Merit Badges For Singers

Were you ever a scout?  Boy Scout? Girl Scout?  Cub Scout? Talent Scout?  If you were, then you remember your sash full of merit badges (or, possibly, you remember your friends’ sashes full of merit badges, and your own sad sash with that one lone merit badge you got for carving your name onto a stick).  What a great way to mark achievements!  Measured goals that would eventually lead you down the path to success at, well, whatever it is that scouts do.  Sadly, once you leave the gentle womb of merit badge-based goals and rewards, it is much harder to even know what you are supposed to be doing in life, much less recognize and celebrate the benchmarks.  With this in mind, I have decided to create some merit badges for my opera singing career, and if you are an opera singer as well, you may feel free to use these badges as well.  I suppose you have a sash lying around somewhere, don’t you?  If you are not a singer, you may need to create your own badges for your chosen career, but perhaps, after seeing what fun milestones we vocal artists get to work toward, you will quit your job and become a singer after all.  Either way, here are a few merit badges that all singers should work towards earning.

1) Performance

You did it!  You sang in front of a live audience!  Congratulations!  Here is your first badge!

2) Professional

Hey!  Can you believe it?!  Someone paid you money to sing something!  You may now tell everyone that you are a professional singer!

3) In the Black

This is a hard one to earn.  After paying for voice lessons, travel expenses, scores, headshots, website fees, audition clothes, student loan payments, and all of your other singing expenses, you actually made a few dollars this year!  Another six hundred years like this and you can save up enough money to quit your temp job!

4) Death Scene

You have died on stage!  Rest in PEACE OUT!

5) German Postmodernist

Everyone deserves a badge for surviving a production run by a weird German director that probably involves gorilla masks, but definitely involves bondage gear.

6) Improv

So you forgot a few lines on stage…who cares?!  The way you made up those excellent words on the fly, nobody even noticed!  Except for the director, the conductor, your castmates, and the composer who happened to be in the audience.  But nobody else noticed!

So, fellow opera singers, what are some other singing milestones that deserve commemoration?  Let me know in the comments, and I will add to the list!