My particular brand of spring fever

In the past couple weeks I've been plagued by near-constant Vienna nostalgia accompanied by a solid dose of general Europe-missing. Combined with all the usual wishing for home and CM and the Bossy Cat, emotionally I've been a bit of a mess. This despite the fact that New York has been utterly gorgeous, springing into Spring with total abandon—outdoor seating popping up at every café, ballet flats appearing on the feet of every stylish Manhattan girl, park benches overflowing with canoodling couples. Leave it to me to be wishing I were somewhere else instead of enjoying it.

I thought I was alone in feeling this way, but when I made an offhand remark in an email to a friend that I was enjoying the weather but ready to go home, he wrote back, “Yes, this weather is inspiring spring-ish fever and nostalgia and all kinds of emotional things. I bet you're ready for being home.” YES! That was exactly what I was experiencing, wrapped up in one sentence by someone I don't even know all that well. So perhaps I'm not the only one… What say you, readers? Are you suffering from spring nostalgia these days?


I'm back home in Houston as of last night for a good long month off (yay!), and that seems to have assuaged the spring fever somewhat, although a large part of me is longing to whisk CM off on an impromptu tour of Europe. Seems to me that the only thing for it is to relive some of our oh so brief glory days, in the form of devoting this week's posts to sharing the rest of our wedding and perhaps a bit of our honeymoon. I hope you'll indulge me in a little walk down (recent-ish) memory lane. Blame it on springtime.


Stay tuned for a wedding post this evening!


Photo taken by me on June 5, 2011

Broadway baby

I have a confession to make. I've been having a little flirtation with Broadway. It's harmless, really, nothing to be worried about—I'm just rediscovering that little piece of my heart I left with musical theater oh so many years ago.

It started because I've been studying Sweeney Todd, listening to a recording whenever I'm out and about (some of the more intense passages end up causing me to walk extremely fast). Amazingly enough, I still have most of the show memorized from my musical theater nerd days. Then I went to watch a bit of Evita rehearsal and ended up staying for hours (and I'm going back tonight) just because it was such fun, and such a change from what I usually do. Then I saw Once on Sunday, and now I'm hooked. I've been listening to various cast recordings (turns out I have FOURTEEN musicals on my computer—maybe my Broadway nerd days are not as far behind me as I thought). I'm scanning Broadway listings daily, and I'm wishing I had brought dance shoes to New York so I could take a class. I have traveled to the tourist-infested hell that is Times Square ON PURPOSE more in the past week than I usually do in the course of two months. I don't know what's going on.

Feeling Broadway-obsessed yourself? May I recommend the following:

Show Business:  The Road to Broadway follows four shows that opened in the 2003–4 season, from rehearsals all the way through the Tony Awards.




Every Little Step is about A Chorus Line, both the original production and the audition process for the 2006 revival. It's completely fascinating.




And though tomorrow night I'll go back to my true love (in the form of my 14th Don Giovanni performance of the season), tonight I'll travel to Times Square once again to be a tourist in a Broadway theater.

I guess you never forget your first love.

Happy weekend!

What do you have planned this fine weekend? I will be doing very little other than recovering from the broken? sprained? bruised? toe I stubbed this morning and then ran on like a fool. Ouch. Also, I'll be pining for my sweet husband who has the whole weekend off but is all the way over in Houston (I've been back in NYC since Wednesday). Happily, I get to see him again in a week!

While I'm icing my poor toe, have fun exploring some links:

For you runner types, I'm loving this Runner's World page that helps you figure out what to wear based on the weather. Very helpful when you haven't quite learned the difference between 35° and 40° for your run.

I'm getting excited about my next project.

Wishing for this pretty necklace.

There is almost nothing I enjoy more than movie previews before the feature. Right now I'm especially fond of this and this. Can't wait to see the movies!


An obligatory shot of my sweet cat (who was extremely happy to have me home for a few days):

Hope your weekend is filled with healing, comfy pants, and hot drinks! xoxo LMB

Home on the Road: Ryan McKinny

Boy, it's been a long time since I posted a Home on the Road feature, and it's not because I've got living on the road all figured out, let me tell you. I'm still struggling with the packing, and the settling in, and the phone calls, and all the rest of it. I think it's time to call in some more experts, don't you?

