Beauty is Pain

Tonight I took some young students from USF on a tour of the haunted Downtown Tampa.  The weather was gorgeous!  There were points in the tour when my guests were shivering both from the wind and the creepy tales I shared.

With my favorite time of the year in play, I was feeling rather spritely and decided to mix things up a little.  In place of my fabulous steampunk hat, I chose to adorn myself with a sassy black wig and vamp up my face.
(See below)

The process of getting ready was very  tedious but I feel the end justified the means.  I lost count of the number of bobby pins it took to ensnare my hair under that wig.  Those pins are not forgiving and I succumbed to many scalp stabbings trying to get each twisted bunch of hair in place.  You wouldn't know to look at it but the wig lining is smeared with my blood.  The process of vamping continues: 

Pins- check.
Pin curls- check.
Cursing at the pins for making my scalp bleed- check.
Tetanus shot- check
Wig cap made out of old panty hose stockings- check.
And finally, wig- check!

Once the wig was in place I could move on to the easy stuff- make-up!  Character and fantasy make-up is a great passion of mine and I love face painting.  The tour was great, the weather was perfect and my wig was a big hit.  Then the adrenaline wore off and the pain set in.  My scalp was throbbing and I could feel every single pin pulling at my hair and tearing at my tender scalp.

If putting pins in hurts, pulling them out of twisted, knotted hair is even more painful.  Removing the pins was not a happy event.  (See below)

So much for the vamp goddess.  Any woman can testify that the things we do for beauty can cause great pain.  Any artist can confirm that the things we do for art can cause us to suffer.  Pain.  Suffering.  Tetanus.  Such is the life of a girl who sings for her supper. 


Until next time,

~Story Siren

An Amazing Performance

I'll be honest.  A common stereotype is that most high school performance groups are notoriously bad.  The school offers no support to the programs, they have next-to-nothing funding and the shows are poorly attended, usually by parents and teachers who are obligated to sit and watch.  It's bad for morale and the art suffers for it.

But today, I had the great joy of watching some very talented students.  I went to see the annual University of South Florida Festival of Voices.  There were students from my last tour performing in the show and I wished to support them.  Both me and my fabulous hat.  (See below)

(These are the kids from my tour.  Go Encore!)

It's always fun to watch a group of choral singers.  There are usually two types: You have the ones who are aware of their stage presence, how to hold their posture, how to position their face when gracefully gliding from one note to the next.  Such was the case with the amazing kids from my tour, high schoolers from Coral Springs Charter School.  Their high school choral group is called Encore.  What an amazing and talented group of kids!

Then there's there other type of choral performer; people in the same group who are not aware of their stage presence. People who slump, slouch, keep their heads buried in their music notes so we can't see their face, people who have no idea how ridiculous they look when they screw up the muscles in their face or crane their necks to hit a note.  The vocal coach within me wanted to straighten their necks and hold a mirror up to their faces so they could see how goofy they looked.  And the worst of them all, the people who have dead eyes, the creepy thousand yard stare.  It gives me the chills.

Dead people, neck craners and face contortionists aside, the music was beautiful.  And Encore stood out of a group of 400 singers, not including musicians.  Many props to the director of Encore, Julie Webb.  She has  done right by all of those kids! 

Seeing their bright faces took me back to my days in high school.  This was of course a bad memory.  I was a Drama student and the Drama Club received derision, not support.  I remember performing my heart out in plays that were rehearsed for weeks, only to be attended by maybe 25 students per show who had to see the play for a required assignment in English class.  Yep, those were the days. 

I hope that Encore and thousands of other creative programs continue to get the support that they need and deserve.  Whatever the football team gets, the arts should get too!

Okay, stepping off my soap box.

With or without support, performing shaped me into the (odd) person that I am today and I wouldn't change it for the world.  I live and breathe art and I will continue to do so every day.

Until next time,

~Story Siren

For the Kids

Yesterday evening, I had the great pleasure of playing tour guide to a group of high school students.  This wasn't a typical group of kids; they all wanted to be there and had an appreciation for storytelling.  They were smart, funny and willing to be engaged in frightful tales of the haunted Downtown Tampa.  Much to our delight, we even found a few ghosts along the way.

I've said this before but I feel it bears repeating: the weather was pure Hell.  Humid, stagnant, hot.  So much for Florida in the Fall.  By the time the tour was over I had sweated out about half of my body weight.  The beauty mark that I had painted on in an act of whimsy?  Slid off in an avalanche of make-upy sweat.

 This is how nice the make-up looked pre-visit to hell!  It's actually quite pretty when it isn't sliding off my face.  :-)

The best part of the evening was scaring the kids out of their wits with good old-fashioned urban legends.  I like to weave them in and out of the scheduled stories to catch them off guard.  I'll start telling them a tale as though it was a story I heard about in the news.  They believe it to be real and are horrified by the grisly ending.  This is followed by gasps of relief when I tell them it's only a fabricated tale.

You know you've done your job as a storyteller when the ghosts you find become the part of the tour the kids are the least afraid of.  

All in a night's work.....

Until next time,
 ~Story Siren