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

by Deborah Voigt

  “Get in,” he said to me, motioning for me to get into the family car and come home with him.

  The next morning, he had a serious meeting with John at a nearby restaurant.

  “Are you aware that you are committing statutory rape?” he said to John. “Are you aware you are committing a crime with my daughter? Do you have real feelings for her? Does she mean more to you than just sex? You are not going to steal my daughter’s future away from her, do you understand?”

  My poor father; he was just as afraid as my mother. They took away my driver’s license for a few months and grounded me and threatened me and pleaded with me, but there was no use. I was a crazy teenager who thought she was in love, and the more they tried to pull me away from him, the more I was desperate to see him. Until finally one morning, they gave in . . . or gave up.

  Mom was driving me to school and, with a sigh, she said something to me I never thought I’d hear.

  “Debbie, I think maybe it’s time for you to go on birth control—if you are not already.”

  Clearly, my parents, at their wits’ end, must have decided that if they couldn’t stop me from sinning and save me from the fires of eternal, damning hell . . . they could stop me from making the same mistake they did.

  I WAS SO consumed with the drama of John that my schoolwork was suffering. I was even failing phys ed. How do you fail phys ed? You don’t show up. It was my last class of the day, and I hated it; I was uncomfortable moving around and showering in front of all the skinny girls. And John got off work right about that time. He’d gotten a new job driving tour groups around, and at some point he’d moved out of his parents’ house and gotten an apartment. He’d come pick me up with the bus before my last period and we’d take off.

  I went to speak to the gym teacher and beg for leniency. We made a deal that in exchange for a passing grade, I would come in early every day for a semester and clean the locker rooms. Which is how I got my (thankfully temporary) nickname from her and the other kids in school—“Cinderella.”

  But the problem was bigger than that, of course. One morning I was pulled out of class and told to report to the counselor’s office.

  “You’re skipping classes, your grades are dropping, and . . . you’re gaining weight,” she said, looking at me from across her desk, truly worried. “What’s going on with you? Are you okay?”

  I hadn’t expected her to be so compassionate and I choked on my answer. What was I supposed to tell her, the truth? That I felt myself getting obsessed and out of control, that my parents were having problems and I was worried about my mother, that I felt guilty about everything I did and I was destined for hell for all of eternity?

  “Nothing’s going on,” I told her. “Nothing . . . nothing.”

  She was right; I was packing on pounds like a snowball speeding downhill, gaining momentum and size as it barreled down.

  In the year since John and I started dating, my weight had jumped from 155 to 175. Part of it was because I had turned sixteen and could now drive and had the freedom to get junk food on a whim, and eat as much as I wanted without anyone wagging a finger. It was easy to stop off at Burger King on the way home, scarf down a Whopper, fries, and shake as I zigzagged through the streets, then dispose of the crumpled wrapping-paper evidence. My part-time job at Del Taco that year didn’t help, either. I probably consumed a burrito for every five I rang up at the cash register.

  My bad habits kept escalating—like a speeding car, I was a wreck waiting to happen—until one early evening I crashed in one grand, dramatic, symbolic collision.

  My parents had sent me to pick up Rob at the movie theater and on the way I stopped in at Burger King for my usual driving meal. I was driving and eating, heading westward, with the setting sun in my eyes. I remember looking in the rearview mirror and seeing a motorcyclist behind me as I leaned over to take a sip of my chocolate shake, and then . . .

  The rest was in slow motion. The cyclist flipped over the roof of the car and was knocked out cold. Then, a flash of images: people saying, “We’ve called for help” and someone getting me out of the car and sitting me down on the curb . . . fire trucks, ambulances, and then . . . the sight of my father standing above me.

  Dad whisked me out of there and got me home, then went to the hospital to check on the cyclist. He had regained consciousness, but when the doctors gave him a drug for shock he had a horrifying allergic reaction that left him paralyzed from the waist down for days. Needless to say, I was a basket case; we all were. My parents even let John come over to console me so I wouldn’t sink into depressed oblivion.

