As my book addiction continues...

Hey there world! Aren’t we all loving all these updates? Ah, I have so many news so let’s get to them. I don’t know if I mentioned but I did get into the Vancouver Community College, YAY ME! Unfortunately I won’t be able to go this year because of many reasons. But on a happy note I did start having classes with my voice teacher again last week and so I feel very well looked after. Gosh I had no idea of how much I missed her, she’s so much more than a coach, she’s really one of the most precious friends I have, plus she has such a wonderful soul. Anyway my voice sounds like crap because I haven’t vocalized properly for the past months but it will heal in due time.

My birthday is this Thursday and I’m actually going to spend it in São Paulo because I have a voice lesson. I’m going to be 24 and wow, suddenly I feel kinda old, twenty freaking four.

This weekend I did an experiment and went on the famous ‘balada’, that’s the dance clubs here in Brazil. It was nice, I guess. The music kinda irritated me, you see you would have about 30 seconds of the tunes you know and love and sing along to followed by 5 minutes of electronic nonsense. Hey, I’m a very open minded person when it comes to music but that electronic crap is just fucking dumb. How am I supposed to dance to something that doesn’t touch me? Mind you that I did ingest alcohol so my senses were slightly off and still I could not get into the vibe everyone else seemed to be so hooked on. I guess I’m just picky, I know that there are some great (gay) ‘baladas’ which actually play normal music, those awesome 90’s songs and pop songs that I really like so that’s where I wanna go from now on. Plus I was a bit shocked at how the majority of the girls were dressed. Some of them seriously looked like hookers, real time prostitutes plus they were so young. I guess you are thinking I’m picky and old fashioned but I myself was wearing a rather short dress but nothing compared to the extremely high heels (which I find extremely stupid for one to wear at a dance club that has no place whatsoever for you to to sit), butt length mini dresses, shorts and skirts, with the occasional crop top, I seriously felt like a nun. I’m amazed that young women think that this is sexy, exposing SO much of their bodies, I find it extremely vulgar. But anyways, I’m not going to solve the problems of the world nonetheless the lack of self respect most young women in that club have with this post.

In other news I did overdo a little bit last week at the book store buying the grand total of 9 new books. I know I have a disease, I’m a shopaholic. So that’s what I want to dedicate this post of today for, to talk about the 9 books I bought that I haven’t read yet (I did start reading one and I’m already halfway through it, I’ll save the best for last)

As my Agatha Christie obsession continues I cannot seem to be able to walk into a place and not buy if not one of her books. When I went to the supermarket for groceries last week I bought two. The Pale Horse, I do believe they used this story for the series Marple (which is a TV series for Miss Marple the sweet old lady who solves mysteries better than any police detective) but the original one does not involve my mother’s favorite bird watching old lady. For this series (as well as Poirot) they do get some of the stories Christie wrote that don’t involve Poirot or Marple and adapt it inserting either of them. But as for the book it’s apparently set on a country side village in England (aren’t they all?) where the vicar has been assassinated and suddenly many people start getting sick. Intriguing hun? Plus it features one of my favorite sidekicks, Ariadne Oliver who is a detective stories novelist always in search of new inspiration.

Then I bought Towards Zero, mind you both of them are in Portuguese. I don’t really like reading translations because normally they are very badly done but I find that whoever translates Agatha Christie for Portuguese is a standing out exception. Just like Pale Horse they also used this story for the series Marple but the original does not feature her but a Scotland Yard detective named Battle.

When I went to Livraria Cultura last Thursday with far too much time in my hands I got another Christie book but this time in the original language. My collection actually varies from Harper editions bought in the US to 60’s and 70’s editions both in Portuguese and English that belonged to my mother to the L&PM Pocket ones in Portuguese. Ordeal by Innocence was something I had been wanting to read for a while. You see I had this friend who was crazy about Agatha Christie and after he passed away his mom gave away his books to several friends and I picked out a big hard covered one called Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks. This is the sort of book that you have to be a real big fan of Agatha Christie to read and it only makes sense if you are familiar with all her stories which are MANY. So I had read every single one of the books mentioned in the first chapter (before each chapter you have a list of the books you must have read to truly understand it) but one, Ordeal by Innocence so there you have it!

