21 grams... at least

I had Kelly and five other friends over for dinner two nights ago, and, like the wonderful woman she is, Kelly brought her USB drive filled with pictures of my performance last week. I'm singing E' Strano! E Strano! from La Traviata. I love singing that aria maybe even more than Caro Nome because it's filled with changing emotions: breathlessness, mocking, worry, self pity, love, and so it gives lots of opportunities to be the acting lover that I am. Plus, I find I can get deep into the role much more easily than many of the other arias I sing. A little bit of tragedy always helps me along I guess.






I love this photo because it looks like the camera caught the song leaving my mouth. It reminds me of the experiment Dr. Duncan Macdougall did in 1907 when he weighed patients during the hours of their deaths to calculate the weight of their departing souls. Apparently our souls weigh about 21 grams. So what about a song? Sometimes I feel like they weigh a lot, maybe that's why when I finally let them out in a performance of rehearsal I feel such a high, and why when I'm sick and can't song I feel heavy and lethargic and generally icky.