Last summer, when I was pregnant with our third child, I had idyllic visions of starting a blog to document my pregnancy. I had always felt that I hadn’t been as mindful about the gestating process as I wanted to be. With my first pregnancy, I was five months gone before I admitted something was going on. With my second, I was working a pretty challenging schedule (Ring Cycle, anyone?). As a result, I never really took time to savour being pregnant. So last summer, I thought, “I have time off; I am going to start a blog to document things.” But then life, children, summer schedules, and quite honestly, inhibitions got in the way, and before I knew it, it was September and the pregnancy that I wanted to savour and document was … a baby. And I was back at work. And the next show happened. Then the next show didn’t.
And so here we are. But no time like the present, right? And nothing like a pandemic induced stay at home order to give myself time to “create before you consume.”
“Off headset” is what we say at work when we take our headsets off. Like when we go to the bathroom – because you don’t want to be the person who accidentally drops their headset into the toilet, or the person who broadcasts the sound of peeing to everyone else to hear. And at the end of the day, I say, “Off headset” as I am powering off my beltpack, and hanging up my headset – the signal that I’m are no longer available over headset, that rehearsal is over for me,and that I’m switching gears.
Life in opera can be all consuming. The long hours and middling pay means that one really needs to believe and love what one does to make a life of it. The intense rehearsals, monumental achievements, warm colleagues with crazy stories – these things tend to take up all my time and energy when I’m in production. Doubly so when I travel for gigs; when I’m in a new city, work can easily become the whole world, because throwing yourself into an show is the path of least resistance. But there is always a part of me that says, “This isn’t the sum of me! This sitting in rehearsal, solving other people’s problems, swapping horror stories during lighting sessions…. I have a life outside of this.”
So in that vein, I thought I’d create a space for myself to explore/write about things that occupy me when I am off headset – food, books, articles, thoughts, family, things that make me smile, think, and contemplate.