yes, I'm pretty certain I mentioned the ability to fall convincingly before. However I thought it would be old news by now, in the last throes of rehearsal and on a stage currently awash with water, blood and grapes. Seems not. While I naturally welcome any praise, it would be nice if the backstage talk was slightly more weighted in favour of my vocal performance, and less in terms of how "quite simply awesome was my fall and how did I do it?" (obviously I paraphrase slightly from the German). Oh well. We're all good at something. Now to work it into all my future roles...
And I should at least sleep well tonight. I've been refraining from too much alcohol in the middle of these rather demanding rehearsals, and piously declined an invitation to a drink with friends after tonight's final Hauptprobe. I cycled home in a self-satisfied haze, only to discover my lovely neighbours gardening on their balcony in the pitch black. A tentative greeting was met with an enthusiastic and unturndowneable invitation to come and see their "garden park" (window boxes on the balcony; red, white, red, herb garden ("lavender, rosemary, sage; sage, rosemary, lavender!") then red, white, red again). Although I am taking the colours on trust as when I got whisked in and presented with what I was assured was a clean chair (and what I equally assured them didn't matter, as most of my clothes were tonight black, and the remaining bits were pretty well covered in blood and whatnot from the stage, it made no difference) and a plastic glass of very nice bubbly (they were very sweetly mortified to have no champagne glasses in their office), it was velvety dark and warm in a summer-evening way; such a pleasure! It's so easy to stereotype nationalities; and an utter pleasure to note that no-one seems to have told this wonderful couple that they ought to be "German" about things. They are enthusiastic, volatile, passionate, tactile, creative... I'm so glad I had the good fortune to stumble across them (trans: I sang so loudly in the flat, they came to see who was making the noise). There's really nothing like a totally surreal evening of nice bubbly in the dark, with conversation trying desperately to explain, in a language that seems further and further from possibility the later it gets, the plot of Salome to evangelical Christians unused to "modern" opera... I love this life!
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