November 2011

Hey everyone… we’re on our break for Thanksgiving and I’m chillin in Port Orange, FL with two members of the cast at one of their parents houses. Finally, some home cooked meals, time to relax in a non-bus seating fashion, and the ability to catch up with my “To-do list”, which included finally sending my mom some information she’d been asking for for like a month… sorry Mom, hahaha.

So the last week before break was very fun and very interesting… Once we got to North Charleston, SC we were greeted with a wonderful theatre and our producers came in with a film crew. We learned a quick Christmas song arranged by our tour music director and then filmed 3 Christmas commercials to be used for Rogers and Hammerstein, some Chicago TV stations, and general holiday marketing (which is funny, since we’re not doing any shows in December, lol)… I was sooo tired from basically two days of traveling tho, so I had two small hiccups during the show that usually don’t happen… but that was just the tip of the iceberg for my flubs, cuz then we got to Florence, SC, haha.

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Hey!!!… It’s been a while since my last post and that’s only because I got ridiculously sick and I was absolutely miserable. There is nothing worse than being sick and not being able to take a day off and rest. Everything is great now though, I went through about 6 days where I could only sing at about 50-75% because I either couldn’t breathe out of congestion or every time I went to breathe I started to cough. Whatever little sickness I had was frustrating as heck because I felt physically fine, but all the gross stuff went straight to my chest and I was coughing all day long which inevitably led to my throat being sore and my vocal chords being tired. It got so bad at one point that for the first time in my life I went to sing notes and what I wanted to sing was NOT what was coming out of my mouth. I couldn’t actually control the pitch of the notes; I would sing and I could hear the note in my brain, but my vocal chords were weak and the muscles would fatigue and force the sound coming out of my mouth the either squeak or fall egregiousness flat. I was scared and freaked out and almost called out of a show in Waterbury, CT but I had friends who were roadtripping up from Virginia, so I enacted emergency remedies and managed to essentially falsetto my way through that show. After that show I worked hard with our tour music director and made it my 100% priority to have perfect breath and perfect mask placement of the notes so that I could sing with a little more power with the least amount of vocal effort. It paid off… I made it through that week without needing to call out. The experience definitely helped me in two crucial ways – 1. I now have a huge respect for the necessity of vocal rest. I stopped talking in order to save the muscle strength for the shows and I noticed the difference. The muscles felt more rested going into those performances that I was sick and it definitely saved me from missing a show:  2. Since I spent almost an entire week focusing on proper technique, I’m feeling the notes in a better placement now that I’m healthy again, and I can feel the growth in the way my voice sounds with this music. Loving it!

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Alright… the past 5 days has been absolutely ridiculous and a complete blur… it took me a good 20 minutes to even remember everything I wanted to share. Let’s start back in Canada…

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