Christie aside let’s turn our attention to another lady author I adore. I don’t know if I ever mentioned here but I do LOVE to cook! Ah, it’s one of the utmost joys of my life, I love to go out to buy the ingredients, selecting them one by one, making the dish all by myself while singing opera and then eating it and most importantly feeding the ones I love. And one of my favorite modern novels is in fact Julie & Julia, it inspired the movie with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. So in this spending spree I was resolute in getting a recipe book. But the thing with recipe books is that I can only get them in Portuguese because of the ingredients, many ingredients in recipes from American books are simply not sold in Brazil so it becomes quite frustrating.

I actually had my mind set on buying Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking because it’s so iconic but the store did not have it. What they did have was a ‘sort of’ translation of those two books called A Arte Culinária de Julia Child (which I roughly translate to Julia Child’s Art of Cooking). I’ve decided that just like Julie I’ll be making every single recipe in that book, already got the ingredients for the first soup in the book.

And then I spotted something that I have a very strong feeling I only bought because it had a beautiful picture of Meryl Streep on the cover in a French market all smiley faced and ‘oh, it’s so good to live in France’. It’s called Minha Vida na França (My Life in France) and it’s a memoires book written by Julia Child about her life in France.

I also got a very thin looking edition of The Great Gatsby because I haven’t seen the movie and apparently everyone knows the story but me. I only bought the thin version because all the others had very ugly covers and I so did not want to own a book with Leonardo DiCaprio’s face on the cover. It’s bad enough that I have a book that has Kristen Steward’s face on it and you all know what I’m talking about.

Moving on toward the a more modern sort of literature but always sticking to female writers I bought the book that originated one of my favorite TV series, Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell. It’s so odd to think that when I was younger and first saw this show I was so sure I was just like Charlotte. But now I feel more inclined to agree with Samantha in most things, I wish I had her balls though, she is one self confident lady, but I do have her drive.

Then I got Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophia Kinsella because let’s face it, story of my life, right? And I love the movie, it’s so lovely! Although I do know that the original story is actually set in London other than New York City.

And last but most definitely not least book I got was Fifty Shades of Gray by E.L. James. I have been hearing so much buzz about this book for such a long time that curiosity finally won over after I read the first page. After I left the bookstore I went to a close by Starbucks and started reading it, well, more like devouring it. Very early on you can tell that the book is a page turner and as a matter of fact quite amusing!

For those of you who don’t know, Fifty Shades of Gray actually started out as an adult fanfiction about Twilight. The author then got inspired to write her own story based in both her fantasies and in the fantasies of many, many women around the world. The book was a sellout phenomenon, at one point it was selling one copy per second, per fucking second!

It tells this story about a girl named Anastasia (I find that name gorgeous) who is just graduating college. She’s rather insecure and is the romantic Austen book and a cup of tea kind of girl. I find it interesting how there is very little actual description of how she looks, she’s a burnet, fair skinned, average body, messy haircut but that’s about it. I do find that rather brilliant because that makes it SO easy for the reader to imagine herself living through Anastasia.

So she’s agreed to help out her flat mate who got sick and can’t make it to interview this big shot company owner so she goes in her place. Anastasia expects Christian Gray to be a 40 year old man but is socked when she comes face to face with a young twenty something year old Greek God. Handsome, graceful, hot as hell and completely full of himself. You would think she would act extremely meek and shy around him but she actually makes quite bold remarks like “You sound like a control freak” and “So you wanna possess things” You are a control freak.

He’s intrigued by her and starts pursuing her, he asks her out and she’s most of time like “Is this even real? What the hell can he possibly want with me?”. As they get to know each other more and more and liking each other more and more Christian decides to show Ana what he’s into and how all his ‘relationships work’. He’s into BDSM which stands for bondage/discipline, dominance/submission and sadism/masochism, so he likes to tie up his partners and have his wicked way with them. But don’t worry because it’s all consensual, that’s the fun for him to have the person want to be in this situation, to make the person want to be in this situation.

