it's the most wonderful time of the yeaaaarrrrr

Wow, every singer that I know is in the WORST of moods these days.
Why?
Because it's "gather ye rosebuds..." I mean, ye CRAP for audition season...while ye may.

There is SO much resume paper, rewritable cd's, printing, filling out, downloading of Adobe Acrobat 8.0...even things on the internetsss are getting more hard and annoying to fill out with writable pdfs that you have to save to your desktop or submit online (that you can't fill out in smaller writing like you could if you were hand writing the thing to actually EXPLAIN to them your proficiency in four languages).

And the kicker? That's just the application. It doesn't guarantee an audition.
The EVEN more annoying kicker?
YOU can fill out an entire application, have the CD with 3 selections, have a new headshot, updated bio, reformatted resume, and IF you don't have THREE people that are "on it" and "on time" to write your recommendations, you can't send out the application.

What if I'm the person to come up with the grand idea of getting ALL the young artist program directors together, split them up by summer and residency/year round, and ask WHAT they want to know about their applicants. For real.

DO you REALLY care that 90 percent of your singers, when asked if they play a musical instrument, will probably put down those 4 years of piano that their parents made them learn in 4-8th grade even though they get by on playing their own line and maybe a little left hand bass notes now?

DO you REALLY care WHERE, WHEN and with WHOM singers have taken acting/dance/movement?
Really? THAT's suddenly going to ring a bell for you?

WELL--we should hear HER because she studied "ekkktinggg" with blabity bla bla bla of the Stanislavsky method.

Oh, no, we should hear HER because she took "movement for singers" at this pay-to-sing five years ago.

I mean, what singer, who isn't in school these days, has MONEY to study acting/movement/dance with ANYONE famous in New York?

Asking straight theater or broadway singers- sure. They take classes ALL the time and parade around NOLA with little clothes and tap shoes on.

But I don't think a majority of opera singers living anywhere get to independently study any of these things, so we inevitably write down who we studied with for one, or two years in college, and then maybe those three times we took a movement class at the summer program we did last year.


OK, so after asking all of these "important" questions, I will come up with a "common application".
Yes, you heard it here first. Don't steal my idea. For serious.

It will be online, and perfect. And if a specific opera co. wants more information, they can have an added "supplement".
AND payment will be online and they can each charge different things.

The MAIN thing will be that all of the "general" info. that we fill out 10,20,30 times over and over in tiny block letter handwriting, or try to fit into pdf files, or have to THINK about because it's just THAT little bit different on each application, will get to be taken out of the equation.

And then it can go straight into their computer, from ours. And there will be room to upload headshots, resumes, bios, reviews, and mp3s.

AND RECOMMENDATIONS!!!!!!