Saturday, October 14
After I finished work on Saturday night, my husband came to meet me, and went to karaoke after a longish time of not going. You can set it up where it rates how well you do a song and gives you a percentage, along with showing your previous percentage to compare (if you have an account login). I often get 90 and up, never 100 because it's pretty strict, particularly DAM. Anyway, all of my songs were worse than last time and it bothered me! Singing is one of the only things I truly feel confident that I am good at, but I just wasn't that night. So instead of revisiting old favorites, I tried to learn a new song and technique, a Japanese enka song called "Tsugaru Kaikyou Fuyugeshiki". The Japanese itself is hard enough, but to sing enka, there's this type of technique called kobushi in Japanese, and the closest I could find to what it is in English is either warbling, melisma, or tremolo. I found that none of these seemed to truly directly translate to kobushi. Anyway, I couldn't do it, but I improved a little, and I'm glad to have a singing technique to practice and a new song to learn!
Sunday, October 15th
This morning began with Midsummer rehearsal. This is not meant to be a musical, but we have some songs and dances, especially for the fairies (which includes me). Lately these dance we've had to learn for the play, I feel like I'm doing sub-par. I mean I always felt like I wasn't that great at dancing when I was young and taking lessons, but I'm with other people who also haven't taken lessons and dance isn't like their main focus, but they get the dances quickly and I feel like I'm struggling and just ungraceful. It's probably not actually that bad, but I feel like it is. I'm just feel like I'm old and I've gained a bit of weight and feel blah about it. And I don't wanna, so I need to work harder! I want to make my body stronger.
This morning, we went straight into the finale song and dance. Oh that's another thing, singing and dancing at the same time WHILE wearing a mask, I feel like I can't breathe, and I either forget to sing or mess up the dance in the process. But anyway, I totally messed up everything and felt awful. Later when practicing the more difficult Lullaby song and dance (mostly focussing on the dance though) I felt like I was a little better.
After rehearsal, I had to quickly catch a train and head to a swing dance event located between Yoga and Futakotamagawa stations. I went to this one before, and it was really chill and lots of fun! This time there weren't so many people and about an equal number of leads and follows, so I was dancing non-stop for a while. One guy came who I guess used to come often, but hadn't for a while. I've found that (me included) a lot of the long time swing crew and slowly trickling back into dance after covid. We chatted for a bit because he knew English well and lived in both the US and Australia.
Then I went to meet my friend in Kawagoe for a festival, but that will be in a separate blog post because I took so many pictures!
