The question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
That moment in Bilbao in 2020, when I tried to cross the street and did a pirouette and suffered a dreadful break in my right leg, which means now I have 10 screws and a band in it.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 November 2024 source ↗
I’d take back some dumb shit I said when I had no audience and found that being shocking made people laugh.
I practise stoicism. Not the stiff-upper-lip, modern stuff, but the ancient Greek philosophy. You have to accept what you can’t change. I try to face forwards all the time. When that doesn’t work, I think about buying a machine gun.
I'd have concentrated a bit more at school and maybe gone to university rather than drama school.
There are several boyfriends I wish our paths had not crossed.
One horrible afternoon in Chicago when I forgot my words in The Marriage of Figaro, in a role I’d sung hundreds of times.
In 2006, I went fishing for red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico. On the way back, one of the engines caught fire and then we had one engine for 70 miles. Slowly but surely, we got to Baton Rouge in the darkness but then got very close to a very large passing ship – they didn’t see us and we didn’t see them.
“You’re a wonderful musician but a terrible friend.” It was Daniel Barenboim, the famous conductor, because I didn’t have time in the calendar to work with him.
I loved my 1 minute 40 seconds singing at the coronation of King Charles. I was the most nervous I’ve been.
Thinking that singing makes me fit.
Absolutely nothing.
Suzanne Vega, Cerys Matthews, Alessia Cara, James Bay, Joan Jett, Billy Ocean
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