🔖🎵 Read Patiently Holding the Sound: Gretchen Parlato on motherhood as a musical inspiration.
What a great interview.
📝🎭🎨🧶🧵🎵💃🏿 This is a reminder that I write Genetrix, a very occasional newsletter curating stories of creative mothers. If those are the kind of stories you’d like to know about, please sign up!
The lyrics from Disney's Disenchanted that make me sob. 🎵
Spoilers for lyrics from Disenchanted follow. Without context they only mean a little but if you’re avoiding spoilers, just move along…
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Are you ready to be spoiled?
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It’s how I’d make a world for you
That never breaks your heart
Where you can grow and thrive
And your every wish can flower
I will always love you, Morgan
I’m so proud of how I know you’ll carry on
I’ve known a lot of magic in my life
But never anything as strong
Love power
My love for you has power
And you’ll have it there inside you
When I’m gone
These lyrics make me sob as a mother AND as a daughter because of course this is what I want for my kid but the “When I’m gone” part hits extra hard when your mom has leukemia and chemo/TKI complications you know?
This is a big cry I’ve been saving up since January as I kept it together for everybody else.
Okay, time for me to go strike now.
Today’s @750words playlist: Music for Writing in a Haunted Mansion curated by Sarah Chavez. 🎵
Now that I’m trained in human subjects research I find myself siding with the Board of Governors in Jekyll & Hyde. 🎭🎵
🎵🎭 I’m listening to the Broadway cast of Moulin Rouge and I’m really impressed with how well it uses the 20 years' worth of music between the film’s release and the Broadway show.
Santigold’s Can’t Get Enough of Myself is mental health goals. 🎵
Me “well actually"ing last week’s Fansplaining in the car on the way to pick my kid up: “But Elizabeth the ‘In sleep he sang to me’ part is really low, even lower than you sang it. It gets obnoxiously high later.'” 🎙️🎵🎭👻👩🏻🏫
It’s a work in progress, but I’m curating a woodland goth playlist. I recommend playing on shuffle. 🎵
Usually Spotify Autoplay makes me grouchy but it turns out when I listen to goth music it suggests more goth music so I’m very happy with its current suggestion of 10:15 on a Saturday Night. (Sorry The Cure, You Are Goth.) 🎵
🔖🎵🎭🍿 Read Judas Christ Superstar: Easter thoughts on being just (Reader) by Katie Prout.
This piece is excellent. JCS is an extremely important show to my family as well. I have a lot more thoughts about it and if I feel up to it, I’ll write them up later.
🎭🎵 Spending my Tues night building an audition repertoire, as one does.
- The Party’s Over
- A Trip to the Library
- Another Hundred People
- Astonishing
- Schroeder
- Let It Go
- Worst Pies in London
- Last Midnight
- Everybody Loves Louis
- I’m Going Back
& 2 opera
🍿🎭🎵 Watched Anything Goes.
Sutton Foster is my hero. Wish I could get to NYC to see her in The Music Man. Everybody in this production was great. I need to watch more musicals because they always make me so happy.
🔖🎵 Read “The Queerest of the Queer”: Listening to Garbage in the Nineties (Catapult) by Niko Stratis.
I enjoy Garbage so much and I appreciate this meditation on what Shirley Manson signifies about gender.
I haven’t seen ENCANTO but I gather Luisa is the middle sister and yet her song is the anthem of eldest daughters the world over. 🍿🎵
🎵 Had to skip “Moonlight Sonata” on the Spotify Dark Academia Classical playlist because belting “Schroeder” at the top of my lungs is not actually conducive to getting work done.
🎵 I’m listening to the full album of Lady Gaga’s BORN THIS WAY for the first time, and I’m a little embarrassed by coming to her this late, given her status as the spiritual successor to Madonna, whom I have adored since 1984.
🔖 Read Two Musicals on the Perils of Aging. 🎵🎭
🔖Also, the Sesame Street Tiny Desk Concert made me tear up. 📺🎵
🔖 I somehow missed Linda Holmes’s beautiful piece about The Muppet Movie soundtrack. She pulls out the very lines that always makes me cry. 🌈🐸🎵
🎵 Do you think if I listen to Bauhaus for the rest of the day, that will magically make it be October?
🔖🎵🎭📚 Read 8 Musicals that You Might Not Know Were Based on Books by Emily Neuberger.
I’ve been grieving the fact that public performances likely won’t be a thing for the next couple of years. I grieve it both as an audience member and as a performer. Neuberger’s book is going on my to-read list, as her main character’s early experiences with musicals are nearly identical to mine. The musicals and books she writes about are now on my radar if they weren’t, or things I’m going to make a point to revisit if I was already familiar with them.
I bet Neuberger’s book would pair well with The Secret Life of the American Musical, which acts as a Poetics for musicals, describing their shared structural features.
🎵🎭📚 You know that feeling when you’re irritated that you have to feed your family instead of just reading Stephen Sondheim’s annotation of his lyrics for the rest of the night? No? Just me, then? (If you haven’t yet, go watch this concert.)