“No, the pleasure was mine. Allow me.”
I smiled at him and accepted. Nice guy. Fun to talk to. But not interested. I could take a hint. He was a little young for me, anyway. I could be a friend without demanding more.
I hoped. Nobody had ever accused me of not being a good actor. I acted every day, masking my intense hungers and my massive insecurities.
***
I was a perfect lady during the music orientation with Maestro Kaufmann. We couldn’t do the in-depth, line-by-line and scene-by-scene rehearsing with him or with the director until the tenor arrived, so the session was short. Sean was as good as his word. Pleasant to work with and not ego all over the place like so many singers. He came across as remarkably self-confident. I hoped some of his confidence could rub off on me.
Later, I was hanging out in my dressing room again, half-hoping my new friend Sean would pop in and want to take me to tea so I could eat cake and try to seduce him anyway—some friend I was. My thoughts about food today were all crazy. Maybe I should call my therapist. Luckily, my phone rang and diverted my brain from its constant fixation on food. And sex.
Claudio’s voice cut short my wallow. “We’re in luck. The Philadelphia Main Line Opera Company has an emergency and wants to know if you could help them out of a jam tonight. Their soprano for Aida just broke her foot, and they have no backup.”
“She broke her foot?” I glanced at the cloth bag holding the Tarot. Maybe it had predicted this. “Why is that lucky for me?”
“The general manager is offering you a good fee,” Claudio said, naming it. “You’re only an hour or two away down there in Baltimore. Easy to get to Philly.”
Hopping on a train in a big hurry was not calling to me. “Do I need the extra work?” Tosca was a demanding opera and I needed all my strength for rehearsals.
“I can spin it to the Times that you’re being a heroine by filling in. An excuse to get your feature article. They might run a little piece on you.”
“Now I get it.”
“Thought you would.”
“What about the Baltimore Civic? Management here isn’t going to like me running off to Philly. We have scant rehearsal time scheduled as it is.”
“I hear the tenor hasn’t shown up yet. Your key rehearsals won’t start until Franco arrives.”
“That’s true, but I don’t want to get in bad with the general manager here. I’m by no means the only dramatic soprano on the east coast today.” I was being modest, and we both knew it. I was hardly a beginner anymore.
“But you’re the best.”
This was why I kept him as an agent. “Thank you.”
“I’ll square it with management. Philly is offering a nice suite at the nearest five-star hotel and all your expenses, of course.”
“And I already know the part. I sang it at the Nat last year and in Munich only two months ago.”
“That’s the spirit. Will you do it?”
We discussed the timing, and it seemed possible, if tight. I didn’t want to think anymore about being publicly slighted by the Times. Although lunch with Sean had diverted my thoughts, he had shut me down, the second blow in a bad day. I was still trying to recover. Maybe I wasn’t good enough for some people. On stage in Philadelphia, that wouldn’t matter. I was needed tonight.
I checked my personal calendar. Nothing social cooking this Monday evening. I was planning on going down to DC to visit my friend, Diana, sometime during this run but we hadn’t settled on a specific day. As for the condition of my throat, I’d only sung a couple of pieces at the Merrill Gala in New York. Then I’d taken Amtrak down to Baltimore last night. I was rested enough to sing the demanding role of Aida without straining my voice in any way. My vocal cords were in great shape. It was the rest of me that needed work.
“I’ll do it. I think there’s an Amtrak train in less than an hour.”
We discussed details and then clicked off, me to rush over to my temporary Baltimore condo and grab what I’d need for an overnight, him to call Philly so the opera house could have an insert printed for the evening’s program. Claudio texted me ten minutes later saying it was all set up with both opera houses. I tweeted the new gig and sent it to my Facebook page, too. I was pleasantly surprised when over two hundred people immediately retweeted and twice as many shared. Opera was a small world today. Only diehard opera fans gave a hoot about opera, but they were flatteringly fierce.
