Voice Lessons

by Cara Mentzel

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  For Dina

  Foreword

  I am not the writer in the family. In fact, the last good metaphor I wrote was probably back in the fourth grade when my favorite teacher of all time, Mrs. Rosalind Pincus, rosy cheeked, always jolly, saw the blizzard outside our Baylis Elementary School windows and exclaimed, “Children! Oh children! Pick up your pencils and run to the window! I want you to write a poem about what you see!” I obediently grabbed my pencil and Bionic Woman spiral notebook and wrote the masterpiece entitled “The White Ghost.” It proudly lives in the drawer at the bottom of my mother’s armoire where every so often she pulls it out in an attempt to build my confidence when I need to write something of merit.

  No, I’m not the writer in the family. So when an agent came to me asking if I would write a book about my life, I rudely laughed in her face. I have no desire to write about myself. I actually don’t enjoy writing. Songwriting is excruciating for me, which is why I now make sure I collaborate with others all the time. I hate the pressure of completing a song. More than anything I dread the “morning after” feeling when I think I’ve written my first smash hit only to find it sucks or I ripped off some melody from a Beyoncé song. So the task of writing about my life? Not for me. Though, the writing gene did find my sister.

  I told the agent that my sister, Cara, was a writer. She enthusiastically suggested that Cara write the book for me. “She can be your ghostwriter!” And I told her my sister isn’t “ghosting” anything. A ghostwriter is some mysterious person who writes for people but doesn’t get credit. There was no way I would allow that. My sister writing my story was not okay with me. It needed to be our story.

  It just made sense. At their core, so many of the projects I’ve been involved with have explored the bond between women. Elsa and Anna. Elphaba and Glinda. Best friends. Sisters. Not always pretty, not always perfect. Yet these relationships, these amazing women, have shaped the way I see the world. There is an uncanny, inexplicable reason these projects keep finding me. And I am so grateful for that.

  Years before anyone had heard of the film Frozen, Cara would send me these hysterical, beautiful little essays about the two of us. Just stuff that she was reminiscing about. I sent out some of her writing samples, encouraged the agent to check them out, and said, “You should let her write the book; not some biography, but a book about us as sisters.”

  Selfishly I thought this was a wonderful way to bond even more with Cara. She lives in Colorado. I live everywhere. Our lives are so busy, caught up in career and kids and trying to remember birthdays and spa treatments for our mother on Mother’s Day. After all is said and done, how much quality time have we really spent together? How many details do we truly know about each other’s day? I was excited about the idea of this book. Ha! I was excited about her writing it and me sticking my two cents in every so often to say “That’s not how it happened” or “Wait, you should talk about the time…”

  Years back, I had an idea for a moment in one of my concerts, to finish the haftorah I never had. It’s a special prayer Jewish kids “perform” at their bar mitzvah ceremony. My parents let me quit Hebrew school when I complained of an impatient teacher getting aggravated by my barrage of questions about God and how certain things in the Bible seemed sexist and unforgiving and not befitting a god whom I was praying to at night. So, having failed my grandparents and hearing for the next twenty years what a shame it was that I didn’t sing my haftorah, I thought I would revisit it in my late thirties on stage. I had learned of a woman in the Bible named Devorah (also known as Deborah and Dvora). “The Triple Threat” I liked to call her. The poet, the judge, and general. And she sang too! When summoning her armies to battle, her husband—also a general, who would never go without her—would chant, “The rulers ceased in Israel until you Devorah arose. Awake, awake, Devorah, awake and sing your song.” A few years earlier, I’d taken a trip to see my sister and baby nephew, Avery. When Cara went to put him down for his nap, I listened at the bedroom door and overheard her sing Avery to sleep. Cara never sang around me, or anyone for that matter. I was the singer in the family. I had some invisible claim to that. But just then she had the most hauntingly beautiful voice. It was sweet and pure and emotional. In that moment I felt as if I had stolen something from her. All these years. That voice was inside my sister and I didn’t even know. By the time I wrote about Devorah, Cara was pushing through some hard times. She was busting her ass to finish her master’s degree, provide for her children, and keep her writing dreams alive. She was my Devorah, the true warrior. She needed her chance to rise up and shine.

  Nearly a decade later, in my blind enthusiasm for this book, I failed to realize that writing our story wasn’t going to be all that simple. This whole book journeys through the lives of older and younger siblings and the shadow-dancing we do. I wanted this to be Cara’s book. Cara’s perspective. I didn’t want to rob her of the purity of the accomplishment. I didn’t want to steal her light.

