Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva

by Deborah Voigt

  “You will not speak to your mother that way. Do. You. Under. Stand?”

  He’d get that soap in good and deep, until it hit the molars. And then he’d twist it around in my mouth to make sure he didn’t miss a spot.

  Even my spankings took on a new dimension. We didn’t have a Ping-Pong table in our house, but Grandma Voigt did. How else would Dad have gotten hold of a paddle? Forty-odd years later, I still don’t remember doing anything so terrible (that they knew about) that would warrant a spanking on my bare ass with a piece of sporting equipment.

  “You will never do that again!” WHACK! “That was a bad thing to do!” WHACK!

  I remember limping away from one spanking with blistering welts on my behind.

  THE YEAR I entered seventh grade, at Holmes Junior High School, I was more than ready to rebel.

  I met my new friend, Sue, at choir practice, and she would become my new agent provocateur and partner in crime. We had a secret voice, a high, squeaky trill based on our nerdy teacher Mr. Weller, that we used constantly throughout the day—in class, in the halls, after school, on the phone—I’m surprised my voice didn’t get stuck there. (The Voice was so high, it may have contributed to my vocal development. We talked how I imagine John Irving’s character, Owen Meany, sounded like.)

  For one month we were put in charge of the ice cream wagon in the cafeteria at lunchtime. (Upon hearing the news, Sue and I looked at each other: They’ve got to be kidding!) We were told to sell the ice cream and put the money in a little tin cash box. Except, that’s not exactly how it turned out. Each shift, my waistline and thighs netted at least three ice cream sandwiches for free—and Sue scarfed down at least three Eskimo Pies. We were eating half the profits, and we gave away the rest, dispensing free ice cream to our ever-grateful friends.

  I had now broken the “Thou shall not steal” commandment, but I wasn’t too bothered by this. Instead, I was high on the feeling of being wild and naughty and getting away with it.

  All a teacher had to do was take one look at me and they’d have known I was guilty of ice cream theft. I was always a bit bigger than other kids, tall and stockier in build; but a few months into junior high I started to round up quite a bit. In addition to our illicit ice cream, Sue and I had a feasting ritual in which we’d stroll the length of our local strip mall, from one end to the other, hitting each food counter along the way—McDonald’s, the glazed-doughnut place, Butterfingers and chocolate-covered pretzels at the candy counter—we were equal-opportunity bingers. It never occurred to me to ask myself why I had begun to overeat like this.

  At home, Mom had become my binge buddy, too. My father was out of town at least one overnight a week, and when he was gone, the fear and control atmosphere in the house lifted. We all felt it. Free from his ever-watchful, scrutinizing gaze on what we ate and did, we let loose—it was party time.

  “What should we have for dinner, Debbie? Pizza? Hamburgers and fries? A bucket of chicken?”

  “Let’s go to Dogs n’ Suds!” I’d say, excited.

  The boys would pile into the backseat and I’d sit up front with Mom and we’d drive to the local carhop chain and order hot dogs, fries, and root beer floats delivered right to our car. On the way home we’d stop at Dairy Queen for sundaes. Later that night, after my brothers were in bed, it would be special Mom-Debbie bonding time (read: eating time). Mom would make a huge bowl of popcorn and drench it with a stick of melted butter and tons of salt and we’d stay up and watch Johnny Carson.

  Dad didn’t know about our free-for-all eating nights, but he noticed the aftereffects. One day toward the end of junior high, Mom and I were walking ahead of him on the sidewalk on a warm summer afternoon, wearing shorts, when we heard him sigh behind us.

  “Like mother, like daughter,” he said from the rear, noticing our similar figures. I think his intent was to tease, but I didn’t hear that I was pretty like Mom, or curvaceous like Mom. I heard: Debbie’s headed for trouble. I see I’m going to have to be relentless with her, too.

  THE ONLY CONSTANT for me, through all this, was music.