Getting a cab to Penn Station Baltimore was easy and I made the next train. Once in my seat, I checked my Twitter feed again. The Philadelphia Main Line Opera had already gotten the PR rolling with an announcement of the cast change, and a link to an Instagram photo of me in costume as Aida a year ago at the Nat in New York. Sean had favorited that tweet and retweeted mine. Nice of him.
I’d taken trains up and down what Amtrak called the Eastern Corridor more times than I could remember. I grew up in Maryland and my progress toward a professional career in opera involved a ton of trips to New York. I loved looking out the windows at the passing scenery, especially the up-close views of abandoned factories that used to have their own railroad sidings. Not today. I hauled out an Aida score I’d borrowed from the Baltimore opera house and started studying it.
Less than two hours later, I was in a cab racing to the Philadelphia Main Line Opera. The curtain would rise in ninety minutes. Hopefully I had enough time to go over the blocking with the director and have a costume and wig fitting. Costume fittings could be a nightmare. Despite all my efforts to lose excess pounds, I was still a big girl and sometimes it seemed as if the designer threw a tent over me in despair and called it a costume. She wasn’t the only one despairing when that happened.
Sean texted me directly, wishing me good luck. Sweet of him. I didn’t reply. What was there to say? We were friends, maybe. I had no time to think about it now, and my hunger for cake had long since dissipated during the packed events of the afternoon in my rush to get here.
Aida was Italian grand opera that had worn well, unlike the great French exemplars from the nineteenth century, Le Prophète and Guillaume Tell. As with much popular entertainment of that era, composer Giuseppe Verdi and his librettist imagined for Aida an historical foreign country and its people that were essentially the same as the modern Europe they knew, but with visual trappings taken from the many extant examples in Egyptian antiquities. To that, a layer of late nineteenth century excess was added. For instance, although archeologists had discovered plenty of pyramid paintings that showed ancient Egyptian royal women garbed in simple, although undoubtedly expensive, see-through white linen, the usual Aida costume was brilliantly colorful pleated material—often the famous shade, Nile green. Depictions of ancient Egyptian noblewomen included handsome jewelry, tastefully restrained. Typical European costumes for Aida were vastly more complex layers of gold, silver, and jewels, plus collars, belts, and other fussy additions. It was hard not to look like a Christmas tree in some Aida costumes.
This time around, I got lucky. The costume fit me with only a couple of minor alterations. True to tradition, it was Nile green, which flattered my pale complexion. Of course my blond hair was hidden by the massive, heavily curled dark wig I wore. Wigs were all the rage in ancient Egypt, so at least that part was authentic. In the U.S., sopranos didn’t darken their makeup anymore to play the Ethiopian princess turned slave girl. My pale skin wasn’t authentic to any part of Africa, but neither was nineteenth century Italian grand opera.
I had no time to rehearse with the individual cast members. I wasn’t even sure I knew who else was singing. I’d never substituted into a performance in such a hurry.
Aida had several scenes with a huge chorus, including the big triumphal march, where I mingled my voice with the crowd. If my timing wasn’t perfect in those, I’d be okay. But the opera also had some very exposed arias that I sang alone on the stage, or with one or two other singers. It could get dicey. Unfortunately, I had zero opportunity to even talk to the maestro about the tem
po he preferred. I had a few minutes with the director, and that was all.
Once I was in costume, I was rushed to the stage. I stood in the wings on one side and watched as the tenor, Václav Novak, sang his clarion opening aria as Radames, soon to be the leader of the Pharaoh’s army.
When it was my turn to walk on, a stage assistant said, “Break a leg. Whoops. Sorry. In bocca al lupo.”
The Italian good wishes line instead. Guess he’d remembered why I was here. I glanced back briefly at him and smiled my thanks before I slid out onto the Philadelphia Main Line Opera stage.
Chapter 4
Aida was a tough opera. It had killer arias to manage. Everybody sang full out and there was intensely loud triumphal music that my voice was supposed to soar above. Since opera singers didn’t use microphones to make ourselves heard, it was a serious challenge. Made it all the more fun. I’d never had a problem projecting my large voice to a big house.
