The Dark Side

So the Requiem concert is now history. And what a concert it was! (Props go to John, Gerard, Vince, Kris, Jess, & Joey for showin' up! Hope you all had a great time)! Definitely one of the most memorable experience of my college career. When the CD comes in, I'll try to convert one of the tracks to mp3 and post it up for your enjoyment. Having said that, this was probably the most difficult performance I have ever gave in my life. And this is coming from a guy who has performed in dozens of concerts, plays, and musicals, including several lead and heavily emotional roles. Definitely the most difficult.

What made this performance more difficult than any other was not the singing; that was the easy part. The hardest part was the sitting and waiting for your cue to come in. Because of the intensity of the piece, even though you are sitting there silently, your mind is going a thousand miles a second thinking about what you have to do next. And there's no agonizing feeling than thinking about everything you have to do and feeling powerless to do anything about it.

And since your mind has its own psychological limits, your natural safety systems unlock, desperately trying to take your mind away from the intensity to a safer psychological place. So as you sit there, looking innocent, your mind actually is cooking up of any and every conceivable way to fuck up the concert. You think: "What is I just get up and bang on the timpani?" Or: "How about I just shout a well-placed profanity during the tenor solo?" And then you realize what you're doing, and you internally castigate yourself for thinking any of that stuff, and you sit in perpetual fear that you will give in and just fuck everything up. That's right, folks. When you see a 200-person choir sitting their silently on opening night of their performance, I guarantee that a good amount of them are really in a state of paralyzing fear. Remember that the next time you catch a 200-person choir concert.

So now comes finals week, and due to my graduate/unemployed status, I have nothing to do for a week. So if you have any appointments you want to make with me, do it now! Spaces are going fast!