When you wish upon a star...

I met today with the student I inherited from Vlad, a drama major whose first impression is one of incredible ditziness. She is very self-conscious, but I got her to be less so by being my usual manic self. She is also the only person I have ever met other than people who have read pedagogical texts on teaching singing who has ever heard of the epigastrium, I suddenly felt vindicated. (Interestingly enough, the spell checker which has suddenly appeared in Safari has underlined that word with a dotted red line, which makes me think it has never heard of it either.)

It turns out that she was a body builder at one point and so actually knows things about anatomy, things that her previous voice teacher either doesn’t know or expressed poorly. So when I talked about breathing and how it works and what the diaphragm actually does and where it is and the stomach muscles responsible for controlling the ascent of that organ, she knew exactly what I was talking about. I asked her what her response was when she heard erroneous information, and she said that she was usually too polite to make corrections.

So anyway, she’s not a great singer by any means, but she has a pretty voice, and I think we’re going to get along well. She was quite happy to learn that I have a background in folk singing and that I do jazz and blues as well as classical. I think it helped her to trust me a bit more, since the teacher I’m replacing has no knowledge of those genres at all, really, at least not vocally.

Tonight I went with Hubby to seeStardust at the university. I liked it, but there was a girl behind me who talked practically through the whole show in more than a whisper, and because the sound system isn’t that great in Centennial Theatre, she made me miss chunks of dialogue. I was not happy. I turned around several times and told her to please be quiet. I guess she was so busy talking she didn’t hear me.

Oh, the car has brand-new snow tires on and I nearly fainted when I saw the bill. But hopefully we won’t have to pay for any repairs for a while (fingers crossed) to either car.

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