Hello June!
Concert: 6/27/22
Hi friends,
It’s summer… I don’t know, I feel like every year when it’s the warmest and the days are longer and everyone else seems to be so enjoying themselves is when I feel the most down. This year’s seems to be no exception.
Likely I am just really tired - and everything feels upside down when you’re exhausted. I’ve been ruminating a lot about my music and my future and what to do with myself next. Seems to be a season of life for me and my peers - maybe it’s my age, or just adjusting to life after the pandemic, or myriad other reasons and of course some combination of all.
As some of you know already, I’m currently playing a principal role in our professional regional theatre’s production of “The Sound of Music” (for which I was originally cast for the summer 2020 production, but… you know what happened). Additionally, this theatre is trying something that has never been attempted before with this particular show by making it a “musician-actor” production (a genre that is apparently very trendy right now) - meaning that most of the actors in the show are also the orchestra for the whole production.
I knew that rehearsal days would be long and intensive. I knew it would be a lot of material. I knew it would be a challenge. But I grossly overestimated how much “free” time I would have, how much rest I would be able to get in between marathon days of work, and, most of all, how my out-of-practice 35-year-old voice would hold up to the pressure of all of the above in conjunction with blasting out high c’s 7 times a week after singing the rest of the full show as an alto (I’m not an alto, so that makes a difference).
My stamina has just not been there. It was okay - I was feeling really insecure and not *great* about how I was doing but was confident that with some workshopping and practice and going through the show so much in rehearsals I would get there eventually.
Time to even warm up before I have to leave the house each day, let alone vocally “workshop” my songs? Yeah… not so much. Then the worst possible thing happened: I contracted a 3-day stomach bug from the kid cast the morning of the big “designer run” (where the actors run the full show in front of the entire production crew for the first time). There are no understudies on this show.
Any other day and I probably would’ve “called in” completely, but the run was important so after recovering from my morning puke session I was there for the afternoon prep, only a few hours late. I managed to get through the performance fairly well considering I was green on the inside, running purely on pepto-bismol and prayers. But of course the exhaustion and the dehydration, never mind the illness itself, only made my physical state worse for the rest of last week.
I “marked” my bits on Saturday and Sunday for fear of completely blowing my voice out before Tech week this week. The stress and concern of possibly losing my voice forever if I didn’t take this more seriously and figure this out woke me at 4am on Monday morning. I took a whole day of near-complete vocal rest, and used every herbal remedy I could think of or find, in addition to my tried-and-true practices like steaming. I even managed to catch up on a fraction of the lost sleep with a little nap.
Feeling a little better by Tuesday (yesterday), I went into our first day of tech week still stressed and concerned, but now that we’ve gotten into mics and into the actual space (as opposed to the cavernous rehearsal studio), I’m feeling a little more confident and a little less worried now that sound amplification and proper acoustics have entered the equation.
Blessedly I have a later call-time tonight, so I’m finally able to get you this month’s links, etc and to say hello and thank you for being here. I’ve been really wanting to hop on and stream but my time/energy/vocal resources are stretched so thin it just hasn’t been possible. Things are starting to get a little easier now though and while an online visit for this week isn’t likely (I won’t be home before midnight most nights) I may be able to hop on next week sometime. As always, opting into alerts in our forum at Discord for live broadcasts is the best way to get notifications for this in real-time.
Between us, the pay for me for this production is not amazing… and I’m kinda hanging on by a thread on all fronts over here. I mentioning that only to say that even attempting doing something like this would not be possible if it weren’t for your ongoing support here at The Vault…
Thanks for helping prop me up while I go out and pursue my dreams and challenges, for being a sounding board for everything I write and try. Thank you for being patient with me when I’m dropping the ball, or sick with Covid, or burnt out beyond any conceivable recovery. I couldn’t keep on without you. Because of you I’m able to “climb ev’ry mountain!”
While my account above might seem like whiny complaining, I am honored and excited to be a part of this production. It’s been a huge learning experience for me - complete with a wild emotional rollercoaster of fear, insecurity, optimism, hope, joy, tenderness, nostalgia, and curiosity. I’m not an accomplished enough instrumentalist to get to play a Rodgers and Hammerstein score anywhere else. I’m too young and too amateurish to play Mother Abbess anywhere else. This is a very privileged (but still humbling) opportunity and to suck at it kinda has been really good for challenging my ego.
We start doing performances in front of audiences a week from yesterday. If any of you are interested in attending, you can grab tickets at zachtheatre.org/soundofmusic
(I do recommend arriving early for the preshow segment, in which I sing and play in a polka band with other cast members while you can grab beer from the onstage “biergarten” bar)
The rest of you I hope to see sometime this month, virtually!
This month’s VAULT concert will take place on:
June 27
You can watch the embed or find the link to enter via the monthly concert/events tab at the top of this page or from your Vault homepage. (You can also watch find the replay links from past concerts there.)
VAULT CONCERTS start at 8PM EST.
Here’s a world clock converter to help you calculate your time zone.
MAY RECAP:
With rehearsals starting, May was a little quiet around here. But I did manage to turn in a Rodgers and Hammerstein inspired tune called “Why Shouldn’t I Try?”
JUNE DISCOUNT CODE:
Your Vault exclusive discount code at the Lex Land Store for this month is: d4bj6q
You can visit the store and automatically apply the discount code to your card by clicking here.
Thank you so much for your support here at The Vault this month and for your direct assistance in the creation of my art. It is appreciated more than I could ever express, but I hope the fun things we’ll do and create together this month will help convey my gratitude.
❤️ Lex
rewards access:
