Happy Memorial Day weekend!

What are you all up to this holiday weekend, readers o' mine? No matter how much I crossed my fingers for CM to have a 3-day weekend, he just has 1 day: tomorrow. Still, that won't stop us from celebrating the beginning of summer in style. We bought a little gas grill for our balcony (shhh, don't tell), and tonight we're going to make sliders with caramelized onions and blue cheese. Tomorrow we're hitting a small-town festival, aptly called Viva! Vienna! (exclamation points not mine, but they should have been—I'm especially looking forward to Funnel! Cake!). As usual, it's all about the food.

I'll be back to writing on Monday, holiday or no holiday. Until then...

How could I possibly keep from bragging about this? It's like the whole universe is saying, "Move to Vienna, move to Vienna, move to Vienna" and we're all, "Dude. We WILL. In AUGUST."


I present to you: our summer signature cocktail. I highly recommend you present it to your mouth as soon as possible.


Have I shown you this artist before? I discovered her work in Paris, and since I got back I've had 6 square postcards sitting, just waiting to be framed and hung somewhere prominent. Alas, they're a weird European size that no American frames fit. Good thing we're MOVING TO EUROPE. (Did I mention?)


We picked up some of these while we were visiting Papa Melear. I can't tell you what a relief it was to discover they're available online, because we need more! I'm still dreaming of the Salted Caramel and Chai flavors—amazing.


This book finally came out this week! I am, of course, devouring it on my Kindle. And I think I need some new book recommendations to ease the pain when it's done. What have you got for me, friends?


Have a great weekend!!

Opera Girlfriend

To get you up to date (and scroll down if you don't care about the minutiae of my schedule), I'm in Virginia keeping CameraMan company for the next month. Then I'm flying back to H-town (I know, I know, I JUST left), picking up my car and getting my hair done, and driving to Santa Fe, where I'll be spending 5 glorious weeks making a new opera and rooming with The New Oregonian. And consuming huge quantities of guacamole and margaritas, obvs. Then it's a hop, skip, and a jump back to Houston, where I'll ship some boxes to Vienna (the one in Austria—are you still with me?), fly back to my CameraMan, and we'll have 3 days before we cash in our one-way ticket to Europe. Phew. I'll save the rest of the year's schedule for another time (but, quickly, I'll be here, here, and here).

For the moment, I'm enjoying a few weeks of sweet, sweet vacation. The real kind, with no boxes to pack, no belongings to organize, no deadlines to meet. I'm prepping for my next few shows and studying a little Deutsch, but my main task is being Opera Girlfriend. CM is already hard at work—that boy never gets a vacation. So I'm busy setting up house in our corporate apartment, driving him to and from work (we're a "one-car family," as he likes to say), and cooking along with all the jobs that go with it: meal-planning, grocery shopping, etc. We have cocktail hour and appetizers after CM gets home, and then I've been making real, honest-to-goodness dinners. Last night was Toasted Pita Salad and Baked Salmon with a White Wine Marinade, with Fresh Peaches and Yogurt for dessert (everything sounds fancier with capital letters, doesn't it?). Tonight: Crispy Baked Drumsticks (we had too many appetizers to eat a salad with it—oops), with Lemon Sorbet and Berries for dessert. Who knows how long this attack of domesticity will last, but for the moment I am loving my life of leisure.

The first few days in a new place are always a flurry of activity, as we stock up on the essentials and figure out where everything is. Usually the Bossy Cat is very adaptable, sniffing every corner and quickly sussing out her favorite spot to lounge. This time, for some reason, her favorite spot was under the bed. Oh, she'd come out to eat or use her litterbox or snuggle for a few minutes, but then she would dive right back under the bed. I was starting to get worried—would she stay there all summer? Then finally this afternoon she emerged, and she's been happily exploring (and sleeping on the balcony, the armchair, and the carpet) ever since.

Yes, we're settling in quite nicely here at the Trap, thank you very much.

Oh, what a week

As usual, just when lots of blog-worthy things were happening, I had no time to blog. The past week has been one of the most jam-packed on record: we put on a show, we packed up all our belongings, we moved said belongings into storage, and we drove from Houston to Vienna... Virginia.