  I first spotted my music teacher, Miss Cronin, the year before, when she’d brought the junior high choir to my grammar school to perform in our gymnasium. She was a former nun, I soon found out, who had the voice of an angel. After the choir finished, she sat down on a chair with her guitar and sang folk songs like “The Water Is Wide,” and I was mesmerized. Miss Cronin had the bearing of the nuns back at the nursing home, but she was young and enthusiastic, with musical talent. She was my real-life answer to Maria von Trapp! She was also a bit of a renegade herself.

  In class, we studied the rock opera Tommy, by the Who (a group definitely not on my parents’ “safe list.” Had they known I was listening to “The Acid Queen” they would have gone into conniptions.) When my virgin ears first heard it, I felt an explosion shatter my formerly overprotected senses.

  In addition to introducing me to rock music, Miss Cronin was the first person to tell me my voice was special. She urged me to sign up as a soloist in a vocal competition sponsored by the Illinois State Music Teacher’s Association, in which our school choir was to take part that year. I hesitated, fearing I didn’t have the chops for it.

  “Debbie, you have a special voice and a special talent. You should do this.”

  The competition was being held at a local high school, and I brought Sue along for moral support, which she gave. In the hallway, before I went into the room to sing, Sue went into our Weller Voice, and we exploded in hysterics until Miss Cronin shushed us. Thanks to Sue, I wasn’t nervous.

  I stood in the middle of the dusty classroom in front of two female judges. One wore inch-thick glasses perched at the tip of her skinny nose, the other had a beehive hairdo teased so high I was queasy from the hairspray fumes. Behind them was a chalkboard with smudged algebra equations. I had prepared “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from Oklahoma! Mom and I had seen it a few months earlier, my first live stage musical, and I’d been swept away—the lights, the costumes, the dancing, the acting, the songs—everything.

  I cleared my throat and began. The sight of the judges and math equations fell away. The stuffy schoolroom became a field of grass and haystacks. . . .

  There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow . . .

  I took home a first-place pin in the shape of the state of Illinois—my first win!

  My success, and Miss Cronin’s encouragement, planted the hint of a dream deep within me—that maybe one day I could have some sort of career in music. That desire was further stoked the day I first heard, on the radio, the most beautiful sound ever—Karen Carpenter. Her voice was so creamy, her phrasing so beautiful, that I fell in love with her and wanted to sing like her. I rushed out and bought my first LP, the Carpenters’ A Song for You, and lay on my bed, playing it over and over on my Philips turntable.

  One day I sat down at the piano in the living room—I was thirteen now—thinking I was alone in the house. I began to play and sing a lilting show tune—I can’t remember which one it was. But I thought no one else was home, so I let loose with my voice and my feelings. My fingers flew across the keys and I sang out to the last rows of imagined Broadway balconies with abandon. I hadn’t sung at home like this since my My Fair Lady days, before I had been taught to be self-conscious about it.

  Just like when I was three years old, this felt right. It felt happy. It felt . . . transcendent.

  I heard my father’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs and around the corner.

  I froze, my fingers stiff above the keys. My parents’ mantra repeated in my ear: “Don’t be showy, don’t be prideful . . . pride goeth before a—”

  Dad walked over to me at the piano. He might have laughed a little; I don’t know if it was out of nervousness or if he was making fun of me or if he was angry or uncomfortable or afraid or what. And I don’t remember his exact wording, either, but I’ll never forget the feeling it gave me.

  “Who,” he aske
d, “do you think you are?”

  I felt humiliated and ashamed. Whether it was his intent or not, I thought he was telling me that I was doing something bad, something wrong—that the way I loved to sing was immoral and ungodly.

  For months after that day, I felt sick inside. As if the delicate dream I dared to hope for had been murdered.

  Until the morning God spoke to me and brought it back to life.

  ( 4 )

  High School Musical

  YOU ARE HERE TO SING.

  Forty years later, I can still hear that authoritative, ethereal voice and feel the impact of those five words; the experience changed my life. They were more than mere words; they were my destiny. And as my bedroom filled with morning light that day and I lay in bed, silenced and humbled by the enormity of what had just happened, I was also determined about my newly defined mission. Without a doubt, no matter what anyone else said or did, I now had to find a way to sing in whatever way I was meant to do so. I assumed the details would reveal themselves along the way.

