I had to have a conversation with my voice teacher recently about a yucky, sticky topic: throat gunk. A plethora of mucus on my vocal folds during rehearsals for the holiday show seriously compromised my ability to sing. A mastermind partner in my Wishweaving Circle had the same issue as she was in the studio recording her audio book.
If throat gunk has impacted your vocal quality, check out the 10 minute video above for advice on how to deal with it.
Two main takeaways:
*If you’re hoarse, don’t sing and limit your speaking.
*As long as you’re not dealing with a sinus or bronchial infection, guaifenesin (I used the Walgreens generic version of Mucinex tablets) will be your new best friend. I also use a saline sinus rinse from time to time.
Whatever holidays you celebrate this time of year, I hope you’ve been healthy and enjoying the season so far. After the Thanksgiving week COVID misadventure, my husband and I, and Linn the cat, had a quiet and lovely Christmas celebration.
Here’s my Christmas dinner Chicken Cordon Bleu recipe because it was awesome. If you make it, let me know how it turns out!
Chicken Cordon Bleu a la Voice Teacher Laura
-Two large chicken breasts, halved/fileted horizontally
-Melted butter with garlic powder, salt and pepper
-1/2 pound thinly sliced ham
-1/3 pound thinly sliced provolone cheese
-An egg or two with a bit of olive oil, whipped with a fork
-Flour, about 1/2 cup
-Bread crumbs (I like Progresso’s, Italian seasoning) mixed with grated parmesan cheese, approximately 1 ½ cup bread crumbs with three over-flowing tablespoons cheese
Pound the chicken pieces with a meat hammer, covering with plastic wrap before pounding to reduce splatter.
Brush seasoned melted butter onto the chicken piece.
Add folded pieces of ham and cheese.
Roll up each chicken piece with the seasoned butter, ham and cheese, and secure with toothpicks.
Roll each piece in the egg mixture, then the flour, then the bread crumb mixture. Put in a baking dish and bake, uncovered, at 375 for about 40 minutes.
I like this with bearnaise sauce (from a packet), Uncle Ben’s https://www.bensoriginal.com/ wild rice, and steamed Brussel sprouts. A lively and tasty combination.
Happy New Year! May your inner and outer voices be completely aligned and ring out with confidence and joy throughout the year 2023 and beyond.
God’s blessings to you and yours.
After she is tragically orphaned, young Abella loses the ability to speak her truth and express herself. She is sent to live with a reclusive uncle she’s never met, and her only friend is her horse. Abella endures heartbreak, loneliness and questions who she truly is inside. Eventually, she meets friends and animals who help her not only regain her voice, but also uncover her strength and purpose. Purchase How Abella Found her Voice for $4.95 here: https://laurahandke.com/product/how-abella-found-her-voice-e-book/
Please spread the love and pass this along to a friend!
The That Holiday Feeling show I was in with the NW Senior Theatre was an absolute blast, until over half the cast got sick, and many of us tested positive for Covid, including yours truly. So, I spent Thanksgiving week sick in quarantine in my bedroom. One saving grace was reading Brenda Novak novels I’d gotten from the library. She’s one of my new favorite novelists, and I think I’ve read almost every book in the Silver Springs series. https://brendanovak.com/
Theatre people have a “the show must go on” attitude that I understand and respect. But, please, not when cast members are symptomatic and come on in and infect fellow cast members anyway. This bugged me when I worked in the corporate environment as well, years before Covid, and one sick person would come to work and infect the entire office. Surely we can be smarter than that now.
Rant over.
The illness threw me off my routine, and I haven’t been meditating like I usually do. Even just 12 minutes a day makes a huge difference in my sense of feeling grounded, centered, and connected to higher wisdom. Hence, the title of this post.
Yet, I can say with the energy I do have right now – there’s a huge project coming up I can’t say much about right now. Maybe come January it won’t need to be so much of a secret.
Other news is I will soon be releasing a single of a song I wrote called Cat Nap Blues. My muse was our cat, Linn, and the band Ten O’Clock Hill made all of this possible. They introduced me to the legendary Dean Baskerville, who mastered the recording right here in Oregon. We don’t have details yet for the release date. Preliminary plans are to have a mini benefit concert in Newberg, Oregon, to support Hazel’s House https://hazelshousepdx.com/, the shelter where George and I adopted Linn.
Keep posted – more details will be coming soon!
After she is tragically orphaned, young Abella loses the ability to speak her truth and express herself. She is sent to live with a reclusive uncle she’s never met, and her only friend is her horse. Abella endures heartbreak, loneliness and questions who she truly is inside. Eventually, she meets friends and animals who help her not only regain her voice, but also uncover her strength and purpose. Purchase How Abella Found her Voice for $4.95 here: https://laurahandke.com/product/how-abella-found-her-voice-e-book/
Please spread the love and pass this along to a friend!
