It’s 1:00 a.m. on Monday, and I am waiting for a shepherd’s pie to heat up in the oven so I can have a little sustenance to recover from the evening at the Yankees game. This probably doesn’t sound much like the average evening for an opera singer, but I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as an average day for me.

Let me introduce myself. I am an opera singer, originally from England, now living in Seattle, and presently staying in New York City. I have been singing professionally for almost 17 years, though I started very young, straight from college. For the last 10 years or so I have been singing what’s known as the dramatic soprano repertoire, which is basically the heaviest soprano roles, especially Wagner, which I suppose is my specialty, though I sing lots of other composers too.

I moved to Seattle two and a half years ago and a year and a half ago married my husband, Brian, which is why I came to leave England. He now travels with me, as around 10 months of the year are spent on the road, singing with various opera companies in the United States and Europe. Having traveled alone for so long, I still can’t get over how wonderful it is to not be alone after performances and to have someone to share this difficult but fascinating life with.

We are presently in New York, where I am singing the title role in Norma at the Metropolitan Opera. Norma has not been performed in New York for 20 years, so the pressure was pretty enormous. It’s a role I love, though, and have done a number of times before, and I am having a really good time coming back to it, but more of Norma later in the week, I think, as I don’t have a performance for a couple of days, and I like to do other things when I am not actually having to sing.

Hence this evening’s outing to Yankee Stadium. I became a huge baseball fan a couple of seasons ago and rapidly became a little obsessed. I have always been a sports fan. When I was a teen-ager, I supported Leeds United soccer team in England and vividly remember wearing black for a week when they lost the European Cup. I have learnt my baseball at Safeco Field in Seattle, so my husband and I seemed to be literally the only two people out of 56,000 who were not happy when the Yankees scored a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning. I had been very good in keeping my shouts of encouragement as quiet as possible, which is no mean feat, as I can make quite a lot of noise if I want to. However, that was not an issue at the end of the game as I could do nothing but watch as the Yankee fans sang a rousing New York, New York, and we crept away. The Mariners only have to win all the three remaining games now to be the American League Champions. You can do it, boys!

The rest of the weekend was fairly leisurely. I had a performance on Friday night, so we slept in late on Saturday. The opera I am singing here is an average length at around three hours, but it actually seems very short to me, as Wagner operas tend to last closer to five hours. It is important for me to get my body clock on track for performances, so even on days without a show I go to bed late and get up late. People sometimes don’t understand why singers sleep late, but I point out that we have to be at our best around 8:00 p.m., when people who have worked all day are coming to be entertained by us, so the energy level has to be up.

My husband and I did do a little sight-seeing, which is a treat for me, as often there is no time to do anything other than work. We went to the New York City Public Library and saw the reading room, which was so beautiful and a real surprise to me. Then we saw a Beatrix Potter and an Oscar Wilde exhibit at the Pierpont Morgan Library, so it was nice to feel I had done something interesting and productive.

Apart from that the weekend consisted of a few phone calls to England, to catch up with family, and too many games of backgammon on the computer, though with my husband’s help my rating improved dramatically.

The shepherd’s pie, which heated up nicely, is now finished, and I suppose I should think of bed. I will probably read a few mindless magazine articles, or some of my book about Henry VIII and his court—which is fascinating, the Tudor period of history being another of my big interests. I love to go from one extreme to the other … English history, immediately followed by the National Enquirer, but that’s me altogether!