Dynasty

One of my Tanglewood colleagues invited me to a recital the other night. She attended a music camp up the road for a great deal of her youth and, now that her sister's string quartet is in residence and her mother is teaching there and her father is teaching at Tanglewood, their family actually gets to see each other for the summer. Her parents were giving a concert with Lucy Shelton, a (mostly) new music soprano at whose feet I have worshipped from afar for quite some time, so there was no way that I could refuse. We dashed to her car just after supper and made the drive through what seemed like middle of nowhere Massachusetts, up the mountain toward Greenwood and she related stories of her childhood and early youth as a young musician, both parents teaching and older sister as a professional string player, caught in this tug of war between going into the family business or not. Another one of my friends was sitting in the back seat and, as his father was an 80s pop star and went on to do quite a bit of work in music both theatrical and popular, he was under a great deal of pressure to do the same. Both of them struggled with this but eventually succumbed. It was interesting to hear them talk about this family of musicians phenomena. A lot of my colleagues come from musical families - mom was a piano teacher or dad played violin or both their parents were singers or one was a composer and the other was a bassoon player. You get the picture. As I was listening to Abby talk about the summers she spent at music camp and the pieces that were commissioned for her and her father, I couldn't help but feel jealous. And then I felt bad for feeling jealous.

It is no one's fault that my parents are not musicians. It is no one's fault that my performing career has not made the circuit back down toward the homeland. And it is no one's fault that my parents are too busy or otherwise occupied or interested in spending their vacation time actually on vacation instead of coming to see me perform. It is no one's fault. I tell myself this regularly.

But it gets hard sometimes when you're on the phone with your grandmother and she wants to see you and you can't really tell her when you're coming to visit. And your mother-in-law is really ill and you're away at a festival so instead of spending the 36 hours that you and your husband have together sitting on the lawn with wine and listening to the BSO play Mahler, you're going to spend it looking at calendars and talking through the logistics of travel and care for the dog. And when you find yourself suddenly up to your eyeballs in deep conversation with Christine Ebersole about the incredibly complicated existence that is wife and daughter and singer and (maybe someday we'll see) mother and even she, who has managed to have this amazing Tony-winning career and a husband and kids and pets and film and stage, has no answers to the problems that are presented. It gets hard.

So I'm sitting in this amazing recital with Lucy Shelton emoting out of every cell and having a marvelous time, singing barefoot in this adorable recital hall up on the mountain in Massachusetts, the night air blowing in through the screen doors, the sky so dark that you can actually see the stars and there isn't even a prayer of cell phone signal so don't even bother, and I'm enjoying myself so immensely when I'm hit over the head with these huge waves of jealousy and emptiness. I will never do recitals with my parents. I will never be able to spend one lucky summer where we're all in the same place doing what it is that we love to do, that our entire family loves to do. And even though my two friends are talking about what a bittersweet and sometimes uncomfortable existence it is with parents who are musicians, I envy them their discomfort. What must it be like to say to your parents, "I'm going to New York to do twelve auditions this week, I really hope that the pianist doesn't poop all over my first aria," and for them to say back, "Well even if they do, you just lead with your consonants and sing as beautifully and freely as you can. Most of the people casting opera these days are executives so don't forget to wear the dress that shows off your legs, and say hi to so-and-so at the festival, we played all those concerts back in the day when your mother and I were in residence and there was that awful conductor who had a comb-over."

Most of this is fantasy and embroidered with my own longings. I wish my father and I had more in common than DNA, OCD and James Taylor. I wish my parents wouldn't call me and ask me for the nineteenth time, "So what EXACTLY is it that you're doing out at Tanglewood? We can't find your name on any of the programs. And you're not getting paid? Oh." Because it makes me want to vomit into my shoes. The nice ones that I wear for concerts. The concerts for which I'm not getting paid.

I'm a lucky girl. I have a sweet husband who's on his way here even as I type this rant, I have an amazing dog whose tail goes round and round when he sees me, I have a career that seems to be taking off, and I have really comfy running shoes that keep me from losing my mind when I'm just about to. So please know that I am grateful for everything that I do have, even when I take up much more paragraph space talking about what I don't have. It's one of those days.