Caramoor Vocal Rising Stars, fifth season, day three: hard work and patience

We had a great afternoon session and managed to delve deep into every single song in the program. It felt a little weird not having a native speaker in the room for the Scando stuff (the bulk of the concert), but that didn’t mean the language police weren’t out. We tend to use the passive-aggressive method of correcting one another—“How are you saying that word, sweetheart?” instead of, “Oy! You’re saying it wrong!” Among the six of us, there will usually be at least two who can come up with the correct pronunciation at any point.

The drama happened in the morning when our very rattly, rented wheelchair-van malfunctioned upon arrival at Caramoor. Not only was the motorized door-opener/elevator dead as a doornail, but we couldn’t even revert to the manual, hand-cranked method because one of the critical doors was jammed. Toby and the ace maintenance guy at Caramoor bashed at it with everything short of a crowbar, but I remained locked in the car. For two hours. Michael was more overtly upset than I; I made a conscious decision to take the moral high ground and go Buddhist till the crisis was over. All the singers came and visited me in my van-prison, Julia brought me lunch, Theo told me a joke, Sarah looked sympathetic, Toby went into handy-man mode. Eventually a guy from the Danbury rental agency showed up, ripped the inside of the door off and wrestled the lock into submission. I was ready to work at 11, but started at 2. Still, the snow held off and we all rose to the occasion. And they brought us a new van, less rattly, in place of the wreck we were using.

There is a Theremin—yes, a Theremin—in the Music Room at Caramoor. The original owner, Lucy Rosen, was a devotee of the instrument and gave its inventor, Léon Theremin, some heavy-duty financial support. I’m not a fan of Theremins but the one in our space has a great quality: the volume control GOES TO 11. It’s just like Spinal Tap—if you want that extra push, well….