WHO WAS HAPPIER? DENNIS THE MENACE OR MR. WILSON?

Raise your hand if any of the following apply to you:

• When you went to college, your dorm room was on a floor with non-Musical Theater majors so you could not practice.
• You "feel bad" singing in your apartment because:

1. your roommates love Musical Theater but practicing for more than 15 minutes would probably bother them. 
2. your roommates hate Musical Theater altogether.
3. your neighbors would complain

• You can anticipate all of the chord progressions in your neighbors' music even though all the songs are in Spanish.  You are also now fluent in Spanish because of said "musica."

I'm sure you raised your hand for at least a few of those.  Now tell me if this is your story, too:

When I was little I didn't care enough to acknowledge the Shut Up's that could occasionally penetrate the ridiculously high frequency of my own singing voice.  I sang a lot when I was a kid and I didn't care who was home or what it said on the clock.  I even remember jumping on my bed and belting "Part of Your World" after bedtime, hearing my dad coming to tell me to stop singing, flopping down and playing dead, and then when my door opened I told him he woke me up in a groggy voice. I was totally psycho even at seven years old.

Putting on a show in my living room.

My biggest fan was my dog, Daisy, who sat in this spot
when I sang and and then left the room when
I practiced the clarinet.  She was a tough critic.

And then I was obsessed with this song:

I was belting about "nights of endless pleasure" at the ripe age of 11 with a red Fischer Price karaoke machine my grandfather got me.  My extended family thought this was hilarious.  And not because of the unfortunate lyric but because I was really committed to my singing even though it was pretty horrendous.  After a few years of self-produced one woman shows in Grandpa's basement, I eventually became a good singer because I was practicing so much!    

Flash forward 15 years later:  After living in cubby-hole dorm rooms with 3 roommates and 2 years of  couch surfing, I finally got my own studio apartment in the hood (Harlem).  There were no roommates trying to watch TV, no sisters trying to do homework, and no non-majors banging on my walls during finals week...  I could finally practice whenever I wanted.

And then I heard it: people talking in the apartment upstairs.  It wasn't a fight or a parent screaming at a kid... it was just TALKING.  And then I realized... "Oh my god... I can't sing here either!"  The walls were as thin as tortillas.  

I stopped singing in my apartment altogether (not even in the shower) because I didn't want to bother anybody, all the while bitterly listening to this song on repeat thanks to my neighbor in 5E:

I hadn't sung more than 8 bars in forever and I started to wonder if I even could anymore!  I was feeling insecure because I had no idea what I even sounded like on my own songs, I was feeling depressed because I had always taken pride in my singing and it was something that I didn't do anymore, and I was angry that the woman upstairs was inconsiderate enough to keep playing her crap despite noise complaints from the entire building.  I was even a little scared to hear myself sing again because what if it was bad? Would that mean I suck and can't sing anymore?

One night I decided enough was enough.  After carefully abiding by the "No musical instruments, bass beats or loud noises" clause in my lease for a year and a half, I decided to intentionally become a bad neighbor. "Frig it!," I said, and I lit some candles, poured a glass of pinot and sang along to The Last 5 Years for as long as I damn well pleased.  In fact, I welcomed a noise complaint!  And I suddenly felt more like myself than I had in a while just because I was singing a full song and didn't care who was listening to it or if it was product-worthy.  It felt great...almost like I had hit some kind of reset button.

We like to be considerate people.  What I learned that night, though, is that you need to be considerate of yourself, too.  Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, singing is a good way for us to release excess energy, and we all know we theater folk have a lot of that! Whether it be anger, sadness, stress, anxiety or even just excess happy energy, we need the outlet.  Some people go to the gym or do kickboxing; we eat chocolate and sing songs.  If we get rid of the songs and just eat the chocolate, we end up sitting in a pile of our own tears and Hershey wrappers just LISTENING to "Someone Like You" and we don't feel any better when the song is over.  Our vocal cords can't live vicariously through our eardrums for the rest of their lives.  We need to be a little less considerate of other people and  take up our space in the ocean of sound waves. 

"Stifle yourself, Edith."

Here is the ultimate irony.  Are you ready?
I work for Tom Burke Voice Studio.  If you have ever been there, you know a funny thing about our studio is that you have to take your shoes off when you come in.  It's not because we want you to air your toes out while you sing a couple of ditties; it's because we share a space with a yoga studio. Voice lessons and yoga, you ask? Yes, voice lessons and yoga.  We, one of the noisiest offices in New York City, are neighbors (or really roommates!) to what is supposed to be one of the quietest places in New York City.  There are plenty of times when I realize I am the Dennis the Menace in this scenario and the yogis are poor Mister Wilson.  But Dennis would be giving up part of his childhood if he didn't make loud noises, and I would be giving up my worth as a teacher if I did the same. So, Mr. Wilson, I will try to be as conscious and aware of when you are reading a book or working on your ship in a bottle, but sometimes I just have to do my job and be a kid.  We need to coexist.

