The Voice can Hold the World

       Son staying over again after a first read-through of a play/musical he's been cast in.  Voice sounded a little weary when he got home from the evening reading.  I told him I envied him that.  I haven't been doing enough reading aloud lately.

       Your voice is weary after working it, but then that's strengthening it too and helping its flexibility and responsiveness to whatever material's being read or performed . . . next.

       I directed and ended up playing the lead in a Readers' Theatre performance of Zangezi, which  I'd been studying for a couple years.  Finally I couldn't fathom how to pass on to a student performer all that was in that complex, linguistically/sonically sophisticated title role and chose, no doubt selfishly, to do it myself:  full of wonderful sounds, words and ideas about language for an hour and a half.

       A month or two later, I took a one-day workshop with performance artist Tim Miller.  A female and I were paired off to improvise on some kind of vocal sounds or word we'd been assigned. We stimulated each other, extending one another further and further, and I remember ending up so high and sonically free of ALL tethers into the far rafters of that building, there was room left only for stunned astonishment in the class, and a sort of gasping whistle from Tim himself.  I knew where my resources for that flight had come from.