Vacation” On Steroids

 

By Rick Boettger

 

The hard part of my life is not my paying part-time retirement job, which currently includes a new nonprofit’s full form 990 and keeping a client out of jail for felonious overseas bank adventures. No, that is relatively relaxing compared to chronicling the sins of our political leaders, currently County Commissioner George Neugent. After four straight days of researching and writing him up, I badly needed to escape the netherworld into the sunshine.

 

 

Which happened most gloriously last Tuesday morning. I’d arranged some recording sessions up in Miami for the young Key West singer I’ve been backing. I’ve written her name often enough in the past, but I’m now going to refer to her in the future as the Diva, because using her real name feels too much like celebrity name-dropping, which another local publication does much better than I can.

 

 

So Tuesday morning the Diva’s “Momager” drives up early to pick me up for our road trip up north. She has to wait 10 minutes as I finish up column No. 4 on Neugent and hit send, and then, Release! I’m off to a glorious new world of musical adventure. It had taken 27 emails and phone calls to set up two days of lessons and studio time on short notice, because I had to leave on Thursday for Cynthia’s family in Madison and our annual Shakespeare festival. And the Diva’s final year of high school started the next week. So the window of opportunity was short.

 

 

We hit the road with Diva tuned into her ear buds, listening to and singing music being her life. Momager and I thus had a few hours for the first time to bond over strategizing the Diva’s future career fame as well as bond with our own life stories. I drive into the Hilton near the Arscht Center in plenty of time for our 3 p.m. first session in a studio a block away.

 

 

But the adventure gets off to a bad start when our impresario not only does not show up, but the front desk person at the expensive office building says his studio is not just closed but has been foreclosed upon! And he had just emailed me at 2:30 to verify our trip was all right and we’d be on time. But we reached him by phone in a few minutes, and he apologized for being late, and said he was just outside the building.

 

 

Sure enough, there he was, getting out of his Lexus SUV. We went out and met him, an appropriately exotic Eastern European/South American with platinum blond dyed hair going straight up and wearing a scarf in the 90 degree heat. In the car was the Diva’s first coach, a stunningly gorgeous 6’1″ blond Russian woman. Platinum quickly apologized for his studio’s being “double-booked,” and he’d drive us to another he had available.

 

 

So we’re driving for 20 minutes north on Biscayne Boulevard until we turn off into some formerly agribusiness area with a grain elevators and a few acres of warehouses. I’m thinking this looks like the kind of repurposed properties used for creative enterprise, but, as she revealed to me later at dinner, the Momager was thinking all Criminal Minds, where warehouses means murder, and what on earth was she doing in a car with a crazy-looking stranger.

 

 

Diva and I had no such worries because Juliana was obviously the real deal, an accomplished soloist in her 20s now doing high-end vocal coaching. She asked the right kind of questions, and she and Diva were ready to go when we entered a dumpy warehouse to find inside a wealth of recording equipment and techies managing it all.

 

 

Here’s where the steroidal vacation began that I want you to be so envious of that you’re going to want to figure out how to create one of your own. I get to sit behind Diva watching Juliana lead her through a series of warm-up scales more complex than any I’ve done in my best lessons. Then on to the meat of the lesson: Teaching Diva how to transition from the classical style of singing to pop, just as Juliana herself had to when she was a bit older than Diva. I was in heaven watching Juliana, because her beautiful, dramatically animated face as she taught Diva through the medium of the complex song Let It Go from Frozen brought me back 25 years to my six-day marriage to a Muscovite 20-year-old model who was a dead ringer for Juliana, just a couple of inches shorter.

 

 

The lesson was at a higher level than Diva had before, she was thrilled, with Platinum weighing in with the kind of professional tips I’d expected from the quality of the female music videos he’d produced and showcased on his website. And the next day at a renowned South Beach studio for a longer session with a new coach, keyboardist, and brilliant sound technician, eight people in the studio including me and the Momager, was even more fun for me. No space here for the details.

 

 

The big insight was seeing my three years of musical training may have been destined only to get me good enough to recognize Diva’s extraordinary gift. She cut a Back to Black better than Amy Winehouse’s, having learned the transition to pop plus a doubling of dramatic expression in just three hours of intense training (she is a genius-fast learner).

 

 

Now I have to hope my 40 years of business experience since I got my own first unsecured loan from a friend to start my own first successful business is enough to master the immensely complicated music business. There are plenty of retirees like me out there wanting to use their money and skills to do good. Usual ways are donating to causes or subscribing to the arts, as Cynthia and I do, too, with the South Florida Symphony, and having the musicians stay at our house. But I’d beg you to consider how to get as intensely involved in the process as I have with Diva. I just had two of the best days of my rich life. For less than a thousand bucks all told, I had 10 times the fun of, say, a week in Vegas.

 

 

It turns out I am NOT in reality helping a young person achieve her dreams. I am instead sybaritically indulging myself in an exotic adventure at the limits of my capabilities to absorb. I highly recommend you use your creativity to find some way to get some similar action for yourself. Good luck!

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