I'm so excited to feature bass-baritone Ryan McKinny here. Ryan and I started working in Houston at the same time, and in the time that I have known him he has gone on to sing all over the world, all while he and his fabulous wife Tonya have grown their beautiful family. They have been based in Germany for the past 2 years, but they just bought a house in Houston (in our neighborhood, no less), so they'll be coming back stateside this summer.

Ryan has been on the road for 4 years. In the last year he spent about 9 months at home, but "home" changed once during that time. He and Tonya have never been apart for more than 2 weeks in the past 5 years (take a moment and let that sink in—it's practically unheard of in our business)!


LMB: Do you have any stuff that you always bring with you when you travel to make your temporary home feel more like a real one? Or any special routines to help you acclimate quickly to a new place?


RM: Not really, but I probably should.  Finding a decent grocery store is usually the first thing we do when we get to town. Then a gym. Some of that can be checked ahead of time, but finding them in person is important.




LMB: You often travel with your whole family. I'm sure there are special challenges to traveling with children. Any tips on how to make it go smoothly?


RM: This is extremely challenging and extremely rewarding. My children have been all over the United States and to six other countries. Travel days have different rules for the kids. They can eat special treats, watch shows on the DVD player, etc. So they (really the older one, Emma) get very excited about it. However, long flights can be quite difficult. Sometimes you have to realize that they are children and occasionally scream, and if people give you dirty looks it's only because they don't have kids and don't have the slightest clue of what it's like. We try our best and our kids are generally well behaved, but everyone gets a little cranky on an airplane. As far as packing, we try not to bring too many toys because they really can play with anything. But they do get to bring a special stuffed animal and a book or two and a few small toys so that it feels like home. The thing that has become super important is finding activities and planning them ahead of time. The internet is our best friend. We are pretty digitized. If we didn't have laptops, iPad, and iPhones we would be lost.




LMB: How has life changed since you moved the family to Berlin? Are you finding it easier/more difficult to navigate your career and your life on the other side of the ocean?


RM: The biggest initial hurdle was the language. My German has gotten a lot better over the last year to the point where now I would say I “speak German” though maybe not “fluently” just yet. My five year old daughter speaks fluent German now after having spent several months in a German kindergarten, which I find completely mind-blowing. It's also culturally much different and you can feel isolated from the world. We have made lots of expat friends, though, and that has made it feel nearly like home. We love Berlin as a city and we love our apartment there. Now two years later we are moving back to Houston, but being in Germany for two years have been very rewarding. We will miss it when we leave, but such is the life.




LMB: I'm always looking for advice on how to make a relationship/marriage work despite spending time apart. How do you and Tonya make it work when you're not together?


RM: I am the luckiest man I know in this department. I have a truly amazing wife. From the beginning of our relationship we decided that we would put each other first. She is more important to me than anything (including music) and I am the most important thing to her. We communicate about everything, always, and we do it in as gentle a way as we can. We decided early on that we would travel together. That means that she is a full time mother and does not have a paying job. This has been a major sacrifice on her part, but one that she is happy with, and one that I try to honor. We have seen relationships in both our families and many of our friends fall apart, and I don't think this has anything to do with one's career choice. Relationships are hard work to sustain, and you have to learn to love that work. People continue to change their whole lives if they're lucky, and my plan is to keep getting to know the new Tonya every day.

Also, we stay faithful to each other. Seriously. In this business there are people who everyone knows are married and people who everyone knows are “married.” I'm in the first group. 

LMB: In order to have the career that you have, you have to be willing to be away from home a lot of the time. What makes it worthwhile for you?

RM: Making impactful art is worth it. It sounds extremely naïve, but I believe that people can walk away from an opera with a deeper understanding of themselves and their place in the greater scope of humanity. Now, not every gig achieves this—in fact, it's really rare. But that's the possibility that drives me forward. If through my voice (and the voices of my colleagues, the sound of the orchestra, the drama that unfolds, etc.) someone can be moved enough that they can never go back, that is worth it. 