Needless to say that Ana is mortified because she fell for this guy and to make matters worse he wants her to sign this contract that dictates how she has to live her life basically while she is his ‘submissive’. But, the thing is, there is a catch, because Christian also starts falling for her so he bends every single rule in his book to please her. Plus Ana has her protestations in regards to many things in that contract and changes most of them so we are really left with the sexy part and none of that real heavy stuff.

I haven’t finished yet, have about 150 pages to go. Plus it’s a trilogy so I plan on finishing it by Thursday so I can buy the other two then when I go to São Paulo. I did not expect to like this book but I did, it’s fun, it’s funny, it’s very believable in a sense that the heroin is of flesh and blood and could be just anyone which I think is one of the main ingredients of the success of the book. Yes, it does have rather detailed descriptions of their sexual adventures but that doesn’t bother me not even a bit. I mean, I have been reading fanfiction for the past 10 years so I’m more than used to this kind of stuff. And something that delighted me was the fact that the author is really one of those everyday people who writes great stuff for fanfiction and all of the sudden she’s a published author selling millions of books! I did also see a lot of writers scold her work and say it’s garbage and it’s porn and I find that so silly and it's an extreme contradiction since everybody has sex, so what’s the harm in writing about it? We’re in the 21st century for crying out loud!

  

Well so far so good with 50 Shades of Gray, I love it that the name comes of a line Christian says to her about him being 50 shades of fucked up. As I said it’s a very funny book and very hot might I add, especially since now I know that the guy playing Christian is Jamie Dornan, aka the Huntsman from Once Upon a Time. 

there we have it, the collection! 

And so that's it! I think that for my next post I'll be retelling my last day in NYC from February that I haven't covered yet. Dang that was a fun day! Cheers all!

The Dream Book Club!

Hey world! What did I say? Here I am, posting again! I’ve been having a pretty good and busy week and although it’s only Wednesday it kind of feels like Friday because tomorrow is a holiday here in Brazil.

We just had one for Easter last week and we got Friday and Monday off so I was able to go on a trip with my best friends. I had a wonderful time, we went to this seaside town called Maresias that very differently from my own seaside hometown is basically a tourist town. That’s great because almost everything about the town is about making your stay as pleasant and comfortable as possible. My friend’s parents have a beautiful house there and that’s where all of us (16 people) stayed. We had a MAGICAL bonfire at the beach, my friend Paula brought her guitar and we sang the night away while eating all the kinds of fruit you can possibly imagine. The moon came out at exactly 9 in the evening and since we were only relying on firelight we could see all of it and all the stars in all their majesty, it was one of the most beautiful things I EVER saw. We also went to the beach, rode on the “banana boat” (fucking awesome), and went to the swimming pool where they had a water slide that we simply dominated. The children there were upset but do I look like I care about their feelings?   

Well, I’m writing this post because I wanted to update the blog more often and not only with opera stuff and not only with gigantic posts. I just finished reading the most endearing book and I wanted to talk about it a little bit.

The book has nothing to do with opera but it has everything to do with two of my great passions, romance and reading. It’s called “The Jane Austen Book Club” by Karen Joy Fowler and I read the whole thing in 5 days. I’m not a very healthy reader, if I really like the book and am truly intrigued by the plot and the characters I devour it! The bad part about it is that, just like a really intense and passionate fling you might have, it ends only too quickly. I ended reading it today while I was doing my physical therapy. I get very nervous and agitated while doing activities that don’t engage my mind, like squeezing a ball 15 times for 10 seconds, so I always try and do something else while engaging in these stupid activities (you should have seen me yesterday cutting tape pieces for my dad and trying to read at the same time).

Anyways I ended reading it in the middle of my shock session and I felt like crying! I’m such an emotional idiot but I kind of grew attached to the characters and kind of wanted to continue to get an inside scoop to their personal lives.