  It’s funny. To me, Cara was always the old soul, the wiser, the younger sister with the older sister who looked to her for guidance. I called her first. Number one. When I felt like life was falling apart at the seams. She taught me so much about the kind of woman I wanted to be. In this book, she’s not just telling our story, but she’s speaking for all of us trying to figure out who we are. Who we want to be. Sisterhood is a complicated relationship. Anytime you love someone so much you are not sure where you start and where they begin. When is the right time to bask in their glow and when do you need to separate yourself and find your own stage? Sometimes it was hard to hear about those moments when I hurt her or let her down. And I know it was no fun for Cara to turn the spotlight on herself magnifying her innermost fears and thoughts. But every moment is authentic and true and if we can’t look at the mistakes we have made we never evolve. In our version of snowy Arendelle, there are no “white ghosts” or ghostwriters, just siblings, each one deserving to be seen and heard. I forgive myself for being a young, scrawny little wicked witch-in-training who coerced my baby sister to drink from a dirt potion I concocted in our backyard. And as traumatizing as it sounds, Cara survived and lived to tell a pretty cool tale of two sisters from Long Island, lost in a perpetual search to find their true voices.

  —Idina Menzel

  Prologue

  On a typical day, I wear a pair of Chuck Taylors, jeans, and a sweater long enough to cover my butt when I bend over in the classroom to pick up a stray glue stick. I teach elementary school students how to read while doing my best to steer clear of snot (theirs) and profanity (mine)—at least until after 3:00. At home I have two dogs, two boys, and a husband. At home I try to steer clear of farts (particularly in the kitchen), and anyone who’s gonna give me shit for cussing.

  I don’t mean to be misleading; I clean up nicely, I just don’t clean up often. And that’s why being on the red carpet at the Oscars
with Dee was such a shock; glamour is in short supply where I live.

  My sister—I call her Dee—is Tony Award–winning Broadway star Idina Menzel. She starred in Rent, Wicked, and, most recently, If/Then. Moreover, she is the voice of Disney’s Elsa, the powerful ice queen, in the blockbuster Frozen. She sings the infectious torch song “Let It Go,” which set records on the Billboard charts and landed her on the cover of Billboard magazine. The one that had little girls singing into video cameras all over the globe, “Let it go … can’t hold it back anymore” and “The cold never bothered me anyway” was the same one my elementary school students constantly sang in the hallways, pointing at me and whispering, “That’s Elsa’s sister.”

  When the song was nominated for an Academy Award, Dee was asked to perform it live at the ceremony. Singing at the Oscars was a contender for the grandest moment of her career to date, right up there with serenading President Obama and Barbra Streisand, and with winning a Tony Award. I was her date.

  Dee has been on the stage as far back as my first memories, back when she was Mabel in the fourth-grade production of The Pirates of Penzance on a stage made out of Baylis Elementary School risers. But even more prominently, she’s been on a pedestal in my mind. There are just two children in our family, and I’m the younger one. I’ve looked up to her for the same reasons so many little sisters and brothers look up to their older siblings—because she was three years better than me at everything: tennis, painting, calligraphy … even folding little boxes out of dollar bills with Grandpa Max. When it came to singing, though, she wasn’t just better than me, she was better than anyone we knew.

  Dee and I arrived on the red carpet to flashing cameras, screaming fans, and a demanding press corps that hounded the celebrities to glance in their direction. To our left, velvet ropes separated the celebrities from a thick line of journalists with large microphones awaiting interviews. To our right was a morphing mass of people—stars with their agents, managers, and spouses or dates. In the distance stood the entrance to The Dolby Theatre. I’d anticipated the frenzy, the glitz and the glamour, but it still felt bizarre to stand in the heart of it.

  Dee looked beautiful, as beautiful as I was proud. Her dark brown hair was parted to the side, straight and sleek, her makeup understated—she doesn’t need makeup to look beautiful. She has full heart-shaped lips, steep cheekbones once described by The New York Times “as distinctive as the New York skyline,” and green eyes. She wore a dark green Vera Wang gown with a four-foot train. A gown her stylist described with words I assume are French but can neither define nor pronounce, words like godet, degredes, and ruche.

  I followed Dee through the crowd. Every now and then she looked over her shoulder at me and reached her hand back, checking in with her eyes and the slightest dip of her chin—an expression that said, You with me? She was taking care of me, which I was used to. I extended my hand toward the borrowed million-dollar diamond ring she wore.

  I reached forward, but the train of Dee’s dress was just long enough to keep our hands a mere centimeter apart. I’d known that centimeter—if only metaphorically—for a long time. And I’d come to hate it. When people asked if we were close I always said yes—a true answer. Our love was as significant and near as my hand, never doubted, never absent.

  But I’ve always wished we were closer. I’ve wished I knew what she did, what she felt on any given day. I’ve wished she called me for no reason at all, to chat, to check in, to tell me that she woke up that morning to find my four-year-old nephew playing the drums naked. I’ve wished I were a habit for her, that when she fiddled absentmindedly with her phone she always thought to call me. Instead, more often we’ve joined at the extremes, at the Tony Awards or Broadway openings. Events drenched in logistics—flights and hotels, timelines and schedules. Celebrations that afforded us really only mini-moments together—a photo op or a quick hug. Occasionally, we had slightly more time together at a family wedding or a baby’s birth, but she lived in Manhattan and Los Angeles, and I lived in Colorado.