Hello Portland Area Students, Friends & Colleagues,
Here’s a warm invitation to the Northwest Senior Theatre holiday show: That Holiday Feeling, which yours truly is in. I even have a solo! Or, more accurately, a duet. Another singer and I combined our solos for what may just be the most interesting (and most likely only ever) mash-up of Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer and Cool Yule you’ve ever heard!
The 14 of us (John and Chick are missing from the above photo) and our gifted musical director, pianist extraordinaire, Tracey Edson, have been hard at work – and play – in rehearsals with the intention to make you laugh, shed a tear or two, and perhaps get goosebumps from time to time. 😊
Come on out and join us! Rise Church, 10445 SW Canterbury Lane, Tigard, OR.
Here’s a quick hello to wish you a fabulous autumn, my favorite time of year. Fall reminds me of school starting, homecoming, bonfires and football games (because I played clarinet in pep band in high school, not because I follow the sport!) When the tree leaves start changing colors, it always feels more like the beginning of a new year to me than when January rolls around in the middle of winter.
Exciting news…I was interviewed by the delightful Paula Vail for her Elevating Your Life show.
The show will be broadcast on KMET 1490 am radio on Sunday October 23rd, 2022, at 8:00 am Pacific time, with a reach of 3.5 million listeners. You can also watch the 27-minute interview on Paula’s YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/jVLKIwvr1mA.
I’m rehearsing every Monday and Wednesday for the NST holiday show, and it’s been a blast! Some of these songs are tricky with complex harmonies, so they’re keeping me on my toes (figuratively) for sure! The three performance dates will be at 2:00 pm, Rise Canterbury Church in Tigard, Oregon, November 16th, 18th, and 19th – that’s Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. I already lassoed my husband into box office duty on Saturday, when he can attend the show along with my two best friends. I really think it’s going to be an awesome, fun show. Come join us if you can. https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/5580801
And…one last thing! I’m giving my eBook, How Abella Found Her Voice, away for free in exchange for a review on my website. (I can’t put it up on Amazon – the video files are too large.) Between now (whenever you read this) and Friday, October 28th before midnight, simply send an email to [email protected] with FREE ABELLA in the subject line, and I’ll send you the link to the eBook and where to write your review. The PDF version is 36 pages, won’t take long to read, and you can write a review after reading just a few pages here and there.
After she is tragically orphaned, young Abella loses the ability to speak her truth and express herself. She is sent to live with a reclusive uncle she’s never met, and her only friend is her horse. Abella endures heartbreak, loneliness and questions who she truly is inside. Eventually, she meets friends and animals who help her not only regain her voice, but also uncover her strength and purpose.
Your local Transformational Voice Teacher is finding herself in a bit of a time conundrum these days. I’m rehearsing for a holiday show, co-writing a screenplay, and will be recording a professional music video later this month.
I will no longer be sending my newsletters every other Friday morning, but I have a feeling you’ll love what you’re reading even more!
For now, I invite you to listen to my podcast interview with the truly engaging Michael Vickers https://www.michaelvickers.com/ about how to free your authentic voice and find your power.
Love Your Voice and Voice Your Love,
Laura
After she is tragically orphaned, young Abella loses the ability to speak her truth and express herself. She is sent to live with a reclusive uncle she’s never met, and her only friend is her horse. Abella endures heartbreak, loneliness and questions who she truly is inside. Eventually, she meets friends and animals who help her not only regain her voice, but also uncover her strength and purpose. Purchase How Abella Found her Voice for $4.95 here: https://laurahandke.com/product/how-abella-found-her-voice-e-book/
Please spread the love and pass this along to a friend!
My talented guest writer for this article, Dorothy Rosby, is a syndicated humor columnist whose work appears in publications throughout the West and Midwest. She’s the author of four books of humorous essays including her latest: ‘Tis the Season to Feel Inadequate: Holidays, Special Occasions and Other Times Our Celebrations Get Out of Hand which will be out November 15. She received degrees in journalism and communication from Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and lives in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Dorothy is also the global winner in the humor category of the 2022 Erma Bombeck Writing Competition, and my good friend. Were I on stage in an auditorium right now, I’d ask you to stand and give a rousing round of applause for the very funny and insightful Dorothy Rosby.
Table Scraps by Dorothy Rosby
For many years I had a laminated cartoon hanging on the wall by my home computer. It showed a small cage labeled Dream #13 and a sign on the cage read, “Please do not feed.” But an odd-looking character was ignoring the instructions. He looked furtively over his shoulder as he snuck a dish into the cage. The caption read “Morty kept his dreams alive by sneaking them table scraps when no one was looking.”
