When singing becomes detached from its reason for existence, it no longer nourishes either the singer or the audience.   Historically, as in ‘from the dawn of time’, people have sung when emotions both good and bad grew too big for mere speech and then needed to be expressed in a form able to carry more emotional weight.  When a song becomes subordinate to a singer’s ego, when the singer doesn’t connect with either the words or dominant feeling of the song, then it’s just a whole lot of noise and no heart.  Virtuosic noise can be exciting, b

During the oxymoronically named Great Depression, more movie theaters were built in America than at any time either before or since. On first thought, this seems to counter the thinking of the arts-unfriendly legislators that view the arts as fluff, marginal annoyances, mere detours from the nuts and bolts business of putting the country’s economy back on track after eight years of unregulated, disastrous greed. So why, then, did this explosion of supposedly superfluous building take place during a time of financial meltdown?

It’s a show day, and you just woke up. You notice that your throat is a little dry and scratchy, and it feels weird when you swallow.  Your nose is a bit stuffy, and you write it off to morning allergies.  Throughout the day it gets worse, and by show time your vocal cords are coated with gunk, swallowing is torture, and you can’t breathe through your nose. Your voice feels like it’s swathed in an itchy wool blanket and sounds like a goose caught in a blender. What do you do?