  When we weren’t together for celebrations, we were together when it was time to grieve—a divorce, a death. We sat next to each other at our grandmother’s funeral, and took naps curled up in bed together when our respective marriages ended. In between those landmark events, our time was spent apart—not only because taking a flight to see each other was a pain in the ass, or because we both have busy lives full of daily responsibilities, but because sometimes she was hard to reach. Those lulls in our relationship were difficult for me. When I needed her she was always there, but I didn’t want to need her in order to have her in my life. My sister and I shared love, but we often haven’t shared our lives. I’ve wished we did.

  On the red carpet Dee’s tall, blond publicist cleared a lane for us through the crowd. Dee followed her and I followed Dee. As far as I could tell, the publicist’s job that evening was to guide Dee through the crowd and tell her when to stop for photos and interviews. As Dee’s date, my job was to stay with her, but also, in some instances, to step out of the way and wait; there would be interviews and photos she needed to do alone. It wasn’t always clear to me when I should step up and take my place beside her and when I should step back, so I was self-conscious.

  Dee, meanwhile, waved to fans and smiled graciously. She had mastered the art of what she called “Chin Down, Eyes Up.”

  “With our long noses, you have to tilt your chin down a bit, but look up at the camera,” she explained. Dee had graced many red carpets before, at theater and movie openings and the Tony Awards. But this was the Oscars, or, as I like to call it, Hollywood Prom. I suspected that even Dee was a little unnerved; the red carpet at the Oscars was on another scale altogether. The Chimento diamonds around her neck were a testament to that.

  I didn’t want to be nervous. Nerves were inconvenient. When I’m nervous I have to go to the bathroom. I sweat. I put on a phony smile so my face starts to feel (and, I’m sure, look) like plastic.

  I tried to talk myself out of being nervous. Get a grip, Cara. Breathe. Breathe, but don’t trip. But if you do trip, don’t take anyone else down with you. My composure teetered on four-inch Casadei heels. I knew the shoe designer only because Dee’s publicist—or was it her stylist?—had asked me to memorize the names of the designers of everything I was wearing that evening, even my clutch—“clutch,” a term I’d never used in my pre-Oscar life. My entire getup, with the exception of my thong, was borrowed, and that made me a walking advertisement. My clutch: Nancy Gonzalez. My diamonds: Forevermark (a name I loved because my husband’s name is Mark). My dress: Vera Wang. I’m not too proud to admit that I had anxiously rehearsed these facts earlier in my Four Seasons at Beverly Hills suite, in the privacy of my room’s full-length mirror. Even though I wasn’t Dee, I was told to be prepared for the question, “And who are you wearing, dahling?” The shameless People magazine lover in me wouldn’t dare screw up the answer.

  Dee gave a couple of interviews as I waited behind her in the adjacent crowd. I chatted with her two managers and her agent, people who have worked with my sister for many years and have taken good care of her. We hug—her entourage and I—whenever we see each other, but I’m still not clear exactly what their responsibilities are. I don’t really know the difference between an agent and a manager, or how many of each someone in my sister’s profession needs. I know their names, that Dee loves them, and that with them I felt more comfortable on the red carpet. In their company I was safe from the chaos and didn’t have to stand awkwardly alone, waiting.

  The people around me were checking their iPhones, probably to see how well their celebrity was trending on social media. I couldn’t resist the urge to snap a few quick selfies, but mostly I tried to ignore my phone altogether, until I felt it vibrate and noticed a text from my teenage son. It read, “You just picked your butt on national television.” Minutes earlier I’d pulled the back of my dress out from under my heel and apparently it was caught on camera; I thought I’d been su
btle. Not so.

  Striking another stiff, contrived pose, I felt more like a witness to the Hollywood hullabaloo than a participant. I had to remind myself I was on television, not watching it. But I was watching, too, and I was a good and practiced observer. I’d been watching Dee perform nearly my whole life. I was an audience of one listening to her sing in the bedroom next door. I sat in living rooms, auditoriums, gymnasiums, and theaters watching her perform in casual, amateur, and then professional productions, and joined a television audience of millions watching her sing on The Late Show with David Letterman. The image of Dee standing in the spotlight was long fixed in my mind.

  When Dee resumed her walk up the red carpet, I followed carefully behind. It was only seconds before she reached back for me again. I read the expression on her face and it was familiar—concern. She didn’t like that I was trailing behind her. I knew it. We’d had that conversation before. The one where she says she wants me to feel more special when I’m with her, not less. The one where I admit that I sometimes feel less significant when I’m with her and she admits it’s hard to feel like her success sometimes hurts me. The one where Dee says that she has me on a pedestal, that I’m her hero, that her confidence in me is greater than my confidence in myself—and that drives her crazy. The one that ends with tears because our feelings are so knotted together, we don’t know how to untie them.

  That night, Dee was to perform a song from a story about sisters. An older sister, Elsa, who had special powers. A younger sister, Anna, who yearned to be closer to her. Two sisters who wanted to take care of each other and two sisters whose lives evolved in relationship to one another. I knew the story well. Dee and I had a similar story, and the irony wasn’t lost on me.