AAAAHHHH!

I NOW HAVE PLANE TICKETS! Oh. My. Goodness. It was quite a ridiculous feat to book them actually (the company had me doing the phone call run-around!), but I have them. This is so crazy! Only 8 months ago, Hungary was just a formulating idea. Even at the turn of the year, it was still an idea in progress. Now, I have booked tickets to actually get on a plane and fly over the big pond. It is so official! Kind of a scary thought but all the same super exciting! Everything will be great. I just know it. Plane tickets are expensive! (especially international flights) However, I found some great fares on a student travel site, so they were reasonable. With gas prices, though, everything is a lot more expensive than before. BUT...I found one of my third-party scholarships (not given by the university I attend) that will not cover my tuition and whatnot for next semester. SO...I gave the foundation a little call and asked if they could give me the money instead of the school so I could put it towards the cost of my airfare to study abroad. WELL...they called me back today (left me a message while I was in my voice lesson, which was AMAZING, but I'll get to that in a minute!) and said they'd be sending me the check (and a quite hefty one I might add!). Needless to say, my tickets now cost me practically nothing! Just a little bit comes out of my pocket. How cool! I was pretty excited. Now...onto my lesson. I normally have my lessons on Thursdays at 2pm (this semester anyway...changes every semester because of scheduling), but today it got bumped up to 1pm which was fine. I have been having some trouble with my voice as of late, so I was weary about how it would go today. (What? My voice being temperamental? Who would've thunk it! haha!) I told her in the beginning I'd been having issues, so we set out and tried to work some of them out. And succeed we did! On some anyway. Singing is far more complicated than it seems. It's like the famous artist Edgar Degas once said,
"Painting is easy when you don't know how but very difficult when you do." So true. The more you know, the more complex it becomes and the more your brain likes to interfere. Someday, though, everything will line up and be excellent. Someday. I swear Lynn and I share a brain. She admits to it, too. We have the most off-the-wall random metaphors, mental pictures, etc. when it comes to singing and different aspects of technique, yet we are almost always on the same page. It is quite absurd! Throughout my lesson, my voice had its shaky moments but overall was fine. Then came the moment of brilliance! We had a little time left to run through one last piece, so I chose one we'd spent awhile one in the beginning of the semester but hadn't touched for a long time, Eterno amore fé by Gaetano Donizetti. (Ah! Donizetti! Gotta love the Bel canto era! They were sheer geniuses then!) I am not quite sure what actually happened, but I was making sounds I had never heard come out of me before. It sounded and felt so cool but weird and slightly foreign. Lynn says it was my full voice, it was Samantha's voice coming out. My support was better than ever, and I could begin adding advanced dynamic contours. It was almost as if two worlds were colliding. I am somewhat confused about the two and what the collision is yielding, but I know it's going to be something good. You can picture the piece as a very melodramatic love and death scene from an opera because that is pretty much what it is. (Oh, melodrama! hehe!) With each stopping and starting that we did, she kept telling me to pull out more of the melodramatics. After about two or three times, we burst into laughter (Me? Lynn? Chad? Laughing? No! haha!), and then she bounced to the other side of the studio, grabbed a sprig of silk gladiolas, and handed them to me saying, "Wave your glads, Dame Edna!" (Lynn has this reference to Dame Edna for placement and resonance...it's fabulous!...and it really works.) It was hilarious! And the sounds were so cool! I had apparently accomplished what she was after. Now, I just have to figure it out and recreate it...all the time! (Choir always messes with that, though. Ugh!) I'm sure it'll take time, but it'll come. :)