Reasons why you should be a bad neighbor, too:

1. If you are an actor, it is quite literally your career to be a bad neighbor.  In order to book and maintain a job, you need to be practicing at home.  And if you don't know what you're going to sound like when you open your mouth at an audition or rehearsal, you're going to be in a far more embarrassing situation than one that involves the guy in 4F, the management company and a warning slip under your door (or even the cops. Who cares? Uniforms are hot.).   
2. If you are not a professional actor and you just sing for fun, that is no excuse.  Don't let the "I don't really have to sing" turn into "I used to sing." It's like Coke.  If you stop drinking Coke for a long time you stop craving it. Then when you taste it again you think, "Ugh this is weird."  And then after a couple of sips you love it and wonder how you were living without it for this long.  Just drink the Coke.  
3. About that clause in the lease:  I realized that night that this clause is not meant for us. This clause is for the A-hole who plays rap at 2am from his car stereo outside your window while barbecuing for the rest of the building.  We are respectful people.  We know what noise level is acceptable and we are smart enough to know during which hours of the day it would not be acceptable to be trying to sing Let Me Be Your Star.  I intuitively know that you (yes, you!) can ignore that clause.
4. If you are not singing in your own home because you are afraid you are bothering someone, you are making a compromise that is more than a compromise; it is a sacrifice.  You are sacrificing an important part of yourself to make other people (who you might never even meet) comfortable.  Is it worth it? 
5. Let's face it, we didn't listen to our siblings when they told us to shut up 20 years ago.  Why are we so concerned about the guy next door?  He'll deal.  And if he says something, then tell him it's your job (even if it isn't your DAY job) and he can expect to hear you during business hours Monday-Friday.   ;)  
6. Don't let your voice lesson be the only place you hear your own voice.  Remind yourself that you can hear your voice for free every day whenever you want.  

Challenge yourself to incorporate more singing into your life so it becomes a fluent language for you again.  Sing when people are around, sing to your pets, and when the train is coming just spontaneously sing some crazy high note.  Nobody can hear you and you'll get a good laugh. If you're in a subway car by yourself, sing in it.  Hold your phone up to your ear and sing on the street so people think you're talking.  Play this game and let me know how many points you score by the end of the week.  As you can see, some tasks are more point-worthy than others.  The more crazy you are this week, the more points you will receive.

Listen to me. You pay your rent, too.  Do this for yourself.  I'm tryna' make you go to rehab so don't say no...no...no.

CANTO BRUTTO (SO EASY EVEN A CAVEMAN COULD DO IT!)

Common dialogue after a goosebump-giving performance at a voice lesson:  
Jen: That was awesome. How did it feel?
Singer: It felt great but it was kind of ugly.  
Jen: Can you describe how you’d like it to sound?
Singer: It probably is what it should sound like but it still feels ugly.
Jen: Do you think it FEELS gross or it SOUNDS ugly.
Singer: It sounds ugly.

This is my short response:  We kind of are making ugly noises.   But it’s also what the song calls for.  
This is my long response:  Why are we so worried about sounding ugly anyway?  Believe it or not, our fears date way back to The Stone Age. Here’s what I mean.

IN THE PAST!:

We were the only species in the Animal Kingdom that sang AND lived on land.  Birds and monkeys sang but they could hide in trees.  Whales sang but they were safe under the ocean.  Way back then, we didn’t have the luxury of living in natural habitats that hid us from our enemies.  We were right there in the open.  In prehistoric times, if you broke out into your favorite Whitney Houston song while cleaning your cave, your voice would be heard all over the jungle and the Smoke Monster would know exactly where to find you.  So it’s a very natural instinct to feel vulnerable while singing your tunes even millions of years later.  The cavewoman in you knows you shouldn’t be singing that loudly. 
But in 2013 our predators are no longer lions, tigers or bears... they’re critics, friends, audiences, teachers, parents and, sadly, ourselves.  Now we’re more afraid of being eaten alive by our fellow Homo sapiens than by wild animals.

Unfortunately using clubs to bludgeon our haters is considered illegal today, so the only thing we’ve got are these:  confidence in our instincts and an uninhibited sense of abandon.   You’ve seen America’s Next Top Model.  You see how those girls are willing to pose in coffins with tarantulas on their faces for the sake of the shot?  They recognize that something that looks highly disgusting can also be high fashion and that’s why they’re the best.  They’re turning their “ugly” into something that will be accepted as pretty because underneath it they are motivated and confident.