There's at least a week's worth of material in there. I could tell you about how a week that I dreaded for months turned out to be incredibly rewarding, exciting, and generally great (surely there's a lesson in there somewhere). About how, despite all my questions and quandaries about what I want to do with my life (or even the next few years), I was reminded that this job is something I love and something I do very well. Or about sitting on the lawn during Saturday night's Tosca performance listening to the whole audience erupt in cheers when Tosca killed Scarpia, and the woman behind me who yelled, "You GO, girl!" I could fill you in on all the details of our highly organized move, but I don't have the words to tell you about the most important detail of all: our amazing friends, who turned out (in shifts, no less) to help us pack and unpack the moving truck, bringing with them laughter, support, and (of course) muscles of steel. I could tell you about the tears that came as I stood with CM in our empty apartment, the first home we shared. Or about inadvertently dropping off our apartment keys early in our hurry to get out of town, and almost being stuck outside with the Bossy Cat stuck inside.

The road trip could provide plenty of blog fodder as well. There was the carefully researched town an hour outside of Houston where we spent our first night, only to discover it was a pizza no man's land, when pizza was all we wanted. There was the Bossy Cat, who roamed all over the car looking for a good spot and wound up on a pillow between us in the front seat. There was some quality time spent with Papa Melear, who just moved to Tennessee a week ago and is already more settled in than we ever were in a year and a half of living in our apartment, and the incredibly Southern pancake house he took us to for breakfast, which had a waitress whose accent and voice have to be heard to be believed. There was the novelty of being in the same car with CM after 2 years of making the same drive in separate cars, and the relief on arriving at our fantastic apartment in Tysons Corners.

It's too much. I'll never get through everything. How about I just show you some pictures instead?

Scarpia, Tosca, Maestro CameraMan, and me

Empty apartment

The whole family in the car



CM's Tennessee biscuits and gravy



The Melear men

Words fail me

At the moment I am having trouble stringing words together to form thoughts, let alone coherent written sentences. We packed all day and then rehearsed all evening and now I want nothing more than to sleep all night. After I have Oreos and milk, obvs.

This whole blogging 5 times a week thing has been going very well, have you noticed? But I don't know if I can maintain that schedule with all the craziness going on here.

So, in a nutshell...

Moving is hard. Tosca is awesome. You should come see it.

And... good night.

Who's the boss?

I love being an assistant director, however nebulous my job might seem at times. I love feeling necessary to the process, and helping rehearsals and performances to run smoothly, and problem-solving, and multi-tasking. The most important part of my job is to be a good communicator and disseminater of information—I'm basically a liaison between the production and the company. I also often act as another pair of eyes, and I'll happily give my 2 or 4 cents when asked, but my primary responsibility is facilitating other people's creativity, not indulging my own. The directors who are the most fun to assist use me as a collaborator; more often than not, though, my mind is consumed with schedules and blocking. And any AD will attest to the fact that we spend a lot of hours of every day consciously NOT giving our opinions. I don't mind that, not really. I use a different part of my brain as an AD—the organized, attentive to detail part—and I'm okay with turning off the creative side in order to be happy and good at my job.

Here's the thing, and it's so important that it's amazing how easily I forget it. The thing is: directing is better. In the past few days working on Tosca, I have made more decisions at work than I usually make over an entire rehearsal period (a normal one, with several weeks). And they weren't decisions about what time to call people to rehearsal, or about how to approach the soprano with a note, or about who needs to know the piece of information I've just learned. I made quite literally DOZENS of decisions about what the set and props and lighting should look like (the show is a remount, but since we're in a different space a lot of things had to change). I saw ways that the singers could more easily accomplish their staging, and rather than diplomatically leaning over to the director with a "Do you like what she's doing?" or a "I wonder if it would work if he..." or a "I liked it better when she used to...," I just walked up on the stage and changed it. It felt good. Assisting is comfortable and well-paying, and I've become very good at it, but it really just isn't the same. My idea of heaven has always been a rehearsal that I'm in charge of, and it's good to be reminded that that's still true.

They don't call me Little Ms. Bossy for nothing, you know.