In our culture we hear a lot about performance.  Sexual performance, teacher performance, athletic performance, dramatic performance.  The word sets my teeth on edge because I think it’s misappropriated.   I used to get up to sing, swim through all the perspiration, let my eyes glaze over so as to avoid seeing the audience, and quaver through whatever I had prepared.  I was always well rehearsed and I knew I had a beautiful singing voice.  Sometimes I pulled it off, sometimes I didn’t, but I was always terrified.  When I stood up to sing in front of people, I would hand myself over to them and say:  Here, you decide if I have any worth, not just as a singer but as a human being.  Psychically, I left my own body, sat in the audience and judged myself.

I waded through all the common advice like Visualize Yourself Succeeding.  Visualization—as I understand it– involves creating an image outside of ourselves.  But getting outside of myself was causing me problems.  The me I would visualize didn’t necessarily correlate with the feeling state that showed up at the point I opened my mouth to sing.   There’s a lot more going on in me than I can be conscious of, let alone predict ahead of time.

My students often report feeling confident up to the point their introduction begins.  Suddenly their knees buckle.  Or if their knees buckled the last time they sang, this time they forget how to breathe.  Or when they start to sing, they don’t recognize the sounds they are making and it spooks them.  With pianists, the fingers sometimes take on a life of their own while you sit there, feeling superfluous, and watching them humiliate you.

Visualization does not acknowledge vulnerability.   When I stood up to sing, all I had was myself and whatever I did with my voice in those few minutes.  It was different every time; and it was unknowable ahead of time.  Can one ever be prepared for vulnerability?  It seems to show up whenever and however it wants to.  It is best met with one’s own ordinariness.   The trouble with us singers is we think we are so very extraordinary.  Understanding that I was an ordinary human being who happened to like to sing ended the debilitating performance anxiety.

The performances I find most compelling are the ones where the singer’s vulnerability is exposed but lightly contained; and with no apologies for being human.  I want to feel their heartbreak because it helps me to bear my own.  Or I want to be invited into a joy that isn’t trying to manipulate.  The joy is there on the face and in the voice, held lightly, as though to say, “Come as close as you’d like or stay far away, it’s not going to change what I am offering.”

What I have learned, and what I tell my students about performing is this:  Do what you do when you are home alone washing the dishes; when you are inside yourself, inside your voice, having an internal experience that is only for that moment, not for prosperity, and not something you are visualizing for use at some future date.   Take a private, internal sensibility on stage with you.  In performance, do what you do when no one is listening or watching.

The best way to prepare for a performance is to practice being present with yourself all the time.  So when you get onstage, nothing has changed, you just go on being.

I had a long time student with the prescient name of Deborah Singer.   When she first started lessons she told me she had always wanted to sing, but she didn’t have a lot of confidence —not at all an unusual occurrence, particularly with singers who have actual ability.  She didn’t want to sing classical music and I didn’t particularly want to do pop or country but we met halfway: Deborah learned to sing “Caro Mio Ben” and I came to appreciate the Dixie Chicks.

Deborah came in one day with a song called “Why They Call it Falling.”  I liked it right away.  I like “list songs” like “The Waters of March.”   She sang it several times while I listened.  I asked her, “Ok who sings this?”  What I wanted to know was, “Who are you imitating?”

This is what we all do in the beginning: we imitate.  A lot of us started out in front of the full length mirror in our parents’ bedroom with a flashlight for a microphone.  My first voice teacher once said to me, “Stop trying to be Julie Andrews.”  I thought, “Why would I want to do that?”

There’s nothing wrong with imitating your favorite singer if that’s what you want to.  But that isn’t singing.  That’s imitating.  Singing begins with your sound.  You get inside the sound of your own voice on single tones, then on phrases, finally in songs.  You fall in love with your own voice so that you are unashamed and unafraid to light up every inch of it and let every color in it shine.   Otherwise, you might just as well get a cellist or oboist or pianist or guitarist who loves his instrument to accompany you while you recite the words.

I once spent nine months singing nothing but sounds.  No words, no songs.   It was one of the most productive periods of time I’ve ever spent in voice training.   Most singers don’t want to do anything that extreme.  We all want to get to the songs.

