(August 2, Saturday) First of all, I forgot to mention that my voice was tired even before the sitzprobe last Friday morning. In addition, I wasn’t able to rest my body for the whole day on Friday because of staging rehearsal in the afternoon and a run-through in the evening. This may have caused the difficulty in singing for the Masterclass at Lobero, Saturday afternoon. I was feeling really bad because the upper register of my voice was very tired. I could sing notes above ‘G’ properly. I had good encouragements from fellow singers, especially Faith Sherman, Anna Uzzell, Ami Vice, Melinda Blum and pianist Dexter Shepherd (Thanks, guys, for keeping ‘me’ together, even though I felt like I would be a disaster to the duet with Anna). I did the best I can to sing the whole duet (from Lucrezia Borgia with Anna). I came through, but felt tired from the middle upto the end of the piece. I felt really bad about not singing as good as I have hoped for, even though, according to the audience, my singing seemed very good, and they didn’t notice that I was under the weather; well, at least not on my voice, but on my body movements and some of my facial expressions. Steven said that he noticed it on my face. Oh well! I felt disappointed at myself, in a way, because Warren (Jones) wasn’t able to work with me during the Masterclass, and I felt that I let him down, since it is being held at Lobero Theater. Inspite of all the bad feelings I’ve been having due to my singing, a lot of people have come up to me and expressed that they truly enjoyed my singing: both students, teachers and patrons of the opera. For that, I am very grateful.

For the rest of the day, Steven and I just went to Uncle Chen’s for Chinese food, headed back to Cate and watched “Speedway Junky”. I slept a little before 11pm.

(August 3) It’s Sunday morning now, and I ate breakfast about 15 minutes ago. I haven’t talked since then, and plan on continuing the silence, hopefully even in the Sitzprobe, which is scheduled tonight from 7:00pm-11:00pm. I may have to plead to Randy that I need total silence for the whole day and night.

For the moment, I’m just going to (probably) watch Children of Dune on video, until the tech rehearsal at 1:00pm today. I’ll keep everyone posted.

p.s.
for those of you who have been reading my journals since it was established, my sincerest gratitude for your support.