The plot is rather simple, Jocelyn decides to start a book club only to discuss the six novels written by Jane Austen. Jocelyn is almost 50 and unmarried, she brews dogs and has them do those dog competitions things and is a control freak and I suspect also a cleaning freak too. She invites to join her in her book club plans her very best friend since they were both 10, Sylvia. They are the same age but Sylvia is married with three children who are all grown up and have lives of their own. Just recently Sylvia’s husband, Daniel, asked for a divorce after almost 30 years that they had been together. Also joining the group we have a slightly older friend of Jocelyn's called Bernadette who has been married countless times and counts herself quite happy. Pruddie is the youngest, about 28, she’s happily married and teaches French for high schoolers. Allegra, who is a bit older than Pruddie, was only invited because she’s Sylvia’s daughter and quite frankly she was the character I least liked of all the main characters. And last but most certainly not least Jocelyn invited a lovely gentleman named Grigg to join them in the hope that he could set him up with Sylvia.

Six people, six books and six meetings. It’s funny because nothing astronomical happens during that specific time but the narrative (for each chapter it falls into one of these main characters) does loads of time leaps and narrates the lives of all of them. That was what made the book so goddamn addictive. I felt specially drawn to Jocelyn’s and Sylvia’s stories when they were younger and also Grigg’s back story. It’s a very feminine book because it pounders so much on the thoughts of 5 women and one man who was raised in a house that contained 4 females.

Contrary to what you might expect they don’t pounder upon Jane Austen all the time. It is brought up in healthy dosages but in no way it’s a rewrite of Jane Austen. It’s like a book illustrating the women whose lives Jane Austen has touched with her writing, real women with real problems. And also it’s about happiness, the pursuit of it, the realization of it and the loss of it. And if you haven’t read all of the six Jane Austen books or none of them it really doesn’t matter, they really serve as a background for their conversations and the plotline.

I came to an odd realization reading this book. I became quite upset about the whole divorce situation with Sylvia, especially after reading her story with her husband and I felt really bad for her, he left her. But there’s something quite odd underneath that, because, this is quite weird to explain but I’ll try. Her husband’s name is Daniel and I don’t know, I’ve always had a weird thing about that name. I’ve met my fair share of Daniels, I’ve already had a big crush on one, idolized another even picked it out from a very early age to be my child’s name. And I always seem to sympathize with every single Daniel I meet or even characters with that name, so I just couldn’t hate him. I was rooting for him to come back to Sylvia more than I was rooting for Allegra to be all right when she feel and was sent to the hospital. And also even though this Daniel from this book is about 50 the mental picture I had of him looked like Noah Bean (here’s a picture), his name was Daniel in the two things I ever saw him in, and you just can’t hate that face!

Anyways, yeah, I’m weird like that I guess but it’s a great book. They made a movie out of it but I haven’t seen it yet. So that’s it for today! I’ll see you guys soon, I’m taking my little sis to the movies tonight! Peace!

Big Opera Wins

Although we are still going through a lot of manifestations all over Brazil I think I should take a break on the subject here. Anyways I’m not up to speed to what’s actually going on right now because I had a pretty busy weekend, only that on Wednesday they did lower the prices on public transportation here in São Paulo and at Rio but the protests didn’t stop.

ReJoyce

First I’d just like to announce that the picture me and ma sista took for Joyce and Me was selected as a finalist! YES! Oh Gods and here comes how I found out. I was on my way to my singing lesson and my teacher’s 14 year old cat had died just the day before so I bought her some flowers. And as I boarded the subway my opera bff called me FREAKING OUT and I just knew it, I just knew that it had happened, that she had chosen my picture. I was so happy and he was also hysterical over the phone and I started crying out of sheer happiness and the people on the subway stared, A LOT. It was quite a sight to see, me holding flowers in one hand and the phone on another with my sunglasses but it was perceptible that I was crying and making the strangest sounds, well that’s me in a nutshell!

Well I was also very happy because Joyce selected pictures from many a number of my twitter friends, so we’ll all be in REJOYCE togetha! Awesome! And as I promised a couple of weeks ago, here is the picture me and Dani took for Joyce. We were going for the Cenerentola/Cendrillon thing.

But now I don’t know what’s going to happen, I mean there are 45 finalists and I’m guessing not all can be in the CD. And Joyce doesn’t say anything, it’s been a week already and I don’t know and I’m nervous!

