Relieved

Hello sports fans. So I'm not the next Canadian Idol and I couldn't be happier.

The audition process was looong, peppered with crazies and performance school sweethearts. When it came time for the first audition I had to pee so bad from all the water I drank I was surprised I could sing at all. There were five of us and then the guy went into his speil about how it never gets any easier to tell people to go home...I thought I was done for...(eternal optimist that I am). But he said he was keeping me and another girl. He then asked me a whole slew of questions and remarked that I had a girl-in-a-band vibe, which was funny since I haven't been in a band since I was twenty. Then after I got my first "go ahead" it was five hours before the next audition. Then the second lady (we'll call her the blonde behemouth) tells me when I am done singing that I have a singer-songwriter vibe and that I have a very pretty voice. I hear a but in her voice even before she tells me to sing my next song. She says I have a breathy thing going on...(all these vibes and goings on...)but that she isn't putting me through but that I should start a band. Second producer telling me I should start a band. Maybe someone is telling me something? Ya think?

Anyway, the experience was very positive and I think some of my friends are more pissed than I am about not going to Toronto. Who wants to go to Toronto anyway? I'm just so glad I did it. Frankly the night before in a rageoholic fit I exclaimed that I wasn't going to do it, that I couldn't...that there wasn't any point. I'm so glad I was told to shut up.

I also now have my show to prepare for in April, which now seems like a much less daunting task. Seems like an fucking breeze, actually.

Hope Sunday finds everyone well and relaxed and rested. peace.

Here I am Baybeh...

OOOOK. Momment of truth. I am on my way to Complexe Desjardins. I know what I am going to sing.

I am terrified and exited and not sweating thanks to some heavy duty industrial strength deoderant. Here goes kids....If you have a minute send me an angel...

Two days...gonna have to turn this mutha out...

Two days. I have tomorrow off to practice and to try and get my nerve up...I think it will be good for me...even if they tell me I suck. And I still have my show on the 10th of April to get me off the pity party couch if it turns out that way.

Am I prepared? I guess I will be tomorrow...all day singin then some retail therapy to find a little sumthin sumthin to wear over my jeans...maybe a hot lipstick.

I have to keep remembering a fortune cookie that I got in high school that I kept in one of those boxes where I keep scraps of useless memories...It said the world will always welcome talent with open arms. Here's hoping I have talent!

Have a great day to anyone who reads this...I could use some good vibes...so send some on!

ONE SECOND AT A TIME

I love Hunter S. Thompson. I discovered him at around 20 years of age and I loved his acid, drunken and pissed-off style. He wrote passionately about politics in Rolling Stone for many, many years. He had movies, with Johnny Depp playing him, made about him. How cool is that? How cool that he fucked the establishment and threw caution and personal safety to the wind? He was my hero and when I finished The Rum Diary, his first book, writen by a then twenty-two year old Thompson, I was awed and envious and aching for a tumbler of rum.

(I very nearly capitalised the word Rum, as if it were a person or a country...Does anyone out there know how telling that is?)

I love Huntter S, Thompson still but I have this pit in my stomach when I think that my hero, tough as nails boy-genious renegade, blew his brains out with a shot gun. He said he couldn't take the pain anymore. Most of the newspaper articles speculated that it was his long suffering with back pain from a surgery he had gotten years before. I know it was booze. And drugs. And years of being a drowning man.

I don't pity him. His ultimate naiveté was that he mistook his anger for cynicism...much hipper, much cooler than fear. Fear and Loathing, people. Think maybe he knew? His opus was Fear and Loathing. Then he went to hang out with Bikers.

Makes me think of some guys I went to CEGEP with, who used to talk about trying heroin. They made a plan on it, these rich kids who spent daddy's dough on Ectasy and raves. I was actually jealous of them too, I wanted to be cool like them and think that doing dangerous drugs was brave.



I ain't giving up my dream that easily. I will not end up living on a ranch alone in the middle of nowhere with a shotgun to my head...So to quote Cypress Hill... "I ain't goin out like that."

Bring on the fucking audition!

Free girl in Paris

Hello sports fans. It's been a weird morning. Just now, the girls at work started talking about American Idol.

Of course I watched it last night.

I am slowly starting to sprout Idol gills, I am living, breathing, feeling it everyday. The pit of my stomach is a torrent of waves, My Brain is permanently locked on THAT moment...the one coming. I will stand in front of judges and they get to tell me if I'm good or not. No pressure, right? Only been more than twenty years of dreams built up, singing myself to sleep, walking with a determined gait and thinking that someday, maybe...

This is getting cheesy. It's fear that's making me think this way. I have to try and remember what James Taylor's brother said (he's a teacher in performance at an American University and of course I can't remember his name...the drawbacks of having your brother be James Taylor, I guess)...He said performance fear can be quelled if you realise as a performer that you are there to ENTERTAIN OTHERS. Yah, course, it helps that you do it for yourself..artistic integrity and all that..but you can't forget the audience...They are the ones that matter. Your fear is personal...tied up in fear of being inadequate.

Frankly, the fear dissipates a little when I think of it this way. Just gotta go and let them tell me whether or not I should bother with this singing thing. I'll probably always do it...But I'd really like to know whether my dream is a sac of shit that I'm carrying around as a crutch...something else I can be angry at if I don't succeed. I hope not. That's all I can do. Hope and try and do my best.


You think this is bad folks...the Idol obsession has JUST begun...



(When should I tell the girls at work?)