March 27, 2012.  Today my energy and emotional fortitude is all but drained from my body.  My initiative for things creative is in the gutter.  My brother’s condition is sapping me of anything I might give to those around me.  He’s fallen gravely ill and I’m doing my best to make a quick trip out to Florida to see him while he is yet conscious.  The health care system seems to be failing him so very badly.  It is explained to me that the tumor on his pancreas is preventing him from making digestive enzymes needed to turn food into energy and he is wasting away.  He barely has the energy to walk anymore and I’m afraid he will starve if there is no intervention.  They never keep him in the hospital when he’s there for tests and yet he is on death’s door.  I’m not medically trained but anyone I talk to says he should be fed intravenously if he cannot absorb nutrition the usual way.  He’s been told to get stronger and gain weight to be in shape to survive an operation… but shouldn’t they be helping that to happen??  I feel so hopeless in all of this… …and being in Canada now, for all the talk in the US about how “the Canadian Free Public Healthcare System is so inferior”, I know for a FACT Phillip would be checked into a hospital and everything that could be done for him WOULD be.  NOBODY, not even a homeless person gets left to die on the street…

New addition to my original post.  April 26, 2012.  I’m grieving the loss of my dear brother Phillip.  As my sister Dina wrote,  “Our hearts are broken into pieces. Our dear brother, son, father, soul mate, uncle and friend, Phillip Myers, passed away this morning at 3:30 a.m. There was no kinder, compassionate, beautiful and talented man. He would help anyone in need, no matter how difficult the task. I had the privilege of holding his hand during his last few hours. Phil, we will miss you more than you will ever know but you will live in our hearts forever. It pains me to have to let his friends know the sad news and I know it is probably a shock to many of you. Phillip was a very private person and didn’t want to burden people with his illness but I know you would all want to know.”   He will be greatly missed indeed.

I feel like the healthcare system failed him somehow.  I’m not a medical professional so my opinions may not be count.  I just know that in the town I call home, there’s a man going about his business who hasn’t had a working pancreas for years by now.  He has to wear a “back-pack” with special “food” in it that is somehow automatically fed into his digestive system through a special port on his side.   He functions well and appears totally “normal” in every other way.   Apparently this is the only method by which you can survive without the digestive enezimes normally made by your pancreas.  Phillip basically died of starvation.  A pretty horrible way to go.  He was unable to eat anything due to the digestive problems created by his pancreas not working.  I’d like to learn more about this problem and would love to see other people going through this better helped.  My heart is so very broken right now….

Okay, debriefing from the Dallas Symphony show has taken me a little longer than I’d hoped.  It was an experience of a life time, to be sure!  Wow… I just loved the power of the Horn Section during the cries in Rhiannon.   A totally different dynamic to a performance like that than even a band that’s really cranked up.  Interestingly, the volume is actually somewhat lower on stage but the intensity of the huge number of instruments all SEEM to add up to something bigger than life!  I just loved it!!

I’ve been sitting in my Hot Tub here at home a couple of times reflecting on things and I have to say I did find the the demographics at the shows to be a little puzzling.  There were some younger people there… as young as 10 years old, but not that many.  You WOULD expect there to be a larger proportion of elderly people as they are the major demographic holding season’s tickets…AND, I DO know symphonies book a Rock show like this to help diversify their audience base, and yet, I don’t think they advertised the show to anyone but their seasons ticket holders.  Even though the shows were very well attended, it sort of seemed to defeat their desired out come, I should think.   Not my problem I suppose… but none the less, puzzling.

There would be a few things I’d do differently, if I ever had an opportunity to do this again.  I’d like to address the symphony as a group to jump start a bit of a relationship with them, right up front.  Just to get everyone on the same footing.  In a group that size, sometimes the feature artist is looked on with a bit of disdain as you are seen to be there to usurp their moment in the spot light.  This is very counter-productive to getting a good show together in short order.   I’m no diva and I need to be sure it doesn’t take me all weekend to let these people know I am soooo unbelievably honored to be performing with THEM…. with an emphasis on “with” and “them”.  In the end, it was all good.  The audience was never the question.   They loved the show and were very appreciative…  For me, it will be a memory to last a life time.