  I sat up in bed and reached for my guitar, which was leaning against the wall—my parents had given it to me as a Christmas present at the encouragement of Miss Cronin—and I softly strummed a few chords. For the rest of the day I moved through my regular routine in an otherworldly daze and didn’t tell a soul of my chat with God. Who would have believed me? I wanted to keep the experience untainted and private, so I didn’t say a word—and wouldn’t for at least another decade.

  Around the same time I heard God’s voice, my life changed drastically in another way, too.

  Weeks before I started high school, in ’74, Dad was promoted and transferred to a new job, and we were uprooted southwestward across the country, from Illinois to Orange County, California. His office had given him two choices for his new position, California or New York. So we took a road trip—Dad, Mom, and me—to look at neighborhoods in Ossining, New York, the home of Sing Sing Correctional Facility, before he made his decision. As we wandered through one beautiful colonial house in Ossining, we heard the sound of beautiful voices raised in song, which I at first took as a heavenly sign that this was the right place for us. (After all, if I could hear God speak, why not angels singing?)

  “Oh, those are the prisoners singing,” explained the real estate agent who was showing us the house. “On some summer nights, if the wind is blowing the right way, their voices rise above the prison walls.”

  Funny that the prison was called “Sing Sing,” I thought to myself. And even funnier that I could relate to their need to sing beyond their physical and emotional prisons. I crossed my fingers, hoping that Dad would pick the East Coast job, but he chose California, and I was distraught.

  The Beach Boys’ Endless Summer album was all over the radio as we packed up the house, but I had no interest in being a surfer chick or a “California Girl” spending Christmases in seventy-five-degree heat, which we did that first December. I imagined a world of skinny girls going to school in bikinis, and after my father’s “like mother, like daughter” remark, I was not comfortable showing my body—especially not in shorts or a bathing suit, the year-round uniform of Southern Californians.

  My nightmare scenario was realized when we arrived in Placentia, thirty miles southeast of Los Angeles, and I attended my first church youth group event. Our new church, the Yorba Linda Evangelical Free Church, was more hippie-dippy than we were used to, and, as I suspected, the teenagers were more invested in pool parties than Bible verses. I was invited to attend one that first week, and my parents urged me to go and make friends, so I put on my conservative one-piece and a big cover-up and stayed that way. In California, I discovered, even the devout Christian girls looked like Twiggy. I was miserable.

  It’s not as if I was terribly overweight. I was fourteen and size 14, and voluptuous—a curvaceous girl growing into womanhood.

  But I felt obese. The messages I’d been given while growing up with a constant dieter and a food marshal convinced me I was bigger than I was, and certainly bigger than I should be. I had boobs and an ass and hips and thighs, and while that was normal for my sturdy body type, it was considered fat in my house. Perhaps my womanly curves worried my father. Maybe seeing his daughter developing into a sexual being was too much for him to handle and subconsciously he wanted to stop it.

  At that time, I had a classic, hearty, country girl’s steak-and-potatoes appetite and I liked my cookies. But I still wasn’t too much of an overeater, nothing beyond the sort of teenaged girl’s frenzied, emotional, hormonal overindulging that I had done with Sue and with Mom. It was the kind of eating that, given a few more years of maturing, I probably would have gotten a handle on. But if you tell me repeatedly that I’ve got a weight problem and to stop eating, well, dammit, I’m going to eat everything in sight.

  “Debbie, get your hand out of that cookie jar!” I’d hear from somewhere in the house every time I lifted the jar’s heavy ceramic lid. So I’d sneak back later, when no one was in earshot, to grab twice as many. It was a power struggle, I suppose. (Later on, this dynamic would play out with my parents and me around the men I was dating: “Debbie, we don’t want you to be with that man.” It only made me want to be with him more, of course.)