  Thankfully, once the drug wore off, the man’s paralysis disappeared. Soon after he was released from the hospital, the man drove past our pretty, upper-middle-class home and decided to sue us for hundreds of thousands of dollars, even though he had completely recovered and was fine. The lawsuit hung over my father for two years, until it was dismissed.

  I was too scared and ashamed to admit to anyone that I’d been paying attention to the food I was gobbling up instead of the road when I mowed that man down.

  BUT I KEPT eating, and gaining weight. At least I had my singing and music to sustain me. It was the one thing God told me to do that I obeyed.

  In my final year of high school, our drama teacher chose The Music Man as that year’s musical. I had begged and pleaded with her to choose My Fair Lady so that I could sing Eliza and realize my childhood fantasy onstage, but she stood firm with Music Man. I auditioned for the lead role of Marian the Librarian, played by Shirley Jones in the 1962 film. My only real competition for the part was a slim, pretty, and talented classmate named Yvonne, who was a year younger than me. We both auditioned and I got the part and was elated.

  As I was leaving school that day, after auditions, I passed Yvonne’s boyfriend in the hall.

  “Hey, Voigt,” he said, “congratulations on getting the part.”

  “Oh, thank you!”

  “You must have got it because of your figure,” he said, with a sneer.

  I was speechless. I kept walking and held in the tears, pushed them down. How could he say something so cruel? It was the first time someone outside my home had made me feel really bad about how I looked. It was the first time I really, truly understood I was fat. Not chubby, not big-boned, not voluptuous—fat. But music wasn’t about how a person looked, it was about talent and ordained gifts and ability. It was the one place that wasn’t touched by my crazy life, my crazy eating. Or so I had hoped.

  The following year, that same drama teacher put on My Fair Lady, with lithe and pretty Yvonne in the romantic lead. I had pleaded for that part, but I guess I was too big to play Eliza. I wasn’t a romantic lead, I didn’t fit the dress.

  By graduation, I was tipping the scales at 190 pounds.

  I stood on the bathroom scale, wondering how, at my size, I was ever going to sing and perform like my idol, Karen Carpenter, who was getting skinnier and skinnier as I got fatter and fatter. And how was I going to sing the Broadway show tunes and play the parts I loved if I was expected to be slim like Yvonne? God had told me I was meant to sing, and I trusted He was going to lead me in the right direction and onto the right road, but lately my own navigating skills were not so good.

  I had to think up a new path to get me wherever it was I was supposed to go. I had to find a place in music where my career would not depend on my weight and my looks. After a bit of research, I registered at Chapman College (now Chapman University) to study choral conducting at their music conservatory. The school was highly regarded and was just a twenty-minute drive from home, though I had every intention of living on campus.

  It was time for me to be on my own and sort myself out. It was time for me to separate from my parents and make concrete decisions and move on. Apparently, my father was in the same frame of mind.

  One day before I left for school, I was watching TV in the family room with Mom when Dad called her to come upstairs. When she returned, a few minutes later,
she crumpled into a chair next to me—crying and defeated, like that day in the Laundromat, but worse.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  Before she answered, I already knew, just by looking at her. After all the years of arguments, separations, reunions, and recriminations, my parents’ marriage was finally broken beyond repair.

  “Your father asked me for a divorce,” she said.

  She buried her face in her hands and cried and cried.

  ACT II

  ACCELERANDO

  ( 6 )

  When the Student Is Ready

  CONVENIENTLY, THE LITTLE convenience store was only a five-minute walk from my dorm.

  Every day, instead of going to class, I’d sleep until noon, then walk over and stock up: Ruffles potato chips, onion dip, and my new discovery, Pepperidge Farm’s three-layer coconut cake with vanilla frosting. And diet soda—always diet soda. Had to save on calories somewhere. Back in my room, I’d attack the cake with a fork and eat the whole damn thing, then I’d start on the chips and dip, and binge until I passed out.