Okay, debriefing from the Dallas Symphony show has taken me a little longer than I’d hoped.  It was an experience of a life time, to be sure!  Wow… I just loved the power of the Horn Section during the cries in Rhiannon.   A totally different dynamic to a performance like that then even a band that’s really cranked up.  Interestingly, the volume is actually somewhat lower on stage but the intensity of the huge number of instruments all SEEM to add up to something bigger than life!  I just loved it!!

I’ve been sitting in my Hot Tub here at home a couple of times reflecting on things and I have to say I did find the demographics at the shows to be a little puzzling.  There were some younger people there… as young as 10 years old, but not that many.  You WOULD expect there to be a larger proportion of elderly people as they are the major demographic holding season’s tickets.  I know symphonies book a Rock show like this to help diversify their audience base but I don’t think they advertised the show to anyone but their seasons ticket holders.  Even though the shows were very well attended, it sort of seemed to defeat their desired out come I should think.   Not my problem I suppose… but none the less, puzzling.

There would be a few things I’d do differently, if I ever had an opportunity to do this again.  I’d like to address the symphony as a group to jump start a bit of a relationship with them right up front.  Just to get everyone on the same footing.  In a group that size, sometimes the feature artist is looked on with a bit of disdain as you are seen to be there to usurp their moment in the spot light.  This is very counter-productive to getting a good show together in short order.   I’m no diva and I need to be sure it doesn’t take me all weekend to let these people know I am soooo unbelievably honored to be performing with THEM…. with an emphasis on “with” and “them”.  In the end, it was all good.  The audience was never the question.   They loved the show and were very appreciative…  For me, it will be a memory to last a life time.

I should be really excited today but I’ve got to start packing and I seem to be putting it off.  I’ve had a little trouble getting used to my “in-ear monitors” at rehearsal lately as I don’t use them regularly and this adds a bit of frustration to learning slightly new “symphony accompanied” versions of the songs I already know so well.  I  shouldn’t let it get to me but I don’t use them regularly enough and that’s the problem.  If you are too lazy to use them during rehearsal then you likely won’t use them during performance it seems.  The upcoming show is at the Morton H Myerson Symphony Center in Dallas and I really AM looking forward to it.  It may be the biggest audience to date… at least for my Stevie Nicks Tribute.  I’m leaving for rehearsal in Vegas Saturday morning… two days from now… and I still have a few Costume modifications to attend to as well!  I should be so very motivated!  Seems like I go through some kind of swings in my levels of motivation… and many times, the better things are for me the less motivated I am.  Any of you have trouble with that?  The human condition seems to be such that whenever we are giving something without having to work for it, we don’t value it much.  There are groups in our society where governments give out assistance to people and it never seems to give these people a leg up.  They remain in their squalor and we think, “man, if I could get that type of assistance I’d do this and that with it… WOW!”.  I am recently married and my new husband has found that at his business if he buys new equipment for his employees his success in keeping this new equipment in good condition doing the job it was intended for is a lot less successful than if he buys a well used piece of equipment and then gets his maintenance crew to dig in and refurbish it from top to bottom and repaint it and everything, often spending almost as much money as just buying it new in the first place.  The reason is that now he has 4-6 maintenance men, who are proud of what they’ve built, helping to teach the operators how to use it correctly and chastising operators who scratch the new paint etc.  It’s a little disheartening to think how natural it is to be ungrateful.  I am always thinking about this part of me and I know I am not exempt… so with that bit of self examination, I’m off to go pack and work on my costume changes….

Cheers everyone!

 Running a blog has not been one of the things high on my Bucket List but who knows, this may be fun.  My managers and agents seem to think it necessary to give people access… and I’m like “FaceBook, ReverbNation, Twitter, and eMails aren’t enough??”.  I DO like a good conversation… and I know FaceBook and Twitter aren’t really great in that sense.  FaceBook always seems to entice you to just flit from one thing to another with all the zillion posts that come in every day.  I’d love to be able to endorse everyone’s posts and let them know I care… but honestly, I can’t even take the time to press the “like” button on a lot of them as it just takes so much time.  Time Vampire, is what I’ve heard.  Hmmm.. I’m hoping this will be different.

Somewhere on this thing, I think I might tell a little of my life story.  Everyone has a story, and I, for one, won’t ever be very likely to write a book… so this may be the place.  I’ve done some interesting and crazy things…. not all of which I’m proud of.   I like who I am today… and I often wonder, “am supposed to be thankful for some of the dumber or rotten things I’ve encountered?”…. because it is doubtless they helped shape my person in some way or another.