My singing teacher is the master of certain comical facial expressions, the most endearing of which is perpetually confused surprise.
Really, she personifies it.
Like today, when she decided to test my range, now that I'm getting more comfortable doing mah thing.
She started up at high-C, and just kinda kept playing down the piano until I couldn't choke out the next note.
We ended up somewhere so low that I didn't really register where it was, and she cocked an eyebrow at me and went the other way.
Where we went right past high-C which was the original cap to my range, and did C-sharp, D, D-Sharp, E... Wherupon sharpening E resulted in a miniature explosion largely resembling a coughing fit.
Blink, went Heather. Blink blink. Blink blink, "Gila..."
But she started it. Six weeks ago she started it, giving me a set of vocalizes and explaining which ones are to do what, which ones extend breath, which ones work the diaphragm, and which ones extend range higher, which ones lower.
When I started lessons, I had NO IDEA how to sing in my speaking voice. Happy Birthday and most campfire songs have always been a disaster for that reason, and I was eager to strengthen my first and second registers, to erase twenty years of debilitating handicap.
Then, remembering a piece that I sang with Maja and how I couldn't hit the bottom note, I pushed lower. As low as I could go. Into my breathy voice, my smoker's voice, my "it's nine o'clock in the morning and I'm leading a corporate meeting filled with men two decades my senior" voice.
To Heather, it sounds like I unintentionally developped a fifth register. I don't sound very nice in it, barely melodic, but dropping an octave to boom out a single rumbling note has its uses as I've learned from re-learning to listen to everyone from Maria Callas to Annie Lennox.
Which makes me a freak with an extra set of phalanges, and Heather and I are both very happy with this fact.
Me, because its status quo for my lifetime, and because it gives me another excuse to believe that I'm the sort of special that my teachers used to tell me I was in early elementary school, before the disillusionment began.
Heather, because she's got a special student, and its amazing to watch her play with me, explore me as I am exploring this whole phenomenon of music, watch her get excited because something different is happening.
My favourite role to play, my favourite sentiment, watching that wonder play over someone's features.
In any case, when we went dooooown the piano keys, Heather started wondering if maybe I'm an Alto, Mezzo, something...
...and on our way back up she cocked that blonde eyebrow and said "no, no, the tone, the tone is so very pure way up here...
And when we went rifling through books to find my first piece, my first aria, we couldn't decide.
Did I want to sing a liturgy? No, no, I wouldn't enjoy practicing Hallelujahs, and would never feel comfortable singing something I've practiced so hard in front of the great pagan front of my friends.
That, and I don't really like it.
Did I want to sing this or that baroque piece? Well, since I made a breakthrough today in not using my throat and I can finally begin learning how to make those notes sound so perfectly light, yes, but...
...but I really wanted an aria.
Putting me through my coloratura, Heather's eyes sparkled and she jotted down something cryptic on my book and told me that next week she'll have the perfect piece for me.
Not the mezzo piece that no mezzo can ever sing because of the upper range portion, because I'm not ready, but one day she said
One day I will sing a piece that to her, suddenly, sounds like it was written for freaks.
Like the piano piece in Gattaca that can only be played by a man with six fingers,
there are arias out there written for freaks of nature who are catching up on a lifetime of refusing to hear melodies because I was told I couldn't,
for voices that started off mature as Dave put it, that have advantages of their own, the advantage of not having a decade of limits engrained in them
or as Heather put it
For virgins, who are beginning their lives in a world free of borders.
Imagine that, a monstre, a virgin.
Don't tell anyone, they'll only think you mad.
As for Heather, she's clearly quite insane, jabbering at me that she can't wait to see me on a stage with her next year.
But I have a secret plan to drive her even further into the reaches of believing in the impossible.
Today, when I was listing off my favourite pieces to give her an idea of my tastes, I announced that one day I want to sing the QUeen of the Night's aria. Not only Rosa's piece in the Marriage of Figaro which I have to learn due to sheer Mozart obsession, but the Queen of The Night. The most wistful character ever written.
Looking frightened suddenly she said "I can't sing that, the top note in that one iS HERE".
Feh, that's only a tone and a half higher than my current range.
And then I dropped the universe on her.
"You'll get very good at it by the time you're finished teaching it to me."
And the look on her face was priceless.