DON’T LEAVE YOUR CREDICT CARD WITH ME

I had a sort of spending spree madness this week. Everything just looked so cheap to me and I had to buy it. I spend about R$200,00 which would be like a little less than $100,00. But I bought TWO dictionaries, TWO books and THREE cds.

Well, turns out, that some major CD/DVD/Book stores here in Brazil are just like Macy’s after all! If you look superficially everything seems expensive, but when you dig a little deeper, and that might take a few hours, you find a mine of gold. That’s what happened last Sunday to me, I actually went to this Mega Store to buy the sequel to “The Devil Wears Prada” book, “Revenge Wears Prada” and was very disappointed to learn that the book wasn’t in any of their stores yet.

Then I went to the music books section with my expectations hitting the layers of the earth and at first I wasn’t surprised that their so called “music books” consisted mainly of rock stars biographies. But to find the good stuff you have to quite literally get to your knees, and that’s what I did and ended up finding The Eyewitness Opera Guide, which I already have. But then I found a series of books by a Brazilian author called Lauro Machado Coelho (who I just learned is a very good friend of my singing teacher) and each book tacked one type of opera by country, sometimes composer, sometimes period in history! So before I knew it I had Italian Romantic Opera and Italian Baroque Opera in my grasp, but then I found The Operas by Richard Strauss on sale and let everything go.

Then I went to the CDs floor, the so called “Classics” section was filled with Andrea Bocceli, Sarah Brightman, Katherine Jenkins, Il Volo and all that sort of “classical music”, but again I diged and found DIVA DIVO! YAY! For R$30,00 (that would be like $15, Amazon price, hello?) And since I already have it I got it for my best friend as a birthday gift. I also found Anna Netrebko’s Live at the Metropolitan Opera cd for R$9,99! (that’s like $5!) plus her Pergolesi Stabat Mater with Marianna Pizzolato and Tony Pappano!

 

AND I convinced my good friend Caio (he went with me to watch the Live in HD of Rigoletto) to buy The Art of Renée Fleming. And I went to his place for dinner just last night and he told me he absolutely loved it and we listened to it all night long!

I was very happy with my purchases, apart from the fact that I didn’t get what I went there for in the first place. So today I went to another book store, even bigger, HUGE bookstore, I love this book store. It’s called Livraria Cultura and they have the most impressive books in English department. It’s really big and they have all sorts of books all in English, they didn’t have “The Devil Wears Prada” though, but they did have “Revenge Wears Prada”. But then again, you gotta dig in there to find affordable prices; most of the things I wanted were abusively expensive.

Well then I made a big mistake, I let myself be led to the music department and there I found just what I was looking for: Offenbach’s La Belle Helene the Zurich production with Vesselina Kasarova and Handel’s Alcina the Vienna production with Anja Harteros and Vesselina Kasarova, they were so ridiculously expensive that I don’t even have the courage to post the prices here, but I was very disappointed. But then the language department was having a sale and what do we opera singers wannabes need more than anything in the world? DICTIONARIES! I already have a fantastic dictionary for German but lacked my Italian and French, problem solved, got two from Oxford that I trust is an excellent publisher.  

Lighting Management

On other news, I’m performing much these past couple of weeks but I’ve been in the theatre a LOT. I’m helping my friends in my hometown theatre group by operating the lightings for their fantastic new and completely original play called “The Box”. It’s your typical ridiculous comedy but with very smart humor, I mean by that that we have Harry Potter jokes. It’s a lot of fun, I’m actually quite happy to be working not on stage because if I was on stage I would probably crack up all the time because they keep on making up dialogues and they just get funnier and funnier.

Ah well, I guess that’s it! I’ve been watching a lot of Poirot lately too, you gotta love Agatha Christie. Cheers everyone!

The Inner Voice by Renée Fleming (part1)

As many of you know, I took advantage of the fact I was spending 3 weeks in the US and ordered quite a big number of things on Amazon. And one of them was the book “The Inner Voice” by the exquisite Renée Fleming which two friends of mine had recommended. The book is fantastic, as Renée herself says it’s a biography of the life of her voice, and what a story. You don’t think someone has been through so much stuff, even in her prime, when you see her own the show as Thäis.

