Gestures

During dinner last night, SK and I merrily went through our song lists, and she gave me advice on how to order my set. I was all ready to order my songs based solely on key, but SK pointed out that I should think of which songs I would need to be fully warmed up to sing. So then I started putting all the more vocally challenging songs in the second set. She then pointed out that during the break, I would cool down again. Ah. Her far greater experience in solo vocal performance is SO handy.

And then, a bottle of wine later, we reached the maudlin stage of the evening.

I'm homesick for Asia. But my nostalgia isn't just centered around a place. It's centered around a time. But that doesn't quite tell the full story.

I committed to DC, when I moved there so many years ago from NYC. I committed to Beijing. And then to Hong Kong.

But when I returned to NYC two years ago, I never COMMITTED to this city. I know why. It just felt so much like home that I felt I didn't have to make the effort.

Perhaps I need to unpack my ever-ready suitcase. That would be just a small gesture, but even the smallest gestures can have meaning, yes?

Life Aspirations

I have two:

1. By day, to write trashy novels
2. By night, to be a lounge singer

My sexless trashy novel will never see the light of day. But my second aspiration might just be achieved - at least for one evening, if SK has anything to say about it.

Mid summer, SK told me that she wants to do a cabaret night sometime in November, starring herself, VH, and me. I immediately enthused about the idea and then promptly forgot about it until she came over one evening last week for wine and girl-talk and reminded me about it.

VH, if you read this post, consider yourself reminded as well.

Since SK is appalled by my karaoke song choices, she wrote up a list of songs for me and told me in no uncertain terms that the list is non-negotiable and that I will have to learn them.

Not only does SK know music, she also knows my voice. So her choices for me are spot on. I did try to be helpful by volunteering my karaoke favorites - all of which she rejected out of hand by telling me, "what you like to sing at karaoke and what you can actually do justice to don't have much in common."

True enough.

So we sat at my little kitchen table while she searched for various songs on youtube, muttering to herself, and I sat opposite her, drinking my wine, swaying along to whatever she was playing on my computer, and pretending that my remote control was a mic.

What do we need to make this cabaret night happen? I'll make a list:

1. a pianist
2. mics/speakers/piano/assorted other equipment
3. a venue
4. a date
5. an audience

But for now, I'm off to download Whatever Lola Wants from iTunes.

Jook Juke Joy

A private karaoke room, delicious Chinese food (the specialty of the house being congee aka jook), plentiful booze, and good friends who are also good karaoke team players: these are the ingredients for a fabulous valentine's day. Who needs ONE loved one when you can celebrate with EIGHT?

It was so much fun that SK and AN are down for the count and holed up in their respective apartments this weekend. And me? I'm still singing, re-living the highlights of the evening. I am particularly proud of my performance of Feelings.

SK and AN turned in reliably fabulous performances - despite being too sick to speak.

EA wowed all of us with her professional trained coloratura - especially on Bohemian Rhapsody.

And just so you know (back to my performance of Feelings), the lyric: "Boy, you'll never come again" has entirely different meaning when sung in a threatening manner.

For Mrs. Tossoff

Fame was on TV this morning. I saw it the first time on the big screen - 1982, I think it was. I remember thinking that the fictional New York City High School for the Performing Arts was very different from my own music school. My music school was more... what's the word? Oh yes, ASIAN.

I only caught the last 30 minutes of Fame this morning and it wasn't until the final scene - the graduation concert where the entire Scooby Gang performs I Sing The Body Electric that I saw her, and remembered her for the first time in many years. My voice teacher, Ilse Sass. She played Mrs. Tossoff, and when asked about the movie, she always expressed mild annoyance that her speaking lines had all been cut.

About 5 years ago, I looked for her unsuccessfully. Google presented me only with countless sites referring to Fame. When I called my music school, I was informed that she no longer taught there and that they only keep records from 10 years back.

This morning, however, with her image fresh in my mind, I tried Google again and found this:

The New York Times Obituaries, published: November 21, 1992

Ilse Sass, a pianist and voice teacher, died on Wednesday at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. She was 84 years old and lived in New York City

She died of a pulmonary embolism, said her sister, Leine Seligmann.

Miss Sass was born in Cologne, Germany, and studied at the music conservatory there. She taught piano for many years at the Henry Street Settlement and taught voice for 20 years at Juilliard and at the Manhattan School of Music.

She gave concerts for the blind and worked with blind singers. She also appeared as a piano teacher in the movie "Fame."

Her sister is her only survivor.

Miss Sass had an astonishing gift for transposition. Her hands were always cold, heavily veined, and when not at the piano, she always wore knit gloves. She was convinced that I was a coloratura soprano and bullied me into pushing my upper range ever higher. She was the one who first told me that Mozart loved his sopranos. No matter how horribly I sang a piece, she would let me finish my first run-through before then breaking it down. She had me sing lying flat on the floor so I could feel and hear the effect of posture, she made me sing at a candle flame to learn control. She loved Paganini, had a bust of him on the mantel of the fireplace in her teaching studio, and being childless, she saw all of her students as her family.

When I was in Hong Kong, I took voice lessons from MH, my first vocal coach since Miss Sass. This was after more than a decade of attempting to retrain my voice to better suit that 3-pack-a-day sound so desired by a cappella singing groups. MH pronounced me an Alto and that was the end of it, except for one day when he had me doing vocal exercises and he heard something he didn't expect in my upper range. "Do that again, and let's keep going higher," he said to me.

"Were you once trained, REALLY trained, as a soprano?" He asked me, with surprise.

That pleased me; Miss Sass had left a recognizable mark on me.

I start my fast this weekend, but tonight, when I am out with my friends, I'll toast to Miss Ilse Sass. She should be remembered.

And she will be.

Mi Ze Hidlik

I remember recording this - we were on stage standing in our socks so there would be no sound of our shoes against the wooden floor.

And yet there's applause at the end...

SK, VH, KD: Help me out here - the version that made it onto the CD - was it our live performance in the holiday concert? Or did the engineers splice the applause from the concert to the end of the "recording" version? I'm fairly certain we wore our shoes for the actual performance? Or was the shoe-issue not relevant here because we were simply standing in place for this song?

So many questions.

But regardless, memory tells its own story and I remember us shoeless, brave, and almost entirely on key.

Home For Christmas

AL once described my family as a bunch of cats. Upon seeing each other after a long absence, we touch noses, sniff a bit, then proceed to completely ignore each other - unless one of us does something very interesting, in which case, the rest of us will come over to watch for a short while before wandering off again.

Christmas, though, being a special holiday, sees a few other elements.

Over Christmas Eve dinner, after my mother and I finish arguing about her dissertation or religion or politics or music or my haircut, my father tells his joke. Always the same one. And I haven't the slightest idea why he whips it out only at Christmas, with no apparent recognition that he's told the joke many times before. And what KILLS me, is that he tells it WRONG, every time.

Daddy: Gorbachev has a long one, Bush has a short one, and the Pope has one but doesn't use it. What is it?
Me: (Playing along, but cringing inside) What, Daddy?
Daddy: A penis!
Me: Er, I think the punchline is "a last name."
Daddy: No! It's a PENIS! GET it?!?
Me: *sigh*

But then after the dishes are cleared, I sit at the piano and accompany my father while he sings Moon River in an untrained yet remarkably beautiful baritone, and my mother sits nearby, closes her eyes, and smiles.

And that's when I think that perhaps I wasn't adopted after all.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!