I’m sitting here in my little downstairs room – the one where I hide all those dreams and take them out every once in a while just to make sure they still have a pulse. I’m watching the video of yet another accomplished participant in the upcoming International Cabaret Conference at Yale (such a long name, but, I suppose, better than the acronym ICCY).

Yes, we’re close now. Those heady days of March and acceptance letters are a distant memory. We’re all strutting our stuff now, and the YouTube videos and FaceBook fan pages and website links innocently attached to the emails that fly back and forth as we share ideas and advice keep streaming in.

Fool that I am, I can’t bear not to watch them…to torture myself as yet another perfect voice marries a perfect patter and produces beautiful cabaret kids, born not only with a silver spoon in their mouth but with a platinum set of pipes to back them up.

And I keep wondering, did they type in the wrong email address when they sent me the acceptance letter?

I mean, the tagline for the final show of our conference, Stars of Tomorrow, hardly seems to be the right moniker for most of the folks whose work I’ve seen. Tomorrow is far too distant for the now in which they travel…maybe Stars of Just after Breakfast or Stars of Elevenses but definitely not so far away as tomorrow.

An email comes to ask me for my headshot…someone on the faculty wants to see what we all look like…will they realize now the mistake they’ve made?

Would they laugh if they knew I'd only finished picking my 12 songs yesterday? It was so hard to turn away from my favorites: the over-performed ones on which I grew up - the chirpy show tunes, all those Gershwin ballads, Sinatra, Ella & Etta, Polly Bergen. Anything too well worn? Well, it bit the dust. Those left with only minor signs of use slipped gracefully to the B-list, as sparkling, unfamiliar choices burst brightly onto the A-list. I recoil from the glare of their newness. 10 days to own them, to tear them apart and string them back together. Enough time? It will have to do; it’s all there is.

I try to find a font for this page so I can post it to my blog…the one I will write, not so other people will tell me I can, but so that I will tell me I can. I try out the Helsinki font and an immediate and doubly ironic result splashes across the page. Ironic, in the first instance because I’ve always mistakenly referred to Stockholm Syndrome (the idea that captives develop a bond with their captors) as Helsinki Syndrome…don’t know why I do it, but it’s just one of those things in my brain that misfires…much the way I confuse ORANGE with YELLOW in English but never in French or Italian. Yes, I am both my own captive and captor, and if those two polar opposites could just learn to love one another, what a wonderful world this would be.

It’s also ironic because, as I try out the Helsinki font, the entire page turns to musical notation. Who would have thought to name a font based on musical notation “Helsinki”…Sibelius?

Whatever the reason, seeing that font kicks me back into action and away from the writing where I indulge my fears. I take the self-doubt and put it where the dreams used to recline. I’m sure it will bang loudly on the box in the still of the night, but, for now, the dreams are singing….