As was custom, the tenor had started with a big aria, “Celeste Aida,” showing off his chops. Then, my rival, Amneris, came on stage to woo him. I appeared next—a holdover from the days when sopranos made grand entrances and the audiences applauded their first appearance, drowning out the music. With the love triangle complete, the drama ramped up in our fraught trio. Then we went straight into a massive crowd scene, complete with very loud music. And then everyone cleared off. All the chorus and supernumeraries (extras without any singing or speaking to do) paraded away. Alone on stage, I began my first solo aria, “Returna vincitor.” I poured my heart out about how conflicted I was because, although I had been captured and enslaved by my country’s Egyptian enemies, I’d fallen in love with an Egyptian general. Nobody in Egypt knew that my daddy was the king of Ethiopia. He intended to win the war. If he won the next battle, he might kill the man I loved, Radames. I was caught in the middle.
Despite being born a princess, I was a slave girl to the princess of Egypt, Amneris, who also was in love with Radames. She’d been giving me the side eye because she suspected I cared for Radames and she wanted him for herself. Her daddy was in a position to reward Radames for winning the war by giving him Amneris as his bride. She liked that, but for Radames, the “gift” was super awkward. I of course was miserable and in the middle there, too.
The mezzo-soprano singing Amneris turned out to be Daylia Fedora. I was relieved that I hadn’t known it until I was onstage. Years ago, she’d been okay to work with, but of late she’d acted like an egomaniac. Tonight, Daylia quickly proved she didn’t intend to rest on her laurels as an operatic bully. As the act progressed, we came close to erupting into open war.
She wasn’t so bad during the opening trio that included Radames. But in our one-on-one confrontation scene, Daylia stepped all over my lines. She sang early, effectively stomping on my last couple of bars, coming in with her next line before I was finished. She reversed the trick when the music clearly indicated I should come in. She still held a note she should have ended. She changed tempos a few bars at a time to do this, then reverted to the tempo the maestro was setting for the orchestra. It threw me off, but wasn’t enough to mess them up. Maybe the maestro was used to her games. Or maybe he liked her.
She also ended any moment of duet singing later than I did, which made me look as if I lacked the breath to hold a note long enough. The same stratagem I’d told Sean about. The first time she did it, I charitably assumed it was accidental because we hadn’t rehearsed together. When she did it again a few minutes later, I knew she was making me look bad on purpose. I fought back by holding my notes longer. As my strong voice continued to hold the note and hers finally dwindled to a choked gasp, I beat her at that game. She stopped trying, throwing me a vicious glance as she realized I had won.
She wasn’t content with singing out of sync with me. She also upstaged me. She constantly circled behind me so I would have to turn my back to the audience in order to face her. I knew how to fight that. I moved sideways.
When our scene was over, the act continued immediately with another big crowd scene. I thought about complaining to the director once the act ended, but I didn’t have any other intimate scenes with Daylia. I decided not to bother. Then I got mad at myself for chickening out. When the act finally ended with the big triumphal march scene, I made myself approach the director.
He got an odd expression on his face, but shrugged off my concerns. “She’s an audience favorite.”
I gaped at his cavalier attitude. I should have reminded him that I had my own large numbers of devoted fans, plus I was saving the Philadelphia Main Line Opera Company from having to cancel tonight and shouldn’t be expected to put up with crap from another singer. But I didn’t. It was hard enough fighting Daylia’s sly tactics on stage. Anyway, after our long scene together, Amneris and Aida didn’t share the stage much. The worst was over.
A few minutes later, I was mad at myself for not trying harder to take back my power and stop people pleasing. I approached the maestro. When I brought up the problem, he winced.
“She won’t listen and she won’t stop.” He said, “I hear she threw a violent tantrum with the general manager. No one wants to tangle with her.”
