Mr. B.

Once again, I should be working, but one of the exercises in The Artist's Way involved making lists of people who discouraged you, and people who encouraged you, so....

God knows I have wasted enough "ink" on the former, so why not write about the latter?

I know I blame other people (and social trends) for my failure to nurture my own singing talent until the age of 54, when it was well past the 11th hour, but much of the blame lies with me.  (But knowing that, where do I go from here?)

I say that I started singing the first time when I was 26, but that is not true.  That was the first time I studied and sang after I had quit smoking.  I don't really count the earlier forays into classical singing but maybe I should.

There were the casual lessons I took at 15, with a former Metropolitan opera soprano, where I learned nothing, and in fact my singing got worse and worse the more I smoked and went on unhealthy crash diets.

Then I stopped altogether to wallow in drugs and rock and roll (any sex I wallowed in was incidental and not really relevant one way or another in terms of my singing) and started again at 22 when I was singing with a Gilbert and Sullivan company in the chorus and as a cover for the lead contralto.

After years of abuse, my voice had dropped about a fifth from where it had been at 15, but it must have had something because one of the men in the cast (who had come to G&S via a minor opera career) told me I sounded "like the old fashioned Italian mezzos, particularly Ebe Stignani." He told me that my performance as Katisha was "astounding".  I didn't have a teacher at the time, but found one via one of the tenors in the company.

I will call this man "Mr. B."  I have always said that he went a good way to "ruining" my voice but maybe some of the problem lay with me and my smoking (and intermittent drinking).  Mr. B. taught a specific technique (I don't know what it's called) that emphasized singing in a raw chest voice.  The theory was that if you could isolate your chest voice you could also isolate your head voice and have better high notes, but with me that never happened, although it had with the tenor in question, who previously to studying with Mr. B. had only been able to sing high notes falsetto.  And lest you think it was a man's game only, Mr. B.'s daughter was singing Mimi at 18 and now, at 50 is a famous Wagnerian soprano.  One of the things that technique is based on is enormous physical strength.  In addition to singing, Mr. B, had me doing sit-ups, walking two miles a day, and drinking milk with every meal.  Actually, in the beginning I did sound a lot like Ebe Stignani and even managed to sing through "O Don Fatale" but that was short lived.  Was the fault with Mr. B., my smoking, or my singing 7 shows a week with the G&S outfit? In any event, my upper register pretty much disappeared and I lived in mortal terror of "Mikado week" when at any moment I might be called upon to sub as Katisha and have to sing a high A flat at the end of Act 1.  Otherwise, I had a rich full voice up to the F or F sharp at the top of the staff and that was it.

But suppose I had stuck with Mr. B. and just been a student?  Suppose I had been nunlike and given up smoking and drinking and partying?  Even given up the G&S company?  They weren't paying me anything unless I sang a children's matinee. (I earned my living during the day by grooming dogs and had a flexible schedule.)  Mr. B. gave a discount to students who came every day ($10 a lesson in 1972) and I remember I did do that in the beginning (hence my surprising performance of "O Don Fatale"?)

When I say I made all the wrong choices, I don't just mean with smoking, drinking, starving myself (actually I had stopped doing that for a while at the G&S company - I had to share costumes with a woman the size of Deborah Voigt pre-surgery and pinning them down to a size 12 was hard enough) but also the gruelling schedule I was performing at that company.  It was "fun".  That was why I did it.  I knew a few people who were going to a conservatory and they were deconstructing art songs in different languages while I was having "fun".  Of course the people who put in the work of that kind when they're 21 have the lives I would give my eye teeth for at 40, but how could I have known that then?

So the question is: what am I going to do with this information that I am getting from The Artist's Way?


What I long for is to find something special, that only I can do, or that I can do better than most of the people in my immediate environment, that will interest someone. No matter how well I can sing "Acerba Volutta" there will be not ten, but probably 50 people who can sing it as well, or better, who are younger and better educated, and who have "connections", even insignificant ones.

I don't think it's likely that I will move out of my rent regulated apartment in the armpit of Lincoln Center any time soon, but boy, there are days when I wish I were singing the National Anthem at a Little League game in "East Eggshell, Iowa" and signing autographs afterwards.