I hope you still feel small when you stand by the ocean
Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens
Promise me that you’ll give faith the fighting chance
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance
No, this song is not by Strauss, but as I was reading a letter from one of our readers today, I wanted to sing this song to her, in all its non-classical glory!
The letter was about giving up. Being a singer, she wrote, requires too much sacrifice, too much pain and heartbreak.
It’s not time to give up! It’s time to get up and dance—or in CS terms, it’s time to get back to your singing.
Perhaps you’ve realized you’re never going to have the career that you first envisioned. Losing a life dream can be deeply painful, and it’s OK to grieve—for a time. Or maybe your losses are more temporary. Maybe you can’t get an audition with management, or maybe you just opened the back of Opera News and saw that your best friend from college is now singing all over the world, and the pain is enough to knock you flat. Maybe you just lost a coveted competition. Maybe you are a decade past all the age deadlines. Maybe your passaggio will never be smooth, your high notes always less than round…
Painful as all these things are, there is a solution. Take action! Get yourself back on the dance floor! There is always a place where you are needed. There’s a saying:
“God wouldn’t have given birds the instinct to fly south, if there were no south.”
You have felt the burning need to sing for a reason. Someone needs you—a lot of someones. Pick yourself up and get back in the game. (You may have to come up with a new game plan but hey, that’s life. We’re always making new game plans.)
Go back, read JoAnn Ottley’s last two articles, and get yourself to her workshops at the convention. You need to rediscover that what you do is powerful and necessary in this world. You are not a frill, something to be cut from the budget. You may have forgotten who you are, who you were when you started out. Or perhaps you need someone to open up this whole new world to you. In the meantime.
If you are older, don’t use aging as an excuse; that can turn into bitterness. If your health is good, your technique is good, (and women, if you take care of your hormones), there’s no reason you can’t keep singing until you are in your 60s or later. Consider Roberta Peters, Lucine Amara, and others who just keep going and going….
There’s a line in the song: “Tell me who wants to look back on their youth and wonder.” But I say: Who wants to look back on any part of their lives and wonder “what if?”
It’s all up to you now. Just: “Promise me that you’ll give fate a fighting chance—and when you get the choice to sit it out or dance….I hope you’ll dance!”
(For complete song lyrics go to the Google search engine and input “I Hope You Dance lyrics”.)
If you have a question about this article or anything else, please write to Ms. CJ Williamson, the editor of Classical Singer magazine at cj@classicalsinger.com or P.O. Box 95490, South Jordan, UT 95490. Letters can be used as “Letters to the Editor” if you would like, “Name Withheld” if you’d like, or just meant for the staff only. Just let us know