  My former binge buddy, Mom, became my new diet buddy as I joined her on various weight-loss diets. We had a little Weight Watchers scale that we used to weigh our three ounces of skinless chicken breast as we forced ourselves to drink eight glasses of water per day. When we got home after going out shopping together, we both had to pee so badly it was a race out of the car to see who could get into the house and to the closest bathroom first. The loser sometimes ended up peeing in her pants.

  Sweets became a precious, rare, and sought-after commodity in our household—even more than before. So much so, that Dad began to hide his own goodies. One day as I was setting the dinner table, I opened up a hutch drawer and found a dozen packages of my beloved Hostess Suzy Q’s—chocolate cake squares with cream slathered in the middle—lined up like diamonds in a jewelry display.

  “Mom!” I yelled out to her, “what are these doing here?”

  “They’re your father’s,” she said, standing in the doorway, hands on her hips. “Don’t touch them.”

  Was she kidding? I was desperate and hungry, but not crazy. I was now, thankfully, past the spankings and soap-in-mouth punishments. They had ended once I started junior high school; but, in any case, I wouldn’t have eaten my father’s stash. I had too much respect for another person’s personal binge needs.

  I TRIED NOT to focus too much on my relationship with food, which was growing more complicated, and instead threw my energies into my new life purpose. That, to me, was clear and all mine.

  You are here to sing.

  I JOINED THE choir at El Dorado High School, where my vocal teacher, Mr. Fichtner, would soon become another key player to help me get onto my music path. He put me in his madrigal group, a dozen handpicked singers from the choir who sang Renaissance and Baroque music a capella. Outside of school, I threw myself into performing with a new fervor. I sang solos in the church choir and helped run the music program there; I performed in local shopping malls and entered competitions; any opportunity I saw to get out in front of people and perform, I took.

  To this day, my parents still talk about the time I decided to play all of Beethoven’s melancholic Moonlight Sonata at an evening church service during the offertory. It was always a small crowd at night, so the offertory passing was finished within a minute or two. Beethoven, not so much. When I glanced up halfway through the sonata, I could see the ushers standing in the back, politely but impatiently tapping their feet, and the pastor trying subtly to gesture to me from the pulpit, with an expression that said: We’re going to go into overtime because of this, kid. Wrap it up, wrap it up!

  With my love of drama, I signed up for a theater class and auditioned for the musical L’il Abner, winning a part as one of the Dogpatch girls. My skimpy costume consisted of D
aisy Duke cutoff short-shorts and a checkered midriff-revealing blouse that tied above the waist. For this body-conscious, suburban, midwestern Southern Baptist girl, it was a racy outfit. But I discovered something freeing on that high school stage the first night I sang and hoofed my way across, pretending to be someone else. If I was playing a part, I could do, say, and wear anything, and it was allowed. There were no rules when you were acting, because it wasn’t you.

  My parents attended opening night, and I’m sure they were shocked when they saw me onstage in my sexy outfit, but they didn’t say anything about it. I think by now they had decided that acting in a school play wasn’t going to send anyone to hell. Grandma Voigt didn’t say anything about my outfit either, bless her soul. But from onstage, I could imagine what she was thinking: Cover those things up!

  The following year, I played the plum role of secretary Agnes Gooch in Mame and found I had a flair for comedy. At the school’s thespian banquet I won several awards, including the Best Supporting Actress award for my Gooch turn, and returned home that night buoyant with an armful of certificates and trophies. One by one, I took them into my parents’ room and showed them—“You were wonderful in that part, honey,” Mom said; and they were both genuinely happy for me. I was trying to be proud, but not prideful, and I wanted them to take my singing seriously.

  It worked. Soon after, my parents asked around about voice teachers and heard about Seth Riggs. He was the preeminent voice teacher in Los Angeles, with a specialty in pop music, and he’d worked with vocalists like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and Barbra Streisand. My parents, to their great credit, may not have understood exactly what I was doing, or where my talents might lead me, but once they saw how hard I was working—and that I did, indeed, have talent—they were supportive of my goal financially and in other ways. They drove me for the audition with Mr. Riggs, who wanted to take me on; but the hourlong commute seemed too much.