Paradise Lost

My manor house lifestyle came to an end last night. The final member of the opera cast finally arrived last night, and since I'm the baby of the company (everybody around here treats me like I'm a teenager - I'm twenty-freaking-seven people!), they moved me out of the master bedroom and to stay with a host family in their farmhouse several miles up a country road even more in the middle of nowhere than previously. The family is really nice, but it's just really inconvenient for me it's farther away, they go to bed really early and I have to tiptoe in after rehearsal, my room is tiny and there is nowhere to put my stuff, there's absolutely no cell phone reception, and I can't really prepare any food there so I have to go back down to the manor house for all my meals anyways. On the plus side, the view of the stars there is amazing! I can't remember the last time I could actually see the Milky Way.

The Manor House was starting to get pretty full anyway with my fellow cast members - Roza from Uzbekistan (who plays Fiordiligi), Kara from Albany (Dorabella), Kevin (the Artist Director of the company), and now Ivan from Peru (Don Alfonso). Plus there's the "ghost," but that's another story that I don't even feel like talking about right now.

The show is going pretty well so far - we've got Act I completely up on its feet and a good chunk of Act II. I was pretty far behind on learning the music when I arrived, but I've been memorizing my music one day at a time (i.e. in the morning I memorize the stuff we're going to stage that afternoon, during the dinner break I memorize what we're staging at night, etc.) and it's been working okay so far. That's pretty much what everyone is doing, actually.

A few highlights so far:

• We did a dinner theater-style presentation at the Cambridge Hotel (which they claim is the birthplace of pie a la mode) for the opera's donors. All of the singers in the opera sang three arias - mostly 'opera's greatest hits' kind of stuff. I've done stuff like this before and it usually just feels like an obligation and you smile and get through it, but I actually had a really fun time. The room was set up with lots of dining tables and not really a stage-like area for us performers to stand, so we just improvised how we wanted to present our arias, so we mostly wandered among the tables singing straight at the people, who were loving every minute of it. The highlight for me was singing my old favorite, "Oh, is there not one maiden breast?" from The Pirates of Penzance to all the ladies in the house, and they just went nuts for it. I ended up with this old lady in a wheelchair who knew all the words and was singing along with me, and I gave her a big kiss on the cheek afterwards. What's more, we had a bowl for cash donations circulating around the room and I snatched it up and took around to all the ladies I sang to and I milked so much money out of them. I could hardly remember the last time that I had had so much fun performing.

• There is a place in the opera where my girlfriend is supposed to be painting a picture of me, and there is pretty well-known artist here in town who volunteered to paint my portrait to use in the show (George Van Hook is his name - here's some of his work). I went to his studio and sat for him for about a half hour and he produced the painting on the right. I never imagined that I would ever be painted by anyone, let alone by someone who is actually good.

• The manor house property has a little summer house hidden away in a little grove of trees, and it has a clay tennis court and a great little pond with a canoe. It is such a beautiful place to get away and relax and I have gone canoeing and even swimming there several times in the past week.

Well, the public library is closing in a few minutes and they are literally removing me from the computer, so bye!