Well, I said I wasn't writing because nothing "new" was happening, and then something "old" happened - I got sick.
There was a time where I used to get miserably sick for every single opening night, it seemed. I remember hacking my way through my first Cenerentola at Juiliard (and the following NYTimes headline: "Cinderella with a cold makes it to the ball") and lying in bed the night before the dress rehearsal for my first big City Opera role in L'Etoile and feeling my throat turn into sand-paper, with this sinking feeling in my stomach knowing I would be in for a world of trouble.
However, I've never ever cancelled. No matter how laryngitical I was when I woke up the morning of a performance, I have always found a way to make my vocal cords come together, somehow, by drugs or prayer or just plain bull-headedness. Then as my career went on, I would get sick for performances occasionally, but not every single time. Then something happened - I started hardly ever getting sick. The last time I was sick - at all - was in November of 2009. I remember because I got sick before the opening of Romeo and Juliette in New Orleans, and I blamed the fact that I was in such a party city, and must have eaten too many beignets and drunk too many kamakazi cocktails. But then I started getting flu shots, and drinking a glass of grapefruit juice with 1000 mg of vitamin C dropped inside every day, and I managed to stave off all the bugs. Even when I was a crazy person, flying from the U.S. to Europe and back every ten minutes, and even when I visited Michael and he had a cold, I still somehow didn't get one. Until now.
Somehow this week, the mean little buggers got the better of me, and now I have that awful congestion that seems to be spreading into my ears and chest, and my dress rehearsal tomorrow night is looming, with my premiere on Sunday only a few days away. But the difference between my reaction now and 10 years ago is that I'm not freaking out. I know I've sung sick countless times, and that I've never had to cancel. And it is far from pleasant because you can't help but feel scared that your voice won't work. But somehow you push through it, and it doesn't have to be the end of the world. And I find that the less I freak out, the more likely I am to recover quickly.
So, here I am, facing singing a premiere at the Berlin Staatsoper sick as a dog. But I'm just going to keep my chin up, and try to find some awesome german pseudophedrine. It probably won't rival the fantastic cold medicine I found in Bogota, Colombia, but who knows - maybe the german stuff will cure me immediately. A girl can dream.