Don't fence me in

A prologue and cautionary note: This is not about singing. This is about singers, not for the faint of heart or stomach. It is, for the most part, unedited.

I've been thinking a lot about boundaries. We spend most of our young lives trying to break out of the boundaries that our mostly well-intentioned parents put up to protect us from the world, ourselves, those who might do us harm. We go through these sudden and disorienting periods of growth where our hormones and emotions tear us asunder and force us to redefine who we thought we were and who we're going to be, and then as soon as we think we've got it figured out, someone turns the egg timer over and it all starts again. Like sands through the hourglass and all that. So are the days of our bullshit.

It extends into our career. Pick a major, pick an instrument, hell pick two or three, pick a style of music you'd like to play and/or sing. Pick a genre. You think you can specialize? No, you can't sing this or that, it doesn't fit with your fach. And don't even think about belting honey, you'll ruin your top singing that poison, just put it down and step away slowly. Come towards me and my 24 Italian hit parade book. You're going to be an opera singer, a recitalist, an oratorio singer, a crossover avant garde chamber ensemble singer who can whistle and tap dance and play the crotales and float a pianissimo Bflat at the same time. You're going to sing what you're supposed to sing until you're not supposed to sing it anymore and then you'll sing some other stuff that you're not ready to sing yet. We have a five-year plan for you.

I'm a type-A person. This surprises no one. I like to label my file folders, my emails, my boxes and my schedule. I enjoy order and will only be parted from my planner by means of physical force. I put little sticky notes in my aria books with the titles of the arias I'm doing and colored tabs in my scores that indicate which character I'm singing. But I've been trying to repress that J part of my Myers-Briggs personality profile that stands for Judging. Keep an open mind, don't move too fast, shut your mouth before you say something stupid or even worse, truthful. No one likes a know-it-all. This lesson I learned early in life - don't raise your hand too often. Even if no one else knows the answer - especially if no one else knows the answer, or wants to hear the answer. No one wants to know that you've written papers on this subject or are doing a critical study on this piece or that you've worked on that piece with the composer and this is what he said. Don't let on that you might be too intelligent - it scares people off, makes them feel weird.

What does this have to do with a Cole Porter song, you might ask?

Recently, the young artists had a meeting with the PR department. We were asked to put together a bio and update our headshot, if it was necessary, and also to consider the ramifications of certain photos and information that are readily available on the internet. (Read: if you have photos of yourself doing kegstands up on Facebook, now might be an opportune time to remove them) I have resigned myself to the idea that my image, public and private, will be under scrutiny should this elusive beast called a career actually come to fruition. I will have to shake hands and smile and do exactly as I'm told by scores of people who are both more and less qualified to stand at the foot of the stage and move us around in trajectories that they deem artistic. I have no problem with this. I've experimented with stage direction but will happily defer to those who have more experience and know-how than I. I used to coach people but don't do that so much anymore, same with accompanying. I am a singer. Singing is my business, my occupation, my job.

So I found myself slightly nonplussed when one of my colleagues let it slip that, in my absence, I am referred to by said colleagues as "The Professor." I acknowledge that this particular moniker, likely appropriate given my current student status in the notorious doctoral program about which I have written so much, is relatively benign. But my question, dear readers, is this:
While the words are benign, is the sentiment?

I have long maintained that the nation in which I live will not have an academic as a president for one simple reason: people fear the educated. They fear the big words and the complex sentence structure and the literary references. Instead, they elevate the mediocre with descriptors such as "down to earth" and "plain-spoken." My description of our exceptionally mediocre national leader would require more patience than I possess at this very moment, so we'll return to the point. After this little slip of the tongue, I confirmed my suspicions by casually mentioning my nickname to another colleague who seemed to think it was marvelous and appropriate. "Librarian Spice," a nickname that I found rather endearing and humorous, was discarded owing to the fact that I am (as this colleague pointed out) neither a librarian nor a spice.

I live with lovely people in a neighborhood with their three dogs. It is what could easily be considered a 'trendy' neighborhood in which boutique clothing shops spring up like crocuses and unique restaurants are to be found on every block. I work out at a small, locally-owned gym that offers a few different kinds of pilates as well as belly dancing, around the corner from the local cupcake bakery that calls to me with the promise of red velvet cupcakes. I wake up around the same time every morning, eat my breakfast of Cheerios and milk, listen to NPR as I'm getting ready, catch the bus down to work in enough time to arrive at least 20 minutes early even if the bus is running late, and work on a blanket I'm knitting. On the way home, I get off the bus in front of the gym. I do my routine, and then I walk home. I am a creature of structure and habit. I don't go to the bar and get loaded on work nights - not because I don't need a drink after six hours of staging rehearsal, believe me when I say I do. I don't go because I get dehydrated easily and I need to sing most every day of the week. So cocktail hour is usually out. I don't party much because I'm married and my husband is across the continent. I don't experiment with recreational or prescription drugs because my cardiologist told me not to at a very early age and I listened. I am, in short, a very boring singer whose fun factor is even more diminished because I refuse to endanger my marriage or my health simply to socialize.

I am a very determined, very focused, and ferociously lonely boring singer. Which is why I am at home on Saturday night writing on my blog about how I am still angry. I am still angry that there are people with whom I share my days - people for whom I have cooked and with whom I have worked and traveled - who know me so little that they can put me in this box, this claustrophobic box in which I now know my place. I am the person to whom you turn when you need something translated. I am the person you call when trying to find that obscure French aria that exists in nineteen different editions. I am the person you ask for extra copies of said weird aria because you know I have them. I am the designated driver. I am the designated academic. Which has nothing to do with my artistry or my work ethic or that I derive enormous pleasure from costume fittings because for the first time in my life I get to be a pretty pretty princess.

But it has EVERYTHING to do with Judging.

My stomach is turning, even now as I write this, and I can feel my eyes prickling with the tears of rage that make me want to sit down and put my Type-A, J for Judging personality to use and construct a matrix of inadequacies that give voice to everything I'm thinking. I am furious and tremendously sad at the same time. I am in eighth grade all over again, left out because I'm too smart to be cool and too square to be fun. I feel you judging me, even from across the lake.
And worse, I feel my inner eighth-grader asking, "Couldn't you do this to make yourself easier to be around? Couldn't you just shut your mouth and not let them know you're a doctoral student? Couldn't you please oh please just go to their party and get drunk so they will like us?"

But worst of all, thousands of miles away from the ones I love, when I'm low and tired and bordering on ill, I feel my character starting to budge. Maybe just a few drinks. Maybe if I make nice or ask them if they want to come over. I'll buy groceries and I'll cook, just please come and be nice to me. Just for a little while. And that's when the big J in my personality hits me the hardest. How dare you cave to this frivolity? When we've worked so long and hard on becoming Someone, a real Someone, and you would sell that so cheaply? Not a chance, sister.
Not on this big J for Judgment's watch. Tonight you go to sleep alone, sober and pumped full of medicine and vitamins and you will sleep well and late and tomorrow you will eat healthy and practice and go to the gym and make progress on that blanket because babies are getting born left and right. And when it's all said and done, you will still be lonely. But at least you'll still be you.

So to those who would happily put me in the box and label me, I tell them to back the fuck off because I'm not done growing yet. Like the song says:

"Send me off forever but I ask you please, don't fence me in."

EDIT: I was a big chicken and didn't publish this right away, but that pesky RSS feed outed me anyway. Go with the gut, says the old man, go with the gut. So I'm a-goin. But I leave you with this quote that founds its way to me (via Christine Ebersole's blog).

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” --Marianne Williamson--