Kathleen is an organized person, especially when she tries to accomplish the impossible. Her letter/résumé/headshot packages were done a few months before she left. In order to save money on postage, she mailed three hundred in a batch to someone in Germany, the plan being that they would then put German postage on them and re-mail them. Between postage, headshots and buying an address list, the mailing cost over a thousand hard-earned dollars.
Five weeks before her departure date, she’d begun to receive responses from a few French and Austrian agents, but nothing from that big batch mailing to Germany, and we both began to get a dreadful feeling. She didn’t want to pester agents and houses, but finally, one morning, she called a few. I do video journaling, and I was rolling tape as she discovered that with only five weeks to go, her letters had not been received.
Kathleen: Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Okay. Bye.
Keith: So?
Kathleen: They didn’t arrive. (Long, stunned pause.) I don’t know what to do. I guess I could send them all again. I could… but that took me forever. I…
Keith: Let’s do it again. I’ll… I’m home this week, and I can stuff envelopes.
Kathleen: That’s like three hundred letters.
Keith: That’s fine. I’ll do whatever you… whatever I need to do.
Kathleen: (leafing through a stack of printed lists of agents and houses) All right, well… Basically… Everything… See, I don’t even have a way of knowing what was sent… I’m pretty sure all the German-speaking countries, plus Denmark and Norway and Sweden and a whole bunch of others…
Keith: Yeah?
Kathleen: This is just… (long pause) All right, so can we… do you think we can do like a mail merge?
Keith: I don’t know how to do mail merges. Do we have a file of all the addresses?
Kathleen: No.
Keith: Okay.
Kathleen: No. We’d have to type them all in.
Keith: All right, I’ll type them all in. I’ll do that today.
Kathleen: (laughs hopelessly)
Keith: Do we have fax numbers for any of them?
Kathleen: Um, yeah…
Keith: Let’s fax them. Save ourselves a week and a half, or something.
Kathleen: Oh… Our phone bill’s going to be outrageous!
Keith: I think it’s more important that we get stuff done quickly.
Kathleen: This is just sickening… I mean… I don’t even know where we start! You know? Look at this!
Keith: I’ll type them all in.
Kathleen: (displays the stack of paper)
Keith: Yeah, all of them.
Kathleen: Four per page!
Keith: Fine!
Kathleen: I just… (long pause) All right, well… How should we do this?
Keith: Well… I guess I have to learn how to do a mail merge.
Kathleen: (looking through the stack) There are also email addresses for some of them.
Keith: Good.
Kathleen: Maybe what you should do is go through and email a small scan of my photo, and attach my résumé.
Keith: Okay.
Kathleen: Um… everything that’s in German… (takes a long breath, collects herself) Everything to Germany and Vienna—er, Österreich, which is Austria—you’re going to send the German stuff.
Keith: Okay.
Kathleen: And… I… I should make you a list…
Keith: Yeah, we’re going to have to write this down.
Kathleen: Okay. (leaving room) I just can’t believe this… This is just so awful… I just can’t believe it…
From: KHaaversen@classicalsinger.com
Date: Wednesday, October 17, 2001
Subject: Hello from Berlin!
Audition report: I sang for the ZBF agency in Berlin yesterday, and I have to admit that it was pretty much a waste of time. Except, who knows what is really a waste of time?? The room was awful… carpeted and draped to bits, and so it sounded to me like I wasn’t really even singing, although the singers in the next room said they could hear me. The auditioners asked for a second piece, and they asked for the long German aria (Elsa) so I guess they liked me well enough to listen. And they looked at me, which is more than the guy in Vienna did. One woman watched me the whole time, which is unusual. But at the end, they said they had nothing for my voice type, so that was that!
We did notice that where the non-Germans got the “We have nothing for you”, and were thanked and excused, the Germans spent an awful lot of time in there with them. So since this is a state-run agency, we think they were doing a bit of career development in there. Of course, non-Germans will be the last called, but still it’s important to do as many auditions as you can, because you never know which ones will be worth doing.
One Australian girl who has both Australian and Greek citizenship was only allowed to sing one aria, which was not usual, and was told thanks. She stormed out, and all we heard for the next 20 minutes was a stream of colorful invective about the auditioners! It was pretty funny! Then she collected herself and a bunch of us went out for dinner together. We all traded info: two Americans, an Aussie and a German countertenor. We had a great time, although the two girls seemed a little depressed about how their tours are going. I think I am expecting less from it than they are. It’s all a crapshoot, and you just have to get in there and do the best you can and not worry about it. But they were a little depressed.
From Keith: Okay, I messed up. In last month’s installment, I promised “Lust and Skulduggery in Milan.” However, I didn’t realize there was another episode first—the one you just read. Sorry! Tune in next month for lust and skullduggery in Milan! Thrill to street singing and herb pipes in Munich! And gasp in horror as our plucky heroine misses the flight to her one and only London audition!
Bio:
Keith Snyder’s new book, The Night Men, is now in stores. Kathleen Haaversen’s web site (www.mp3.com/haaversen) includes arias, new music and audio interviews.