The book is divided in 13 chapters that tell her story chronologically. From the first called Family in which she talks about her childhood and growing up with not one but two musician parents. She starts out by telling us how she fell in love with singing in the most dreamlike of situations her parents were singing Porgy and Bess duets and their voices were being carried out to the streets and the neighbors came to the house to listen to them sing. And soon everyone was there and her mother sang Puccini and the crowd went wild. And this is awesome I gotta quote her :

“Finally, it was over, and the thrilled and exhausted neighbors wandered back to their own houses, and my parents sent us to bed.  I was Eliza Doolittle, too excited to sleep. I was the luckiest girl in the world to have parents that other people marveled at, to live in the center of such singing.”

Even though it didn’t really happen like that as she points out right after this quotation, but I found it quite magical. And the fact that she was actually quite shy and kind of a goodie pants was quite surprising for me too. But one thing I liked is the fact that she considers herself an eternal student, always learning and wanting to know more, which I think is so important not just for artists but for everyone. The eternal search for knowledge of any kind is essential for any human being who wants to evolve, the moment you stop and say “I know enough now, I don’t need to learn anything anymore” you might as well give up. But I’m getting off track here, back to the book.

Then in Education she tells us about her college experiences and how very fortunate she was to get a singing teacher who had the time to coach her several times a week during a long number of hours. And how really she began building her technique and ‘tuning’ her instrument. She also tells how she almost became a jazz singer.

“One of the reasons my work is so endlessly exciting is that you never know who is going to be in the audience or the orchestra pit, holding your fate in his hands.”

Then in chapter 3 Apprenticeship she tells us about her time at Julliard, kind of coming and going from Europe. And to my delight gives quite a Master Class on breathing, because as she says, some of our tuning problems actually come from not breathing correctly. And the road to fixing that is a long and arduous one, it’s so weird, because I have gotten to a point where I fully understand the right kind of breathing, I know what I have to do, but I’m not always successful in doing so. That’s what Renée says, you gotta build your body brick by brick to have a well functioning instrument. Got off topic again, sorry!

Renée Fleming playing one of her most iconic roles, the Marschallin in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier

But this particular chapter talks about loads of things we must worry so much about, like the passaggio, languages, covering your voice, and so very interestingly about Master Classes and what makes a great teacher and finally and most importantly about being a student.

Then we go to Mentor she talks about starting a career and the so feared auditions. Starting to go into competitions, and a curious thing she said about being a great second place winner. Because it surely did feel great to win second but it didn’t carry the responsibly of being the best. It was a great incentive to keep her continually working and striving.

Then we finally arrive at Success she starts off with:

“Picture the education of an opera singer as a beautiful country – say England – full of museums and concert halls, palaces and rose gardens, where people study and learn and grow. Now picture a career as a successful opera star as another country - say France – and imagine it being full of culture and couture, Champagne and the Eiffel Tower, where the power of a single voice is lauded and adored. Now picture the English Channel separating those two countries, with its icy grey waters and choppy waves. Having completed my stay at Julliard in 1987, I found myself stranded on the English side with no boat, no plane, no Chunnel, trying to figure out how to get across.”

Doesn’t sound very nice hun? This book, apart from being such great reading material, gives us so many tips about absolutely everything. In this chapter Renée highlights repertoire choices and especially audition repertoire choices, about how to act in an audition, how to present yourself. I’m going to quote her once more on this:

“I’ve given enough master classes by now to know that the thing that really distinguishes an individual, voice and singing aside, is Personality with a capital P. Charisma. Touch me, move me, take me out of this stuffy little room with its fluorescent lights and dropped ceiling, its linoleum floor and badly tuned piano… That kind of conviction and engagement will win the audition and, later, the audience”

Also in this chapter she talks about dealing with the famous inner voice and how to keep positive. How it is at first being a “star is born” soprano and how to deal with everything. How it was for her getting pregnant in the middle of that fabulous and oh so demanding career and how she sang pregnant (something I though not possible until I saw Anna Netrebko sing Giulietta pregnant).

