doing my part

Hello All!

It's one of those rare occasions in which the "enda" part of "Chenda" is writing the blog! You see, Chad only agreed to go to law school because I promised to help out with keeping the blog up to date. Oh, I'm just kidding! ... Okay, I'm half kidding...

Anyhoo, it's been a pretty busy week even though I only had two performances at Glyndebourne. We had a four day break, so I took that opportunity to head to London for a day. I had a three hour coaching on the opera La Traviata since I'm preparing for my debut in the role of Violetta at Frankfurt Opera in October. If you don't know Traviata, try to listen to some of the music! There are some amazingly beautiful moments, and it's one of my dream roles, soo I'm pretty excited! After my epic coaching session, I had dinner with a friend who lives in London. I met her while singing in Bordeaux this past winter, and it was great to catch up. She and I made some new friends on the Golden Jubilee Bridge, and were persuaded to sing "Happy Birthday" to one of the guys once they found out we were opera singers. Now, getting opera singers to sing in public can actually be quite difficult, since most of us are rather shy about singing when we're not onstage! But the birthday boy seemed really excited about getting an operatic happy birthday, and so did all the innocent bystanders, so it was worth it.

On one of my other days off I decided to actually have a real day off, and went to the beach in Brighton/Hove with one of my friends. Don't be fooled by the beautiful blue sky and flip-flops; it was actually quite chilly due to the wind. Chilly but still beautiful at least!

Now that Chad's in law school across the ocean, I've been adjusting to apartment life on my own. This includes many things, such as getting the bed all to myself, and getting all the coffee to myself, but it also includes negative things. Case in point: yesterday morning, as I was having a nice lazy morning before my show, I was getting ready to cook breakfast, and I noticed one of these spiders had made a beautiful web on the stovetop. Well, I wasn't about to have spider for breakfast, so I needed to deal with the spider issue. Come to think of it, it's probably good that Chad wasn't around, since he probably would have just killed the spider, but my dad taught me not to kill spiders, since they eat mosquitos. And we all hate mosquitos. I would definitely feel no remorse over killing a mosquito. Anyway, I very generously took this spider outside and freed her into the bushes outside the door. And how did this spider pay me back? By building it's web right in front of the door at about eye level. Sigh. I'm glad I saw the web (and the spider idly sitting in the middle of it) before I got a face full of spider goo, because I probably wouldn't have felt so generous after that. I don't really know what the moral of this story is, but for my own peace of mind, I'm going to credit that spider for my lack of mosquito bites.

Well, it's getting quite late, so I'd better think about getting my beauty rest. We have a show tomorrow, and it's being filmed for release on DVD. They'll film the next show as well, so thankfully I have two chances to get it right! Wish me luck, or hope that I break a leg, or spit over my shoulder. One of those should work!

In closing, I leave you with this YouTube link. It's a very silly song, made by "auto-tuning" the girl's spoken voice, and the result is quite catchy! I dance to it every morning. Hope you enjoy!