So I live a kind of a double life, you know, and it’s exhausting. I am writer, editor, and I am a cabaret singer and songwriter as well.

So I currently divide my time between Philly and NYC. NYC is where I dive into cabaret and music.

For me cabaret is all about the connection with the audience, it’s not about when you’re in a play and pretending to be someone else. It’s all about being your most truthful, your most real self with the audience.

New York gives you permission to be an artist. In other places when you say you’re a cabaret singer people look at you like you’re crazy, or what is that, and here you’re a dime a dozen, oh cabaret singer, no big deal, there’s lots of other people doing that.

I hope that when I’m up there all this seems effortless. There’s actually a lot of effort and rehearsal – a lot of rehearsal in front of the mirror – alone in my apartment, probably people next door think I’m crazy because they can hear me singing through the walls.

I feel like I’ve grown in huge ways in the past six months, being here, and being out of my comfort zone.

It hasn’t been easy, it’s been really expensive, and it’s brought me to my knees in a lot of ways. It’s brought me down to really thinking about what my priorities are.

And that’s always been kind of a struggle, to figure out how to make a living as a performer and make that sustainable.

Sometimes you feel like you have to hide that part of yourself. And I think I’m finally at that point where I can be a whole person. It doesn’t have to be like tear the glasses off, like Lois Lane at the end of the day and I’m this whole other person.

But I just did a show and I felt like a different artist than I was six months ago and that was a good feeling.

I first met Karen Gross in 2005 while working as an editor for Bucks Magazine, a regional publication that covered arts, culture and lifestyle in Bucks County, Pa. At that time she was the editor of Where Magazine in Philadelphia, a local visitor guide. Later on I joined Where as a freelancer and worked with Karen on a regular basis for about a year before I moved to NYC. I knew that Karen also performed cabaret at well-known Philly venues, but never actually caught a performance. We lost touch after I moved away, but she reached out about four years later after she decided to move here part-time in order to further her cabaret education and career. We met up over the summer, and I suspected that her natural charisma and unique cabaret angle would make for a compelling character-driven story. This suspicion was confirmed when I finally caught one of her shows this past spring. She indeed had talent. And while the overarching tale of the struggling artist is nothing new, what made Karen’s story appealing to me is the level of sacrifice she’s committed to her craft: she’s constantly shuttling back and forth between the two cities since her boyfriend and full-time job are in Philly. But she spends part of every week in NYC in order to take singing classes, attend workshops and network with other cabaret performers. And how her story plays out remains to be seen, since she’s still torn between two cities and two careers — essentially two loves.

http://karengross.com/