At Least We Got To Sing

Work was same old same old. One more run and I'll be able to turn in the script I've been working on.
Also need to document the classes I've taken from new company catalog, and share with my team.

Round Table for lunch, ate half a small pizza. Took the rest home.

Home after work, relaxed with the cats & watch the other half of Shark Tank.

Went to the Peninsulaires' 4th voice lesson. This time they did okay, hardly wasted any time, we got to sing a lot. Vocal exercises about different vowel sounds. They have their own theories about how vowels should be sung which are reasonable, but not as universal as they would like to believe. The example words they use show the theory came from New Yawk, where "long" and pronounced "lawng" - on the left coast it is mostly pronounced "lahng".

After the exercises, they changed directors and we got someone who has no clue at all how to teach 4-part harmony to a group. This is the third time we have run through You're A Grand Old Flag, but the last two times he only taught the melody and the non-intuitive "bass part" which is really a baritone part. The baritone part is all over the place and the tenor part is closer to soprano. They sing it way too high for me, and too high for any man who is not adept at falsetto or is a castrati. I did my best Milli-Vanilli impression. I tried singing it down an octave, but he said not to. :-(

Bottom line is he did not rehearse each part separately, so nobody really knew what they were supposed to be singing except the leads. The agenda said we would be broken into octets for this, but it never happened. Not a major issue because they did not have enough instructors to do that. They did have enough to break us into the 4 parts and teach us those separately, but they didn't think of that.

But still, better than the last 3 lessons combined.

On my way out there were flyers for West Valley Light Opera's Fiddler on the Roof which the first instructor is in, though he has not verbally mentioned it. I know the director and half a dozen of the cast, but this is a company which kicked me out of a show once, and the person who did the kicking produced this show, so I'm not going. Won't go to any of their productions. My other excuse is it's in a crappy facility in Saratoga which is a PITA to get to.

Home, dinner was a tiny Banquet dinner, watched some of the news but am so damned tired of the media hyping the government shutdown. Which would not have happened if the "news" "organizations" had not gotten obsessive about covering the idiots who caused it.

So I switched to The Voice where I saw he last two contestants, one of whom was so Country he had to scrape the cow poop off his boots before entering the theater. Excellent voice, though. The other was a single mom with a voice like a buzz saw. All four of the judges loved her, even though she chose a song with half an octave range and sang it was if it had no detectable tune. I think they all thought she needed their coaching. SOmething tells me that no matter how she does in the competition, she will be picked up by some record label, probably CeLo's, even though she chose Adam.

Then I channel surfed, Bones grabbed me because sexy redheaded doctor against he-thinks-he's-sexy no-clue detective. Way too much gossip and innuendo for a crime drama.

So here I am, wrapping things up.
   
Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Meeting with mobile home manufacturer's rep.