WE LOVE UGLY!:

Because singing is a natural thing that began millions of years ago, it would make sense that it wasn’t originally meant to be that pretty. We used song to communicate because we just didn’t have the mental capacity to have formal languages yet.  Everybody sang.  It wasn’t a special talent.  But as time passed and our brains became more sophisticated, those sounds we were making were omitted from our vocabulary because they were too cray cray.  That’s when people started being judgey and deciding who was allowed to sing and who should keep their day job.  And those who were deemed untalented had to resort to words as their penance.  And words, tools that are supposed to allow us to articulate exactly what we mean in a very specific way, can ironically be so confining and frustrating and not specific enough!  Sometimes there just isn’t a word for how we’re feeling and we just want to make a noise!  When we’re in pain, when we’re scared, when we’re disgusted, when we think something is funny, we use sounds that aren’t found in the dictionary.  We need to give ourselves permission to use these crude noises in the context of a polished product even if it feels counterintuitive.  These are the sounds our audiences are wishing they could use themselves but society is telling them they’re too good for it and they’re not allowed.  Deep down, all of us really just want to lay in coffins with tarantulas on our faces.  No?  Ok...  We need to be confident enough to unlace our vocal corsets and run bra-less on stage so that our audiences can praise Jesus for some vicarious release.  Yes, I said it.  (Because that’s what we REALLY want and you know it.)

Guys, listen. We’re in Musical Theater. The whole point of a musical is that the character just can’t express what she wants to express unless she sings it.  Should we limit ourselves to the mundane sounds we use every day when we’re ordering a chicken sandwich?  Absolutely not!  Singing is the time to reach into your primal souls and pull out what’s in there and trust that, inherently, because you’re humans and descendants of cavemen, you’ll succeed in the Mix and Match Game of Paleolithic Sounds to Paleolithic Feelings.  You know instinctively how to depict these feelings in a simple way because we were once... well... simpler.  After all, Cavemen felt these things first: Desire, Fear, Sadness, Aggression, Joy. . .  and when they expressed themselves they didn’t worry whether it was aesthetically pleasing to the people around them.

UNTRAINING YOUR TRAINED BRAIN:

We take so many classes to learn how to be “organic” and “raw” actors.  We need to trust and remember that some of the most organic things we’ve seen on stage and screen are brilliant because they’re freakin’ ugly!  We literally give out awards for something called The Ugly Cry.  Viola Davis: boogers galore in Doubt.  Did we care? No.  Oscar.   Even Anne Hathaway could have used a Kleenex when filming I Dreamed a Dream and she won the Oscar before the movie came out.  We need to take some of the same values we work towards in our acting classes and bring them into our singing lives, too.  These women have been training for years but when push comes to shove we don’t want to see the training; we want to see how the training helped them to be as raw as hell.  These performers have enough experience to know how far to push themselves emotionally before they start hyperventilating, yelling “Cut!”, killing co-stars, etc.  The same should apply to vocals.  We can keep our training in the back of our minds to protect ourselves from getting injured, but we also can do what feels right in the moment even if it’s ugly and trust that we know what we’re doing because we practiced the pretty stuff.

Let’s switch gears.  Food for thought:  Who are the most careless, raw and untrained people on Earth?  Babies. Grown men have been known to reduce themselves to goo-goo-ga-ga-ing just for some sort of reaction from a baby.

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If we’re willing to lose our dignity and produce high-pitched, nonsensical sounds just to connect with an infant (who can’t possibly afford to give us a paycheck, by the way), why not make this sacrifice for our audiences, too?  Aren’t we looking for a visceral response from those people, as well?

If it’s character driven and connected, it’s not “just screaming” or “ugly” or “silly.”  Even Idina Menzel says her vocal inspiration for Elphaba was literally Margaret Hamilton’s laugh from the Wizard of Oz movie.  What could be more ugly than that?  But that’s what got her a Tony.  It was character appropriate, controlled and motivated.

If you still don’t believe me, look at this video I made just for you.  Out of context, the climaxes of these songs sound crazy!

These girls are basically yelling, crying, screaming, etc. in a controlled, musical context and that’s why we take voice lessons anyway, right? -- to learn how to make weird sounds in a controlled musical context.

Life isn’t always pretty so our voices shouldn’t always be pretty either.  Don’t deny yourself your humanity.  Be an animal. Sing some gross notes. I leave you with this: