Roseanne woke up the morning of her audition for Lyric Opera feeling exactly the opposite of how she had the day before. She wasn't sick, she wasn't nervous or dizzy. She was slightly thirsty after the exertion of the previous day, but otherwise she was thankful to find she was calm and ready to do this.
It was a professional habit of hers. If she lost her mind the day before, then she was usually able to pull it together when it came down to it. She was nothing if not a pro.
She sat up in bed, her lips clamped tightly together just in case she would be sick again, but she was fine. She breathed a sigh of relief and pulled her hair up into a ponytail, happily remembering that by that time the following day, the audition, for better or for worse, would be over.
She couldn't think about Lisa or Charlie or any of it. Not today.
Roseanne didn't say much throughout breakfast, and Luke seemed to understand. He didn't even seem perturbed, and instead spent breakfast pushing far too many banana slices into his mouth at the same time.
"I'll get it!" he cried, spraying globs of banana when there was a knock at the door. She let him go, knowing it was Teresa, instead wiped up the blobs.
Roseanne kissed his cheek when he returned, happy her audition time was an early one.
"I don't know exactly when I'll be back today," she told Teresa. "I'm sorry. If I don't advance, then it will be in two or three hours. If I do, it could be all night. I'll call and let you know if you're staying tonight, okay?"
Teresa's eyes went owlishly large. "Ooooh," she hummed. "That's right, today's the—"
"Okay!" Roseanne cut her off. "I'll see you two tonight." She kissed Luke's sloppy face and headed out the door before Teresa could say much more.
Roseanne got to the legendary Civic Opera House, home of Lyric Opera, forty-five minutes before her actual audition time, which was perfect. That gave her just enough time to find where she needed to go and warm up before it was her turn.
She pushed past the heavy doors and paused just inside of the lobby. The grand pillars, the crimson staircases, the huge space, at the moment vacant of patrons, gave her a small thrill. She loved old opera houses like this one.
The floor was a stark white with systematically placed tan patches; the lamps on each white pillar looked like hung torches and brought out the red of the stairs and the walls. Her mind wandered a little as she stared up at the two-tiered chandelier, wondering what it would be like to come here every day for work. The thought of getting to know this building, of memorizing its scent, of the way her shoes sounded on the floor, of which coffee shop nearby was best, was exhilarating.
She caught herself before the thoughts could run away with her, and swallowed hope down, hard. She refused to allow herself to think about it. Instead, she gulped in some air and headed straight to the check-in table on the far end of the hall.
"Name?" the woman behind the table asked without looking up from her index cards.
"Park."
"Okay, Miss Park. Number forty-eight. Here is your preliminary list. You are in room 3C. Go through those doors, take the elevator up to the third floor, down the hall, and it will be the third door on the left. If you follow Andy, he will show you."
Roseanne nodded and followed the volunteer to the small greenroom just beside a series of practice and warm-up rooms.
The noise released from the room the moment the door opened was like a physical force strong enough to knock her clean off her feet. It smacked her with a healthy set of nerves.
Cellos were squeaking and squawking, many pounding out the preliminary list. From every corner, cellists were humming and singing as they tuned. Over the years, Roseanne had learned that there were two types of people at auditions. The first was the type to sit quietly, perhaps practice for a few minutes, but mostly they just tried to enjoy the experience – or tune it out entirely. They were calm and usually spent the time in their own world doing their own thing.
The second type were, well, everyone else. These people sat in the middle of the floor, demanding attention while glaring at anyone who dared to interrupt them or, god forbid, practice the same piece they were at that moment. They spent their time practicing frantically, perhaps scratching notes in their panic, their eyes growing wilder each time a mistake was made. Roseanne hated the second type and did her best to stay away from them. They radiated stress, and if you stood too close, you always caught it like a bad cold.
She recognized a number of faces in the crowd as she walked along the edge of the room, but that wasn't surprising at all. It was typical to run into one or two people you knew at any given audition, but none of these faces were past friends so she didn't bother to say hello.
Roseanne found a corner that was a little less chaotic than the others and put her headphones in. She would practice only enough to warm her muscles and then it was time for John's meditation.
Her hands flowed smoothly over the hard cello strings, allowing muscle memory to take over as she listened to the loud rock and roll blaring in her ears. She hummed, her head bopping along as she tried to lose herself, earning a glare from many around her. Her plan worked perfectly, though; she was too busy listening to Joan Jett swear she didn't give a damn about her bad reputation to care about the daggers being flung at her or the nerves that were trying to squirm their way into her belly.
Despite her insistence on tranquility, she still couldn't help the way her breath caught in her throat for just a second as the personnel manager appeared in the doorway. The whole room, which had been steadily blaring, froze; everyone turned to watch him, bows frozen against strings, mouths slightly agape. He didn't seem alarmed by the sudden attention at all. He just squared his shoulders and began to summon the first few people into their private practice rooms before their auditions. The room held a collective breath, waiting to see if it was their turn and then released, returning to their activities, when their numbers were not called.
Roseanne's nerves only flared their ugly head once, surfacing despite her best efforts when the tall, balding man appeared in the doorway and called, "Twenty-two, forty-eight, seventeen, and sixty-three, please."
Her stomach and her head swam as one, and she stumbled to her feet, worried about the need to be sick again.
She grit her teeth. She would not do that. She would not. She swallowed back the feeling with difficulty and followed the man to her individual practice room, doing her best not to let her shoulders slump or her face look too worried.
"Okay. Made it this far. I got this," Roseanne whispered to the bare white walls. Her hands were shaking, but she played quickly through the music the audition committee would most likely ask for. She didn't critique herself or think in any way, she simply let the music happen. When she was done, she closed her eyes, put in her headphones, and hit play on the meditation track. The tinkling of chimes and the moan of a sound bowl filled her ears, and, though she wasn't a big believer in this type of thing, it was easier than she would have thought to sit in the small, white box of a room and focus on taking long, deep breaths.
The knock on the door roused her from her semi-conscious state just as the willowy voice was asking her to reabsorb her energy back into her body.
"We're on the person ahead of you."
"Right." She blinked a few times to clear away the fog in her mind. "Yeah, okay."
She packed up her belongings and continued her deep breathing, mind zeroing in on the task ahead with a nervous tremor.
She could do this.
She was a badass.
Luke had always insisted she was a rock star, and right now she needed to believe it.
Her mind was roaring a tribal war cry as she bounced on the balls of her feet, pumping herself up until the personnel manager appeared at her door with a professionally blank smile and led her to the stage door. Again, her nerves fought to free themselves from the cage she had shoved them in, but she had locked them away too well. They were her prisoner.
She had this.
"Number forty-eight?" a small woman just inside the stage door asked. She wasn't surprised to see the union rep standing there. This was common practice, to be sure the audition was run fairly and without any bias.
She shook her hand but was distracted from polite conversation by the typical audition setup. A large white scrim was hanging down, cutting the gigantic, bare stage off before the apron. On her side of the partition was a small stand for her music, a single chair to sit in, and a series of mats leading from where she stood to where she had to sit. This was typical. The world of classical music had been far behind the feminist movement and therefore, to avoid any bias or judgments of anything other than skill, most auditions were behind partitions or screens until the final round; just like the mat was there to cancel out the telltale sound of high heels or flats.
