". There were never sleepovers once a week or meeting up for dinner after work. There was never a surprise lunch in the middle of the work day or angst-filled kisses goodnight after a movie, making absolutely idiotic conversation just to spend a few extra moments together. In fact, the first time I went to visit him I was so startled by his normal day-to-day living noises that I sat in the other room, barely moved or breathed, and barely ate for most of the week (if only a little bit of that anxiety would come back, because I looked goooooooood). I was so terrified of him finding out that behind that somehow-majestic filter of a Skype screen and without those pauses in chat conversation, the ones that allow you to think up the exactly perfect mix of funny/clever/insightful sentences, I was actually just a not-so-quippy, rather smelly, awkward-noise-making, kind-of-hot dude with way less self control and self motivation than I may let on.

As the months passed and we spent more and more awkward weeks at a time pretending not to hear each other stifle farts in the bathroom, things began to feel more natural. I memorised his smell, his gait and the cadence of his footsteps. I even stopped feeling so bad about the all of the gear he had to buy in order to block his orifices from any sight or sound of another person in the room that might keep him up at night...even though that other person's snoring might be particularly adorable. We were really starting to feel at home with one another. But things always felt natural with Phil, and when we started living together this past September, nothing changed. There were no crazy blow up fights that couples often experience during those first few months of cohabitation, and though I don't believe that we'll ever agree on the appropriate amount of soap to use when washing dishes, we started to really build a life together in the same city for the first time. Since we did seem to skip a few steps along the way, it is especially important to me that we turn off Breaking Bad every now and then, skip the stir-fry or curry and have an Amazing Super-Fun Date. (Just to be clear, an Amazing Super-Fun Date is very different from any ol' ordinary date).

Below is my ever-growing list of Fool-Proof Ideas for Amazing Super-Fun Dates. I will add more and more ideas to this list as I think of them, and please feel free to leave comments with your own ideas so I can add them to the list (IF I deem them worthy of being categorised as Amazingly Super-Fun). Regardless of how long you've been with your partner, having Amazing Super-Fun Dates is so important for continuing to appreciate one another as individuals and building new experiences together so that you don't become boring and predictable (or fat). Most of these ideas have been tested by Philip and I, and will cost little or no money because we are poor musicians... but I will absolutely throw some other, more opulent, ideas in there in hopes that we will one day be able to afford fancy dates or for some of you readers with "jobs" and "income". Enjoy!


A List of Fool-Proof Ideas for Amazing Super-Fun Dates:

1. Split a bottle of whiskey (or a sheet of LSD, depending on your means) and see any of the Twilight movies
2. Go swing dancing at a retirement home's Big Band Night
3. Eat Special Brownies and surprise your partner with an ice skating date!
4. Go to Eataly: Make your rounds, ordering the cheapest thing at each station and speak in overly animated Italian accents the whole time. Then, when the bill comes, insist that not only did you pay the one-time-buffet fee at the door, but also "ma non parlo inglese!"
5. Go to David's Tea and talk for hours
6. PIER. 1. IMPORTS.
7. Go to trivia night at any sports bar and eat your weight in Super Scorchin' Hot Wings....then go home, put on sweat shirts and try to have sex
8. Drink a glass of whiskey, pop three Benadryl, blast Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" and see who can jerk off for longer before passing out. Nobody loses. 
9. Walk all the way across a city in five feet of snow during a blizzard... to an ice skating rink
10. Try to have exhibitionist sex on a tour of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant
11. Split a bottle of whiskey (or a sheet of LSD, depending on your means) and crash rich kid's a Bar/Bat Mitzvah
12. ....

Thoughts on Cohabitation and a Short Story of Persistence:

The mystery of socks and underwear continues to baffle me. Even after I have compulsively searched the apartment for every last pair to put in the laundry, I am haunted by the renegade balled up sock. The lone, forgotten pair of man panties that has been under the desk for who-knows-how-long. A colony of socks livi

ng in the crevice of the couch, and their sister colony of briefs that has set up camp in the corner of the closet. When I have found all the hidden ones, I look around the now-clean room with trepidation before I leave for a glass of water. I stand at the sink, pensive. The condensation from my cold glass falling in time with the sweat beads down my brown. I consider acts of love. Maybe it is the lack of years under our 'relationship belt', but it actually is somewhat endearing that my partner's intimates seem to scatter like the frightened Jews of a diaspora. I smile to myself smugly, relishing how much he'll appreciate that I've cleaned, done laundry and organized while he was out of town. I high-five myself. "Look at you, you anomaly of gender roles" I think. "You, with your cooking, cleaning, doing laundry AND being a full time student with a job. Who says you can't get good grades AND keep those whites white and colors bright?!" Phil will come home from his gig and find not only a clean apartment, but every pair of socks and underwear cleaned, folded and lined up like detained prisoners in submission, and I will live to tell of it! Glory! 

I put the glass in the sink and return to the room to collect the laundry, only to be met by horror and bafflement. Did I hallucinate the immaculate floor? There are socks and underwear in places I must have missed! As I move the desk chair, not one but FOUR different socks somehow materialize from under the wheels. I hurriedly snatch them up and make toward the bed. With shaky hands and bated breath, I slowly pull back the comforter, and one after another three pairs of man panties tumble forth in a manner that I can only describe as garrulous laughter. I grab the underwear, now panting and turn around to find a decoupaged floor of single socks and balled up underwear. "But how?" I think to myself, "he isn't even here! Where are they coming from!?" ::RUSTLE::RUSTLE:: I look up and cannot hide my smile. A suitcase on the top shelf of the closet must have shifted, and so very innocently, like the first December snowfall, socks and underwear float toward the floor like graceful ice crystals. I sit, unsure of what my next step should be. Do I accept defeat? Wait for my partner to get home and help me? Surely he knows how to deal with these nefarious articles of clothing. The socks do not stop falling. I lie down on the now pile of dude-intimates, exhausted. How could I have been so naive as to think I'd gotten them all? I even took a water break! I laugh to myself a soft cackle before the last pair of underwear falls over my eyes. Everything is dark.

They found my body a week later.