The cartoon was signed “Norman,” and I kept it because whoever he was, Norman had summed up my frustrations in one panel. I felt like Morty. I wanted something so desperately that I ached for it, I prayed for it and I worked for it. For 23 years, I snuck my dream table scraps when no one was looking.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a writer. From a young age, I journaled and wrote dreadful short fiction and even worse poetry. But I found my genre when I was in my mid-twenties. I joined Toastmasters, an organization where members practice their public speaking skills, and I realized quickly that I loved doing humorous speeches. I competed in humorous speech contests and I won some. Eventually, I typed up some of my humorous speeches and sent them to the editor of my local newspaper, and she agreed to take me on as a humor columnist.
As time went on, I began to see humor writing not just as my hobby, but as my calling. I desperately wanted to do more than write two columns a month. I was feeding my dream table scraps, and it was starving.
But I had a job as a public relations professional for a wonderful nonprofit which serves people with disabilities. And I had a son to raise and a mother to care for. My mom was 80 years older than my son and she lived with us for several years. I didn’t have time to write. But column deadlines forced me to fit it in somehow and that taught me discipline. Deadlines are a gift to a writer, though they seldom feel like it when they’re staring you in the face.
The other gift that didn’t feel like a gift was the ache to do more. Of course, it was a source of great frustration and hopelessness too. There were so many things I wanted to write that I didn’t have time for. I envied anyone who had more time than I did to pursue a creative life, and when you’re a working mother caring for an elderly parent, almost everyone has more time than you do.
But looking back, I see that yearning as a gift too. I took it as a sign that I was meant to do the thing I yearned for. Trying to ease the pain of it motivated me and strengthened my commitment to my writing routine. And it was that motivation and that routine that got me through the constant fatigue and feeling of being overwhelmed during those years. I wrote every morning for at least half an hour before my family woke up. I rarely missed a day. I fed my dream table scraps when no one was looking.
There were many difficult times. My job was demanding. My precious son had childhood asthma and my mother seemed to have everything else. At one point, she dislocated her shoulder and for weeks, she needed help even to get up out of her chair. I raced home from work every few hours during the day to help her to the bathroom and I slept on the couch outside her room at night. When she woke up, I got up and helped her to the bathroom, and then, because I was too stressed to fall back to sleep, I wrote in the night.
I’m one of those unfortunate people with a jukebox in my head. When life reminds me of a song, and it often does, the song becomes an earworm. A song by Meatloaf, “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” was stuck in my head during that time, and that earworm became my anthem.
If you know it, you know that the title is also the refrain. I’m not sure what Meatloaf was referring to, but I know what those words meant for me at that point in my life. I’d do anything for the people I love—I’d feed them and care for them. I’d get up in the night to help my mother. I’d drive my son to his activities and help him with his homework, and I’d work all day on very little sleep to help put food on the table and a roof over their heads, but I would not give up on the thing I longed to do. I would not do that.
Were it not for the deadlines and that ache, I would have quit. My life would have been easier. But not writing was more painful than writing. So along the way, I never missed a deadline. I found my writer’s voice. And I managed to do some marketing and convince 36 other publications to run my column.
Eventually, my son grew up and my beautiful mother died at the age of 96. I became an empty nester, but all those years had made me greedy for time. I still hated getting up from my home computer to go to work.
Fortunately also along the way, my husband and I saved our money and paid off our home and other bills. And on April 1, 2019, I sat down at my computer for the first time as a full time writer. I don’t know what it means that it was on April Fool’s Day—maybe just that it was foolish to give up employer-sponsored health insurance so long before I’m eligible for Medicare.
But I’ve never regretted my decision and I’ve never been happier. Now every morning I get up and go to work—in my home office. And as I write this, my third book of humorous essays is at the publishers.
And by some strange coincidence, the cartoon that hung on my office wall all those years—Morty feeding his dreams table scraps when no one was looking—disappeared. I hope I find it in one of the piles in my office someday. In the meantime, I like to think Morty’s dream came true too.
You can learn more about Dorothy and sign up for her always entertaining blog at https://dorothyrosby.com/.
After she is tragically orphaned, young Abella loses the ability to speak her truth and express herself. She is sent to live with a reclusive uncle she’s never met, and her only friend is her horse. Abella endures heartbreak, loneliness and questions who she truly is inside. Eventually, she meets friends and animals who help her not only regain her voice, but also uncover her strength and purpose. Purchase How Abella Found her Voice for $4.95 here: https://laurahandke.com/product/how-abella-found-her-voice-e-book/
Please spread the love and pass this along to a friend!