Deborah had learned her song from listening to Lee Ann Womack so that’s who she was imitating.  I slowly tried to insert little options and new ideas as we went through it, working on the rough spots, figuring out where to breathe, how to approach the higher notes.

Occasionally Deborah would say, “That’s not how it goes.”

I would say, “It can go anyway you want it to go.  There’s no way that it’s supposed to go.”

Sometimes students say, “Do you want me to bring in the CD so you can hear how it goes?”

Actually sometimes I do want to hear what it is they are wanting me to hear but most of the time I want to say, “Hello!  I read music.  I teach singing.  This is what you are paying me for.”

Deborah said, “But I want to sing it the way she does because at least I know that’s a way to sing it.”

That’s like saying, “I want to live someone else’s life because I can see that person is alive.”  It’s understandable.  It’s human to feel that way.  But it can’t be done. You can’t live someone else’s life—without destroying both of you– and you can’t sing a song like someone else sings it.  I love the way Jane Monheit sings “Embraceable You” and I love the way Arleen Auger sings “Weichet nur betrübte Schatten,” but when I sing those songs, I need to do my own work of getting inside the sound and the words.  What makes the singing of those songs compelling is not the way the singers phrase this bit or the little swoop on that bit or the crescendo here and the fading away there.  What makes a singer compelling is not imitable.  A singer is compelling when she sings from the inside out, when we hear and feel her vulnerability.  She sings from her heart.

Deborah and I worked on “Why They Call It Falling” for months.  One day she came in and said she had listened to her recording and thought, “She’s not singing it right.”   I can’t tell you exciting it was to hear that.  Deborah had gotten the song inside her and she was bringing it out her way.

Being in front of an audience can be un-nerving, even if that audience is the voice teacher.  We imitate because it feel safe.  But there’s no real vulnerability when we try to sing a song like someone else sings it.   Afterwards, even if hoards of people rush to tell us how much they enjoyed our singing, we know deep inside, whether we are fully aware of it or not, that what we did was not genuine.  If we don’t want to imitate, we can take a deep breath, sing our own lives and live our own songs.

My Vanity Fair came the other day, looking more bloated than usual.  The articles are exceptionally well written.  There’s usually one really juicy one that’s worth the price of the subscription.  But I really hate the inserts, the thick advertisement pages, the fold out pages and the way the table of contents is 25 pages into the magazine.

So here’s what I do:  First I hold it up and shake out all the loose inserts, and then I flip through the pages, stopping at the most obvious of the thick pages.  These I cut out with scissors or a utility knife or tear out with my bare hands.  I do a second sweep and take out any I missed the first time.  I do this until the whole magazine can be easily rolled up like a newspaper.

Then I open the cover to the first page and: r-r-r-ip.

Second page: r-r-rip.

Look at these models, my God, they don’t even look real:  r-r-r-rip

What in God’s name is wrong with that one’s eyes?: r-r-rip.

Oh, that’s how you spell Jimmy Choo: r-r-rip. . .rip. . .rip.

Is that Julianne Moore?  Why is she always everywhere?: rip. . .rip.

What’s wrong with her eyes? r-r-rip. . . rip.

How can she walk in those things? r-r-r-rip

What’s wrong with her eyes? r-r-ip, rip, rip rip

Rip. Rip. Rip. Damn it, that’s the Table of Contents.

By now the Vanity Fair that came in the door as thick as a paperback book has the depth of Time magazine—spatially speaking.  But now I can read it.

My neighbor Gwen, who knows something about everything, loves the advertisements.  She used to design clothes at Opus 204 near the Pike Place Market.  When she looks at those emaciated models, she sees design.  I see people who if they tried to rip out a magazine page would break themselves in half.

I used to get a magazine called Real Simple.  When I finished my ripping routine and was left with 30 pages to read, I noticed that those 30 pages were advertisements, too.  Every simple suggestion had half a dozen expensive things you had to buy in order to make your life that much simpler.

