The clothes make the woman

I am singing tonight as part of a fundraising concert benefiting the Life After Exoneration Project and the Unrepresented Death Row Prisoner Project. I became involved in the concert because I have performed with the woman whose pet project this is. And she is formidable: a death row lawyer, clergywoman AND dramatic soprano. Unusual combination, eh?

All of the music being performed tonight is either sung by characters in prision, enslaved, or otherwise held against their will. We've excerpts from Aida, the prisonners chorus from Nabucco, etc etc etc.

I myself will be singing a lively Handelian piece. As is often the case for us mezzo-soprani, the character singing is male. He's been imprisioned for plotting the overthrow of his beloved's sister, the Queen of Egypt. However, jail does not get him down - if anything, it makes him that much more cocksure and determined:

Yes, even in chains and bonds
my faith will shine.
No, not even death itself
will extinguish my fire!

And now to the title of this post . . . as this is a fairly formal event, I've been debating what to wear. Since we'll have an emcee announcing a little about each of our arias, the audience will know that this is a "pants role" for me. In other words, it would be weird for me to waltz out in a long formal gown, breasts a-heaving as it were, hair defying gravity and rain with unnatural poofiness and the aid of much hairspray. Nope...instead, it'll be black formal pants, a red shantung button-down and keeping the hair back in a low, less-poofy ponytail.

I'm not conceeding my diva jewelry though . . . hell no! A woman's got to do what a woman's got to do!