  I’d wake up later surrounded by the smashed cardboard cake boxes and torn-open Ruffles bags, icing and onion dip smeared across my mouth, like a vampire after a violent feeding frenzy.

  I was now about six months into my first year at Chapman, and it was not going well. I hated my classes and started skipping them around month two, then finally dropped out halfway into my second semester, I was so miserable. I had a nightmare roommate for the first three months, an exchange student from China who cooked up strange and unknown concoctions in her wok in the room and walked in on me and John even if I’d looped a tie on the doorknob, as per our prearranged signal.

  “On the door! The tie! Didn’t you see it?” I’d explode, as John dove for cover under the sheets.

  WHEN I’D STARTED school, John and I sort of broke up, but not really. He was going to be out of town a lot for his bus-driving job, and I had to concentrate on my studies, so we decided we’d go with the flow, maybe see other people. I wasn’t going with the flow so well. John would visit me at my dorm, but when he wasn’t with me, I’d go into stalking mode. I’d heard he was dating a friend’s sister, so I’d drive by her apartment to see if his car was there. If it was, I’d park and prowl through the alleyway behind the girl’s apartment and peek into her kitchen window through a crack in the drapes, trying to catch them together.

  The pressure of being alone at school, coupled with my parents’ split and John’s being away, threw my usual clingy nature—and my eating—into high gear.

  It’s not as though my parents’ split came as a surprise. I knew from age five that they shouldn’t be together. Still, I was having a hard time handling it, handling everything. On top of all this, I had a voice teacher at school intent on torturing me. In class, we studied operatic history and had vocal workshops, and once a week I separately met with this vocal coach for one-on-one sessions in her studio.

  She had an ugly, squeaky voice and instructed me to watch myself in a giant, full-length mirror as I sang. Every time I looked in that mirror and opened my mouth, I felt like I was looking in one of those distorting funhouse mirrors that make you look blown-up and grotesque. I tried to sing but instead I’d burst into tears.

  “Debbie, what’s the matter?” she’d ask, impatiently, in her grating voice.

  “I can’t do it. Why must I do this? I’m not going to have a mirror in front of me when I’m performing. What’s the point?”

  “You need to see what you are doing with your facial muscles and mouth and jaw as you sing. Why is this so hard for you? All my other students do it.”

  Why was it not obvious to her why it was so hard for me? In my first two months at school, I had packed on a whopping thirty pounds (how was that even physically possible?), and to look at my reflection was to confront how unhappy I was. I wasn’t inspecting how my larynx and diaphragm worked in tandem, or how the roof of my mouth vibrated. All I saw was my sadness and pain.

  After a dozen lessons and crying jags, I stopped going to her and went instead to the convenience store for more coconut cake to shove down my larynx.

  I HAD BOLDLY struck out on my own to start a new life, but I wasn’t emotionally equipped for any of it. I didn’t know how to deal with my feelings about my parents, about John, about my difficulties in school . . . so I stuffed them down with cake, a sweet tranquilizer. Whenever my parents telephoned, I’d tell them, “Everything’s great! Classes are great!”

  After I officially dropped my classes, I isolated myself in my dorm room and was a complete mess—overwhelmed with emptiness and despair. I got a stern notice from the school to vacate. Without my parents knowing, I took the reimbursed tuition money Dad had paid and moved into an apartment with some girlfriends. I would have gotten away with it, too, if the school hadn’t mailed my father a receipt that summer, itemizing the monies returned to him due to my incomplete course work.

  My parents were livid, and I couldn’t blame them. I spent the next two years drifting in and out of meaningless office jobs with no direction, and no faith in anything. Since my parents’ separation I’d attended Sunday church services less and less. Church became more of a job for me than a place of worship: I was hired by churches of various denominations that had a lot of money and could afford to bring in a soloist—like the big Presbyterian church at Leisure World nearby—to beef up the sound of their choirs. During the sermons, I’d zone out. It was a way to keep singing somehow, to keep me near God somehow.