They had a section where you could share your tips on how you were simplifying your life.  Every month there was a winner who got something: a free magazine subscription or a trip to New York to meet the advertisers.  Or maybe it was $30 off a gift wrapping station that needed a second wing on your house to accommodate it.  I thought about sending in my ripping routine as a suggestion and dare them to print it.  Instead I cancelled the subscription.

I am going to take those Vanity Fair pages over to Gwen.  Real simple.

Every year I have a yard sale where I attempt to get rid of the year’s accumulation of capitalist effluvia.  Since I have lots of storage space, I have merchandise still in stock from years’ past as well as much of the stuff that didn’t sell in my mother’s estate sale 3 years ago. One of my yard sale rituals is to go through all my books and decide which ones I have read for the last time and no longer need to keep.   Here are some of what made this year’s cut:

A stack of books for my morning read when I can manage complex sentences and ideas.  This is when I read Freud or Shakespeare, most recently Civilization and Its Discontents and King Lear. I have just come off a 6 month orgy of literary theory; for some reason I could not get enough of it.  (I came out of Lit Crit at Whitman College and couldn’t have told you what it was; same with high school algebra.)  I read three literary theory texts; I downloaded all the transcripts from Paul Fry’s Intro to Literary Theory at Yale Open Courses, and read them.  (I had listened to the lectures but had missed a lot because I kept playing Free Cell solitaire at the same time.)

In the morning, I also read books with those titles like “I Be Where I am Now.”   Currently my favorite writers in this genre are Pema Chodron and Mark Epstein.

As the day progresses, the sentences need to get shorter and the ideas less complex.  But that is not to cast nasturtiums at authors like Anne Morrow Lindbergh (her diaries and letters) who I have re-read since I was 18.  I am drawn to British women authors; I re-read books by Angela Thirkell (Before Lunch is my favorite) Margery Sharpe (the 3 Martha books), E.M. Delafield (the Provincial lady books), Joanna Trollope, Susan Howatch, and Elizabeth Jane Howard.  Every few years, I re-read the Lucia books by E.F. Benson, A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens), A Passage to India (Forster), The Raj Quartet (Paul Scott), and To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee).

My favorite books in the past several years amongst current writers are Gods Behaving Badly (Marie Phillips), Three Bags Full (Leonie Swann), Eat, Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert), and The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)

Poetry I can read any time of the day or night.  I had forgotten all about poetry and its power until Billy Collins was the Poet Laureate.  Through him, I was re-born.  My favorites among his output are Sailing Alone Around the Room and Nine Horses. Other poets I love are Stephen Dunn, Mary Oliver, Jack Gilbert, W.S. Merwin, Robert Frost, and an interesting guy—or maybe I should say 4 interesting guys—called Fernando Pessoa.

Another author I can read any time of day, even though his sentences and ideas are complicated, is Adam Phillips.  He’s the enfant terrible among the psycho-analytic set.  His provocative ideas are just what I need to open up new states of mind, to remind me there are many different ways of constructing my experience.  Here’s a sentence from Promises Promises: ‘To presume something is an error is simply to look at it from a point of view that makes it one.”  And another: “What we call a culture or a tradition becomes the way we go on running imaginary errands for the dead.”

By evening humor is about all I can take in but that can be rather like swimming at a beach where there’s no lifeguard.  I read at my own risk; it can be too entertaining when I need to be thinking about sleep.  I am partial to the Blandings Castle series by P.G. Wodehouse and I love Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Notes from a Small Island). With Wodehouse, if I have anything liquid in my mouth, I generally have time to swallow before I burst out laughing, but with Bill Bryson, it doesn’t matter if I am drinking something or not;  One of his asides will– without warning — provoke laughter accompanied by spontaneous discharges from any or all bodily orifices.

Murder mysteries are doubled edged nighttime reading, too.  I like Dorothy Sayers, Robert Barnard, Conan Doyle, Minette Walters, and Elizabeth George.  If it’s really late, M.M. Kaye, Nancy Baker Jacobs, and Alexander McCall Smith have good plots and short sentences.  For something like a Lifetime Movie Network experience, there’s always Mary Higgins Clark. These books are easy on a tired brain but can also give a second wind.  I’ve never stayed up til 2:00 AM reading literary theory just to see what happens next.

