Friday Fermata – Sweet Dreams

Me in costume with a fellow "actor"

Happy Friday everyone!  What a way to end the week than with a picture of a cute puppy!  This was taken during the Philadelphia Opera Company’s production of Don Giovanni.  The dog was very popular and we all waited patiently to pass him around for photos. 

My Friday Fermata for today is the importance of REST.  I don’t get enough of it, and I’m sure that most people reading this post don’t either.  I don’t know about you but I’ve GOT to find a solution to this issue of NOT getting enough sleep.  I get MAYBE 5 hours average.  Until I am “living the dream” and singing full-time, I have a job that gets me out of bed at 5:30AM.  If I have a concert that night, I won’t walk back in the door until close to Midnight.  When on vacation, I notice that my natural cycle is really from 9:00AM until about 1:00AM, which I will fall in to after a couple of days.  The nasty thing about biorhythms is that even though I need to go to bed at 10:00PM to get adequate sleep, and even though I’ve woken up at 5:30AM that morning, my brain will “turn on” at around 10:00PM and I will catch the dreaded “second wind.”  I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that when one gets enough sleep, they are a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON than when sleep deprived.  This includes the singing voice.  I sing better with rest.   Which scares me because I’ve probably been sleep deprived the better part of a decade.  Maybe I could be winning my second or third Tony award by now if I had enough sleep!  LOL! 

As a singer, I know that in my current state, the Matinees are my favorite because I’m actually rested!  During a recent performance I did with the Philadelphia Singers, as we sat in the Conductors Circle during The Damnation of Faust, I turned to the person next to me and said, “I can’t recall an evening performance in my career when I haven’t been exhausted.”

Some of my coping mechanisms have been:

1.  I will take vacation time around the time of a concert run so that I can sleep in – it’s a whole new world when I do this.

2.  Ok, well, that’s really the only mechanism I have.

How do you cope with this?  How do you get enough sleep?  I would love to hear your secrets.

Have a great weekend everyone and enjoy the extra sleep!