When the two most powerful people in a production said something was hopeless, I believed them. My next logical step would have been to confront Daylia directly, but I had a lot of solo singing to get through in this opera and didn’t want to start a screaming backstage confrontation. Soon I felt disappointed by my cowardice in not confronting her during the intermission. I began to fantasize about having a chocolate milkshake.
Food addiction was the worst. It beckoned whenever I had trouble in my life, and also when I didn’t. I could be in the middle of something important, when my brain should be concentrating on whatever—like could I reach that high note with the right kind of sound?—and an insistent voice in my brain would say, “Chocolate. I need chocolate.” It was crazy. It often bore no logical relationship to what I was doing at that moment. But my brain had decided food was the solution to everything hard in life. That’s why it was an addiction, a physical–psychological kind of insanity. Being addicted to food could kill me if I listened to the siren call to eat, eat, eat. It almost did one time. Since then, I’d been determined to fight back.
Yet nearly a year of careful dieting was nothing in the life of a fat woman. According to the statistics, I was now at the most dangerous part of the process, where I’d made visible progress and my image had changed, but I wasn’t psychologically ready to be thin yet. At this pivotal moment, any little thing could set me off and undo all my hard work. Logic had nothing to do with it. Psychological need tied to physiological need created moments of intense craving provoked by stress. In other words, I wanted a milkshake.
Living in an era of super plentiful food and high tolerance for public eating at all hours did not help me. True, there was social pressure not to overeat in public. Big girls like me didn’t want to be seen in the throes of desperation for carbs. We tried to maintain a sphinx-like mystery about our eating habits, not put them on display and invite critical commentary. Some people felt they had a right to concern troll me in person. Total strangers had come up to me on airplanes and on city sidewalks and told me I should lose weight. Seriously. Utter, complete strangers thought they should do that. Tell a fat girl she was fat. I didn’t eat alone in public because I didn’t want to give them more ammunition.
The intermission dragged on and on. I withdrew to my dressing room. Thinking about how Daylia Fedora had behaved made me angry all over again, but also made me anxious. I should have whispered to her to knock it off when she was trying to upstage me. No one would have heard me since I was briefly facing away from the audience. I should have, but I hadn’t. Avoiding a scene, as usual. Now I needed more than a milkshake. I was desperately hungry for a few pints of ice cream and a large bowl of frosting, plus a little cake, too. I headed for the break room, where the candy machines were.
I was discreet as I bought five ca
ndy bars and an ice cream. I hid them in my voluminous costume skirts and retreated to my dressing room again. I lined them up on the makeup table. Was I really planning to undo all my hard work of the last year in a binge? I reached for the first bar.
My phone pinged. A text message from Sean.
Aida going ok?
I replied:
OK.
My phone rang. It was Sean.
“Hey, girlfriend,” was his cheery greeting. “How’re you holding up?”
“I’m doing okay, but Daylia Fedora is stomping all over my lines. She’s being a rhymes-with-witch.”
“Challenge her to an arm wrestling contest?”
I laughed a little. “Good one. No more intermissions. Luckily, we only sing together during the final tomb scene.” We chatted about this and that and I calmed down. While we talked, I systematically opened all the candy wrappers and tossed the bars into the trash. I melted the ice cream bar on top of them.
When I got the call to return to the stage, Sean said, “See you later,” and clicked off.
I had my biggest solo of the opera to sing within a few minutes after the curtain rose again. I concentrated on ignoring any nagging voices demanding chocolate or other comforts. I visualized myself singing each note of the aria with beauty, with power, and with finesse. The curtain rose on some minor action that set the scene for my aria. Then it was my turn.
“O patria mia” was Aida’s heartfelt song of woe, her misery over the dire situation of her fatherland, Ethiopia. In Italian, the word “patria” was very close to the word for father, “padre,” and that wasn’t a coincidence. Aida was bedeviled both by the war that had turned her into a slave in a foreign land and by her father, who was determined to use her love for Radames to gain a tactical advantage. Amonasro wanted insider information so he could crush Egypt’s army.
Friendzoned Soprano (Singers in Love Book 2) Page 3
