A Skier's Guide to Opera Singing 5. My Left Foot.

I will keep this one brief.

I was thinking back to my first day of ski season.  It had been years since I had put on skis.  After a couple of glides around the bunny hill, I thought that I had rediscovered some semblance of skiing form.  Keeping in mind that I only skied about 4 times in my life before this.

That first run down, I started off feeling confident.  As I started my first turn, my left foot entirely failed me.  I started to snowplow and I had no strength to coordinate my legs.  For the remainder of the day, I wondered what on earth could be the matter that I could not move my left foot and leg with the same skill and precision of my right leg.

In a way, I was taken back to being a young opera singer.  There were so many things wrong that I had to manage and figure out.  I'm a notoriously slow learner about some things and it took awhile for me to get some equilibrium about performing and learn the skills so that they were reflexive.

So my advice as a skier to an opera singer? Keep track of all the left feet you have.  Deal with them.  It will make the subsequent trips down much more fun.  And then don't forget to repeat again and again... that will help to fix it.

A Skiers Guide to Opera Singing 4. Insanity.

If you are on social media, you may see this meme around:



First off, it is very likely that Einstein did not say it.  Let's put that aside for now.

As a new skiier, I would say that repetition has been my greatest friend.  I started out barely creeping down the green slopes and with more and more runs under my belt, I found that making the leap to more challenging slopes was not nearly as scary.

And besides, the first time I looked down from the top of the mountain I was petrified.  I thought I could see for far too many miles than was humanely safe and the bottom was completely out of sight.  That first run was a blur and it was only with repeating the runs down that I could take in more of the scenery.

Does this sound at all like singing to you?  There is a reason that I spent a month in NYC for rehearsals of my last show.  We were performing a new work that had never been staged and, in addition to giving the music the attention it deserved, my colleagues and I had to spend time figuring out how our characters would interact and what our stories were when we were not on stage.  By the end of rehearsals we were running the show twice per night.

Repetition leads to strength.  Repetition leads to the ability to recover from mistakes.  Repetition leads to confidence.  Repetition gives you the opportunity to look with a wider field of vision and appreciate different nuances.

And soon I began to realize that with repetition, the adventure was in the journey and not the destination.