LMB: Any other advice you wish someone had given you when you were just starting out on the road? Or advice that you did get that has been helpful to you?


RM: Some advice I gave myself early on— Don't follow too much advice! Listen to it all and take it in, but you are responsible for your own life. If you have a crazy idea that everyone thinks is ridiculous it doesn't mean it can't be wildly successful, and likewise just because everyone says it's a good idea doesn't mean it is. Weigh your options, make your choice, never look back. Good luck.




Thank you so much to Ryan! You can find out more about him at www.ryanmckinny.com. For more on his marriage to Tonya, check out this post from my Happy Marriages I Know feature.   

Seven months in (and counting)

I read a lot of books about marriage. Some are scientific, some are anecdotal, some are gimmicky, some assume if I'm reading that my marriage is already in trouble (and it's my parents' fault), some are optimistic, some are fatalistic, some prompt me to start conversations with CM, and some get tucked away in the back of my brain for the future.

Whenever I drop this into a conversation, long-married people seem to find it universally hilarious. The idea that reading about marriage might help me to preemptively protect my own prompts much eye-rolling and wry chuckling. Maybe it's evidence of my youth and naïveté—I'm fairly confident that in my parents' entire 38-year marriage (yes, 38!) neither of them has ever picked up a marriage self-help book. But then again, they've also never experienced the shockingly swift unraveling of the one relationship they thought was indestructible. I have. I know that fragile sometimes masquerades as strong, that red flags can look like good omens from close up, that "till death do us part" does not guarantee lifetime happiness. I know, and CM knows, too.

So I read. I read now, while we're solid, loving newlyweds, in the hope that I'll build habits and patterns that will carry us through someday in the future when we're shaky and hurting. I read about other marriages, and in so doing I spend time analyzing ours—what's great about us, what we could do better.

Lately I've been worried that we don't spend enough time really talking to each other. We talk on the phone multiple times a day, of course, particularly when we're apart, but those conversations mostly consist of stories from our days, work talk, to-do lists, etc. During our engagement, we worked our way through a book of 100 questions to discuss before marriage (in lieu of pre-marital counseling, which is hard to do when the bride and groom are on separate continents), which helped us get to know each other even more deeply than we had in the first three years of our relationship. Now our conversations are mostly pedestrian, and although I treasure the day-to-day I also wish for the occasional profundity.

Yesterday over breakfast CM started telling me all about a book he's reading, called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. He's finding it fascinating, and I realized as he was telling me about it that I didn't really know exactly what makes someone an introvert or an extrovert. CM has always identified himself as an introvert, but I didn't think I could even accurately define the word. This led us down an internet rabbithole which ended with both of us taking one of those personality tests online, a short version of the Myers-Briggs. I had taken one in college, I know, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the result. Well, according to the test (and the one we took after that, just to be sure), it turns out we're both introverts. In fact, we both got the same type: INTJ (that stands for introversion, intuition, thinking, judging—you can read a description of the type here).

I, for one, was shocked that we were identified as the same type. I've always thought we were similar as in compatible—we like the same stuff, we get along easily—but that we processed and reacted to things totally differently. After a thought-provoking discussion of our results, I'll admit that I seem to have gotten that wrong. We are so much more similar at our cores than I thought we were, and though it might seem silly to take an internet quiz this seriously, I am finding great joy in discovering our alikeness. This one conversation, simply illuminating something that was already true, has caused a real tilt in perspective.

So I think I'll keep reading, and analyzing, and asking questions, and demanding truth and depth. And though it may be naïve of me, I'll continue to be delighted when I discover just how much I don't know.


Interested in some light marital reading material? Might I suggest:

No Cheating, No Dying: One couple tackles a year-long marriage improvement project. Here's a teaser.

Spousonomics: All about using economic principles to make marriage better and more efficient.

Committed: An exploration of the history of marriage by the author of Eat, Pray, Love.