we did it babby

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one of my friends saw it earlier today and she told me that multiple elderly couples got up to leave as soon as group sex was mentioned. they couldn’t handle people talking about fuckin

so what I’m saying is please support this movie. the 4 leads are all exceptional. it’s hilarious and emotional and awkward and sexy. olivia wilde directed that shit immaculately. it’s conversation-centric and moves like a stage play. original score paired with 35mm film so it feels warm and nostalgic. 🙏

So I took these vocal lessons for 2 years and it helped improve my singing voice and confidence dramatically. I went from full body embarrassment on the mic to an unbearable ham at parties. When someone says karaoke I react like those dogs hearing their favorite words. I’m not amazing, no one’s gonna go home and talk about me when they get back from the karaoke bar lol but the difference is that I’m good enough for me to only care about the amazing time I’m having. Singing feels like such a critical part of being alive and I’m forever grateful for those lessons. It’s one of my greatest sources of happiness.

However!!! I could never figure out vibrato. Our focus in my lessons was classical fundamentals and improving range, but every now and then we’d do exercises to try and unlock my vibrato. She had a suspicion it was a soft palate issue but it just couldn’t click for me. After switching jobs and moving, I had to stop taking the lessons because I couldn’t afford them anymore. 😞 I never stopped practicing and I’ve improved some since my lessons but the damn vibrato!!! It would come out sometimes by accident but I could never figure it out.

(Sorry for being long winded as usual lmao) But okay flash forward to one week ago. My pal had pitched playing a tabletop role-playing game called Good Society, which is a Jane Austen themed game. I pulled the Foreigner card, so someone from out of town arriving in England shaking things up. I looked up common immigrants to England during the 1800s (nobody asked me to do this but I’m a freak) and saw that German immigrants were common. I didn’t know a thing about German but I love research and I love learning and taking notes so I went apeshit on this self-assigned project. I watched dozens of German language videos, listened to German podcasts about culture and history, and my favorite part is practicing pronunciation. I fucking love linguistic differences across cultures and noting the similarities. German has been so fun to learn and I want to keep at it even when my game is over, I feel so drawn to it. The biggest challenge in pronunciation as you might guess, has been the German R. I’m not used to having to use the back of my throat for speech so that has taken a LOT of work but I love the challenge.

So last night I was studying one of my German lessons on an app, taking a lot of care to say things as correctly as I could, and afterwards I started doing karaoke. A couple songs in I was like…… damn my vibrato sounds like it’s getting way better. I put the mic down and stood up and started singing a few Disney songs so I could hear myself better and confirmed YES I HAD FINALLY FUCKING UNLOCKED IT. I showed my husband and he was like, “woah!! when did that happen?” I was trying to rack my brain about what I was doing differently and then I was like…. Babe… THE GERMAN R!!!!!

Practicing that sound finally, finally lifted my soft palate so I’m capable of producing vibrato. I sobbed all over my husband from happiness. I’m so shocked that this is what finally helped me figure it out and delighted that my silly German character was the path that led me there.

he’s a very gentle, mild-mannered guy and he just looked at me like