travel

Dining alone?

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While I’m on a gig, sometimes my dinner company looks like this:

dinner at El Charro

Lovely singer friends, at the ever-tasty El Charro

And other times, more like this:

dinner alone

Catalina Foothills HS auditorium lobby – oh yeah!

Being a singer is the best and worst thing about being a singer. Making music entirely with your own body is an amazing thing. Minus the worries about cold bugs and Airplane Voice from dehydration, a voice is certainly an easy instrument to travel with (much less stressful than a cello or guitar; check out this blog posting on Alban Gerhardt’s recent experience, or Sons of Maxwell’s humorous music video for the instrumentalist’s take on traveling).

But, being a singer is also, quite frankly, a pain in the butt. There’s the aforementioned constant worry about sickness that turns you into a ridiculous germaphobe. And there’s the fact that the voice is produced by a delicate collection of tiny muscles, cartilages and tissues which must be treated nicely.

Part of the difficulty of being good to our voices is that we don’t only use our voices for singing; we also use them throughout the day for communicating by talking. Marathon runners don’t finish a training session and then jog around for the rest of the day. But that’s exactly what singers have to do when they rehearse or record for 6 hours a day, and then spend their breaks socializing over meals or calling friends or family back home.

So, sometimes we do “singery” things like being unsocial and eating alone quietly. We try not to make phone calls on a heavy singing day. Email and online typed chats are a godsend for staying in touch without losing your voice, but it’s weird to tell your best friend you’re free to talk but you’re going to have to gchat instead. After concerts, we do our best to keep our audience conversations short and low-volume, and we have to avoid loud bars and restaurants.

It’s hard for me. I’m social and one of my favorite things about gigs away from home is getting catch up with friends from around the country. But sometimes, ya just gotta’ eat your bag dinner, alone, in the auditorium lobby…

Delight in Dallas

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In my lifetime I’ve probably flown through Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport over 100 times. I’ve never been outside the airport to experience the city it serves, but my singing travels take me through DFW sometimes ten or more times a year. I’d say I’m a pretty experienced DFW flyer.

So here’s my expert advice: if you have more than an hour’s layover, head to Terminal D. Even if neither of your connecting flights has anything to do with Terminal D. Terminals A through C are serviceable but there’s nothing nice about them. They have low ceilings, stale air, and restrooms too far apart. Terminal D, by contrast, is a great work of aviation architecture, or at least a nice place to spend an hour between flights.TerminalD

It’s airy and light, surprisingly quiet, and several degrees warmer than the aforementioned other terminals which force me to carry on a jacket just for my layovers. Terminal D has nice food selections, shopping options, and public art.DFW floor

 

There’s even a section of comfy armchairs away from any boarding gate, but I forget exactly where that is and couldn’t find it today. Terminal D rivals Charlotte for pleasantness, and pleasantness is hard to come by during a day of air travel, unless you’re fancy enough to belong to an airline lounge.TerminalD-art

 

In case my frequent repetition of its name hasn’t burned Terminal D into your brain, I have a simple mnemonic for remembering which terminal it is. Once I flew through Dallas with my friend Aryo and we had an argument about whether it was D or E that was the nice terminal. He may have been trying to get my goat, but he insisted it was E. I was 100 percent sure it was D. I told him, “D for delightful.” I was right, of course. I don’t mess around when it comes to Terminal D. As I began writing this post, I realized that one could also, more obviously, remember “D for Dallas.” So there you have it. One more travel day made more Delightful (or at least less oppressive) by DFW’s Terminal D.