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Also - just picked up on one of your comments about typing - perhaps, if your voice allows it, you can make increased use of speech to text.

I have a clear speaking voice, perhaps overly-articulate from spending so many years on stage. My issue with text-to-speech is that I spend more time editing than I would by typing one-handed.

Singing again took years. With half my body paralyzed, that included vocal cords (pitch & range) and my diaphragm (power and stamina).

How this video showed up on a Russian web site ten years later is still unclear. Anyway, this production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Ruddigore was my first public performance, 4 1/2 years after my incident, surprised as hell that I passed the audition. I had to rehearse my breathing just to sing—I hadn’t figured out that I was singing with only one lung and I’m a bit pitchy. My cape was designed to cover my lack of movement and is a repurposed velvet theater curtain that made me feel like Scarlett O’Hara. The cane with the skull is a traditional prop for Roderick and is the one I’d used twelve years earlier with the skull reinforced so that it could bear my weight. One thing I always enjoyed about G&S is that the bass normally shows up in the second act.

My lines starting at “Beware, beware, beware…” are part of the role as I had done it twelve and thirty-eight years earlier (migawd, that was 50 years ago!) but the page before was cut by Gilbert from the original production and added to this. Every night, I was studying that page before it was taken from me as the screen revealed my presence and I started to sing.

I wasn’t going to post this but it’s an enjoyable production of a show that most don’t know.
Lyric Theatre’s 2013 “Ruddigore”

Eleven years later, I move no better but I no longer have to think about my breathing as I now have some lung function on the left side—pitch isn’t great but I can blame some of that on being 70. Frustrating being able to hear the right notes and know that I don’t always hit them. My memory has improved so that I could memorize that first page if I ever sing the role again. I do occasional small roles and am conducting a Christmas choir that includes some of the folks from that 2013 show—this is done from a wheelchair. Standing is a lot harder on me than walking short distances.

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