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theater, I’d dabbled in voice lessons, but never trained intensively. Sure, I knew about breathing from your diaphragm and all that, but learned to sing mostly by a method I liked to call “Guess and Check”—guess a way to sing something, check to see if it sounds good. If so, great. If not? Adjust.
    Would my do-it-yourself approach fly in the face of the impossible?
    Julie was peering at me with searching eyes, like a stern-browed headmistress. I counted off in my head, planted my feet, and started singing a few bars of the Act I Finale, “Defying Gravity.” I managed to hang in until the end, but soon it got way too high and relentless, and I had to stop.
    “Um, yeah—great!” Julie said.
    I would have maybe half-believed her if my throat didn’t feel like it had just been slathered in razor butter.
    Julie said she’d observed a few imbalances in my posture, which may have been compromising my singing support. My left knee had a habit of bending inward and collapsing my hips, she said, which threw off my diaphragm and short-changed my breathing.
    “To fix this,” she advised, “tighten your butt, really hard.”
    She demonstrated, and I stared, enthralled. And not just because she had a totally rockin’ butt.
    Who knew it all came down to butt clenching?
    I could definitely do this; I’d been clenching my butt for years! Just ask anyone who’s ever known me at an academic institution.
    We worked a bit more, the goal being for me to align my body and suck in my glutes with a vengeance. I next applied these principles to “The Wizard and I,” whose excerpt was twice as long, though slightly less terrifying than “Defying Gravity.” One of the tricks here was to adjust the vowels of the lyrics sung on super high notes. For example, final lyrics, “the Wizard and I,” were actually sung as, “the Wizard aaaa naaaa.” (Like you were saying the middle vowel of “banana.”) The listener’s ear, Julie explained, would be tricked into thinking they’d heard it right. Same went for “Defying Gravity.” At the end of the song the lyrics were “bring me down.” But I would actually sing, “bring maaaa naaaa.”
    What is this crazy singer voodoo, I thought as I clenched my butt once more, gearing up to sing. In a leap of faith, I tried it.
    “ The Wizard….aaaa naaaa! ”
    In the end, Julie promised that no matter my difficulties now, I would eventually be able to sing Elphaba. I just needed to practice every day.
    This was great news, except for the fact that the audition was in less than forty-eight hours. Would I pull through, I wondered, given the time constraints?
    Next, we read the confrontation scene between Elphaba and Glinda,  Wicked ’s other main character. “Don’t be afraid to really let her have it,” Julie told me after one run-through. “Elphaba doesn’t take crap from anybody. She’s brave, and sticks her neck out.”
    I flashed back to the time I had seen Wicked  on Broadway five years before, when I couldn’t help but feel a strong connection to the character. Elphaba was fiery, like me, but also sensitive, bookish, and awkward, with a confused fashion sense. (Like me.) Through outward greenness and inner strength, she was one-of-a-kind: a girl who would face, head-on, any challenge cast before her.
    (My only wish? That Elphaba could audition in my place.)
    “You know,” Julie said, “once you’ve got the acting down, you’ll find that singing the role is as much about emotion as it is about vocal technique. You have to reach inside yourself to find the source of what’s causing Elphaba to sing so passionately. Practice good form, of course—but once you have that down, just let everything go.”
    Our session came to a close, and we hugged goodbye.
    Alone in the studio, it was time to keep pounding the pavement. I’d typed up the lyrics to “Defying Gravity” on a separate sheet of paper, which helped me to visualize the lyrics as a story, as opposed to spread