Tuesday, April 14, 2009

On making up for lost time

I know, I managed to miss four entire days of Wikipedia entries. Well, rather than kill myself trying to make up for those entries, I'm just going to hop right back onto the wagon and pretend nothing is amiss. I could sail through my life much more easily if I'd just adhere to that sort of laissez-faire attitude more often.

Anyway, today's entry is Agrippina. Actually, colloquially, Agrippina should've been tomorrow's entry, since it's now one in the morning. However, I'm finding myself unwilling to be caught up on an issue of semantics...and actually, I don't particularly want to blog about today's issue, which was White Deer Hole Creek. I mean...come on. White Deer Hole Creek? Rather than talk about the creek, I probably would've gone into a whole spiel about the sort of man who'd give a creek an asinine name like "White Deer Hole." Yeah, all you perverts out there, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You know exactly what I'm thinking, and shame. Shame shame shame on you for your filthy, filthy, filthy minds! What would Sister Aloysius say? Think of Grandma! What would she say if she knew what you were thinking? And how dare you think of Grandma with a mind like that?! I bet you have her sunk in all sorts of disgusting, perverse, and unnatural positions now.

Anyway, Agrippina is an opera in three acts, which already puts me into a bit of a "Uh oh" mood, because I know very little about opera. My training, you see, is in acting, and it's actually very, very difficult to behave realistically when you're belting out a high C in Italian. I know this because actors need to be in the moment, whereas singing is actually all about keeping track of your muscles and your breath and making the little adjustments you need for the sound to come out beautifully. Although breath is every bit as important to acting as it is to opera, the latter parts are antithetical to keeping yourself grounded in the moment, to stop paying attention to yourself and to start paying attention to your partner and your surroundings. I have a lot of respect for opera singers, mind you. Theirs is a demanding art that requires a very great deal of technical skill and physical stamina. I just don't tend to have a lot of respect for opera singers as actors. Which is fine, since I fairly sure most of the people who go to the opera aren't there for the acting.

I actually gave some thought to opera, way back in those dawn ages when gods roamed the earth and heroes still existed. In between besting a red dragon and slaying the Lich of Dunwich, I briefly entertained the notion of getting operatic training, since I enjoyed singing a great deal and it seemed to be a nice way to synthesize that with a fondness for the stage. Then a meteor missile hit me in the head, knocked some sense into me, and made me realize that singing eight hours a day wasn't really my idea of a good time. My passion for that was lukewarm at best, and a lukewarm passion is only good for party games and soiling the sheets.

I'm not too sure where or why that last paragraph went in that particular direction. I think hunger is making me delirious. I'm going to sign off and eat some of my shrimp.

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