  I still had my faith in God; it was people (myself included) I wasn’t so sure about.

  And I still had faith in the music itself.

  Even depressed and aimless, I kept up with my private voice lessons. I still wanted to be a musician, and I still believed God wanted me to sing, but maybe I was meant to do it differently. My new halfhearted plan was to marry John and get a job as a high school choir teacher in a small town where John could get a job as a local DJ—he had by now left his driving job and signed up as a communications major at Cal State Fullerton. I would live a simple, quiet life . . . perform a concert once in a while maybe. I would still sing.

  But, oh, God and His mysterious ways. Once again, having lost my way, I was plucked from my inertia and set on a new path.

  The nearby Garden Grove Community Church (it would later become the famous Crystal Cathedral) was holding auditions for their production of The Sound of Music and I couldn’t resist. I would have died and gone to heaven to sing the role of Maria, but I didn’t dare audition for her—I knew my size would make it impossible to be considered for the part. Instead, I auditioned for and won the role of the Mother Abbess. During rehearsals I discovered that pastor Robert Schuller’s wife, Arvella, was a die-hard opera fan and had created a scholarship at the church for young singers who wanted to train in opera. Again, opera had never been my favorite music genre, but I could sing it. And another plus about opera was that I didn’t have to be a waif—opera singers were big girls, like me. I applied for the scholarship and auditioned at the Cathedral a few weeks later, and got it; it was that simple. The money I won afforded me to study with a new voice teacher, Nancy Estes, at the church—but not for long.

  One day as I performed “Sebben, crudele” (“Tho, not deserving”) from the Caldara opera La costanza in amor vince l’inganno (it means: faithfulness in love conquers treachery), my voice rose up to the vaulted ceiling. Nancy stared at me silently when I was finished.

  “Debbie, you’ve got to do something with your voice. You’ve got to sing.”

  “What do you mean? I am singing. I’ve got my church jobs and—”

  “That’s not enough.” She shook her head. “You really, really have talent,” she said and walked over to me and put her hands on my shoulders. She shook me a little, as if she was trying to wake me up.

  “Listen to me. Please. You really have talent. Your voice is a gift and you’ve got to do something about it.”

  You are meant to sing.<
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  A MONTH LATER, I was enrolled on a full scholarship as a voice major at California State University, Fullerton, studying with the head of the vocal department, Jane Paul. Nancy had pressed her number into my hand and urged me to call her. After I sang a few arias for Jane in her living room, she nodded. “The timbre, the warmth of your voice . . . yes, I’d like to work with you.”

  Jane would be the most influential voice teacher in my life. Not only would she become my coach on and off over the next fifteen years, but she’d also become my dearest friend and biggest supporter and encourager.

  The program at Cal State focused on classical training and opera, a genre I was still warming up to. The conductor at one of my church jobs gave me a record of Puccini’s Tosca sung by Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé as a gift and I listened to it, but I didn’t love it. I was encouraged, though, by the photo of Caballé on the album cover; she was a large woman like me.

  Soon after that I attended my first live operatic concert. Beverly Sills passed through town on her “farewell” tour and I was moved to tears when she spoke about the “joy and passion” she felt for her career, and that she hoped to help other young singers realize their dream to sing opera. So while I wasn’t one to listen to or attend operas as a fan, I was drawn to the passion of it, to the pure doing of it.

  When I sang in the safety of Jane’s studio in Placentia, I could feel myself connect with the music. There was something basic, something primal, something timeless that happened when I opened my mouth and became one with the melody. Everything else fell away—every problem vanished, nothing else existed or even mattered: it was simply my beating heart connecting with the beating heart of the composer and the beating heart of whoever might be listening.

  It was love. It was God. And it moved me.