I always knew that one day one of my cats would pee on the Great Books: that ponderous, pretentiously leather –bound set from Encyclopedia Britannica which my parents bought in the 1960’s.    The exclusively male writers, chosen by Mortimer J Adler, include Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Plutarch, Aquinas, Newton, Kant, James, Darwin.  There are 52 volumes in all.

My father read them.  His note-filled bookmarks still stick out of them.  When he died, I brought the set to my house in Seattle.  I knew my mother didn’t want them: she only read Jerry Falwell approved books.  I thought I would keep them around to see if I would read them.  If not, I would sell them and become fabulously wealthy.

I haven’t read them and it turns out that nobody else wants to either.  For one thing, they aren’t reader friendly:  the books are heavy, the pages thin and the print tiny.  I am at an age where these things matter.  I sat for a minute in the cat-pee scented air to see which Great Books I have read in Penguin or Riverside editions.  Hmmm.  I went to a private liberal arts college so I have read quite a few of them.  So as not to sound pretentious, I won’t list them.  The only of these guys I have continued to read throughout my life are Shakespeare and Sigmund Freud.  In Book Chi Part Two, I am going to ramble on about what else I like to read and I guarantee it won’t sound pretentious.  At least some of it won’t.

I don’t know what got into the culprit who peed on the books last night.  I don’t even know which cat it was.  It’s the 5^th hot day in a row and we are all a little ragged and drained; but Freudy was the cat who seemed most distressed about something.  He appears to be taking exception to my trying to put him on a diet. There’s a certain poetic justice in Freud peeing on the Great Books, I suppose.

I have tried to sell my set of Great Books to book stores, on Craigslist, on Amazon, and in yard sales, and no one wants them.  Now that they smell like cat pee and I can’t conscientiously pass that off as the scent of old leather, I expect they’ll end up on my parking strip with a free sign on them. How the mighty have fallen.

I live in a rabbit warren of a house in Seattle, Washington.  My backyard borders a small private cemetery.  When I first moved in, I put a gate in my back fence so I could slip into my own private park and walk around whenever I wanted to.  I love my quiet neighbors.  I’ve twice had to sell houses and move because of neighbors who had relocated from hell.

The cemetery is a sanctuary for city animals.  What with the neighborhood cats, the squirrels, opossums, raccoons, rats, moles, and birds, there are spontaneous episodes of Animal Planet nearly every day.  The other day I watched a raccoon carry something furry through my yard.  I called my neighbor, Gwen, who knows something about nearly everything.

“Do raccoons eat rats or opossums?”

“Nope. They’re not carnivorous.”

Before too long, here came the raccoon again with something furry in its mouth.  It came from across the street, into my front gate, through my side yard.  I decided, given the color and texture of the furry thing that it must be a baby raccoon.

“Now why is that raccoon dragging her baby all over town?” I wondered.

By the time I saw it the third time, I realized it was not the same baby.  The mother was evidently ferrying her young to what she felt was a safer home.  I hope they are now comfortably ensconced in a generous cemetery tree and not in the yard where they keep the grave digging equipment.

At sunset, my cats—Winston, Artemis, and Freud– set up lawn chairs facing the cemetery wall, mix up a batch of mai tais and get ready for the nightly show.  For a first act, an opossum’s nose may appear and a body will heave itself over the fence, followed by 3 or 4 little noses and bodies.  They strut along the top of the fence like the Rockettes.  The raccoons then come through a hole I have cut in the fence, a hole that creates a thoroughfare for everything in the neighborhood with four legs.  They tumble around the yard, play with the rubber ducks in the bird bath, and for the denouement, they tip over the bath and run off to vandalize someone else’s property.  A few squirrels chatter in lieu of bird song to close the show.  Winston, Freud and Artemis come in, drunk, and whine at me to give them something to eat.

My cats have understandings with the wildlife in the neighborhood.  With the raccoons and opossums, I believe relations are amicable and consensual.  The arrangements with the birds and rodents are a bit more ominous and are stories for another day.