 Renée Fleming as Desdemona in Verdi's Otello to the left and as Rodelinda in Handel's Rodelinda to the right, two iconic queens

Ok this post has taken a length I wasn’t expecting it to get, so here is what I’m going to do I’m going to wrap this up right now and make another one or maybe two more posts talking about chapter 6 onward. But really guys, this book is a real keeper and a MUST HAVE for anyone who is aspiring to be an opera singer.

NY Trip and Operatic Beach

I never got to explain the actual name of the blog, hun? Well, believe it or not, it’s the name I’ve always used, ever since I was a teenager blogging for the sake of layouts. It’s from an Andrew Llyod Webber musical called Song and Dance, never saw it, but I like the song. And now more than ever the name makes sense, this whole thing was completely unexpected.

Since I am not talking about anything specific in this post I’ll talk about my crazy decision to go to New York City alone. It was I think September of this year and I was bursting with the need to watch first rate live opera. And then the craziest idea dawned on me, ‘cause me and my family are going to spend something like 3 weeks in Orlando. So I could easily go to New York for a couple of days and then come back, and that’s exactly what I told my dad, and he agreed. It was odd, ‘cause normally, he doesn’t, so I bought the ticket from Orlando to New York, 3 tickets for the Met Opera, and booked 3 nights at a Hostel in Manhatan.

I had chosen the date that coincided with certain performances of certain super cool opera starts (just a reminder that I didn’t know Joyce at the time, if I had the dates would have been completely different). So I’m arriving on the 8^th of February and watching Rigoletto with Diana Damrau (hell yeah baby!) and Piotr Beczala both which I LOVE! Then the next day I’ll be watching L’Elisir D’Amore, one of my favorite bel canto pieces, with Anna Netrebko (my heart will stop when I see her), Erwin Schrott (then I’ll have a convulsion when I see him) and the increasingly handsome Mariusz Kwiecien (marry me!). Then in the evening I’ll watch Carmen, because Carmen never gets old, and this production is really very beautiful.

And I’ll be at the stage door alone, God help me. But my friend told me it was very easy to make friends at the stage door, we all have an objective in common! I remember it was very easy making friends at the stage door of broadway musicals, I suppose it’s gonna be like that.

 So yesterday I made a list with everything I intend to buy when I go to New York. And yeah, I’m gonna be so broke I might as well stop eating now so I can afford these things. Here is a glimpse of the list I made looking only at the Met Opera Store and at the Julliard Store. There are some titles in the sheet music department that don’t have prices ‘cause I didn’t find an edition that can fit my pocket yet, they are all in French, and my favorites.

Most importantly I found the Cendrillon dvd, they sell it at the Met Store, and it’s $40! The things we do for love, like buying Opera Cooks, I love to cook and this is the ultimate book to have if you love opera and cooking! I also decided to buy the critic edition of Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflüte because these are the ones I’ll be using for real you know. I already have a critic edition (Bärenreither) of Le Nozze di Figaro and it’s just wonderful! I could be spending much less, but my teacher warned me against buying from certain publishers that to my utter delight were the cheapest!

And I also selected quite a few cds, I mean come on! I feel so bad already downloading these things, the least I could do is buy the cd when I have the chance! Of course I’m buying the 4 Joyce DiDonato cds they have, but that’s just because she’s my idol!

I also finished my “The Mark of Athena” book the day before yesterday, sad, I didn’t want it to end. But immediately started another one called Contos de Opera e Cantos by Sergio Casoy, who is a brilliant Opera History professor here in Brasil. This book is rather delicious to read, in it he shares little stories about things that happened during the productions of the operas. Like that for instance, the Othello project of Verdi was actually called the Chocolate Project because Verdi didn’t want to compromise in the beginning and took a good two years to write the piece. While Donizetti wrote L’Elisir D’Amore in less than a month! Really very entertaining, I’m still in the Italian operas part, he talks about all sorts of opera which is rather cool.

Also yesterday I did something quite soothing! I got my opera book, a towel and my purse and headed off to the beach. It was the end of the afternoon, so it wasn’t packed with people, but I had to walk a while to find a good spot to read. It was quite nice, and a beautiful sunset!