Back by popular demand.....

My darling friend Nicole intimated that it's been a while since my last post and, in keeping with her track record, she is not wrong. I've been quite busy in the last few weeks, coming back to Boston, back to back concerts, and getting ready for the great house hunt that began on Saturday and is continuing even as I type. Cross your fingers that we don't end up in the ghetto.

Something that's been on my mind a lot lately - respect. How do we define the respect that we give others, our spouses, friends, family, colleagues, etc. Returning home to Boston, a lot of my conservatory friends asked me how the program in Seattle was. Anyone who has read my blog has a pretty fair idea of how I feel about my experience in Seattle, but a few weeks' distance affords me a little more perspective. What did I go there to accomplish? Husband and I said that the purpose of going to this program was to 1. get management 2. get work and 3. better my craft. Done, done and done. I know that I did a lot of bitching and whining and crying over how I didn't make the friends I wanted to or how I didn't get included in the cool kids' table, but safe in the warmth of my office with my dog asleep on the rug, I can say that it all comes down to respect. You either respect yourself or you don't. You either respect your art or you don't. And you either respect the work or you don't.

My mom is a superwoman. She went back to school when I was a senior in college to start her bachelor's degree and pushed, full steam ahead, through her undergrad and masters with a 4.0 at the end of everything and then went straight into her first accounting job, and started studying for the CPA exam. And even though Miss Jean gets on my nerves, as I know I get on hers, I have a tremendous amount of respect for my mom.

My piano teacher is also a superwoman. She suffered a huge blow about eight years ago with a nerve disorder that left two fingers on her right hand unusable as a pianist. Many people would have closed up shop and taken up scrapbooking. What did she do? After many rounds of physical and drug therapy, she re-learned how to play the piano with eight fingers and came back to play my masters' recital. And with eight fingers she wipes the floor with many pianists who still have all ten. The Divine Dr. L is an ass-kicker of phenomenal proportions.

My husband is also an ass-kicker of phenomenal proportions. He has supported this insane opera career of mine for the last four years, packing lunches and suitcases and driving me to and from the airport and coming to concerts and helping me not lose my mind when I want to kill the people I work with. And he's put together a career of working for non-profit music schools (is there such a thing as a for-profit music school?) who desperately need the kind of energetic organization and innovation that he provides, expanding and revamping the music program at his church (even if by force, says I), and organizing and rehearsing concerts of his own music in his 'spare' time. Show me a musician who has spare time and I'll give you a shiny new nickel.

*Shameless plug - go to his website and listen to the sound files from last week's concert. Go now. I will wait here for you.*

Back now? Good.

What do these people have in common, other than that they're on speed dial in my telephone? I have tremendous respect for these people and many others that I've talked about in the last few years on this blog. And it's not just that they respect themselves and their art (my mother will tell you accounting is an art and, since I don't have the experience in that field, I defer to her). Most of all, they respect the work. And because they respect the work, they are in turn respected by their colleagues. This is what I want from my career. I want to respect the art and the work enough to continue to fuel the drive that makes me practice and research and read and explore. I want my kids to tell their friends that their parents are ass-kickers and takers of names. I want to come home from work exhausted from working well and working hard. And I want to still love it as much as I do now.

Things work out, you know. The truth is always the easiest path. It's less complicated to be yourself. All those cliche nuggets of wisdom that your parents told you, they're true. And I know that I'll get upset again when I have to work with someone who doesn't respect the work. I just have to remind myself that I get to come home to the husband and the house and the dog. And so long as I'm faithful to the work, the work will be faithful to me. The rest is, in the words of Alex Ross, "just noise."