Sunday, December 21, 1997

The firm's Christmas party was Friday night, in a hotel ballroom downtown. One of the partners knows I sing, and every year he asks me to do "O Holy Night" after dinner with the hotel pianist. Every year I say no. Every year I do it.

This year it went fine until the high note near the end, which I've always sort of aimed at and hoped for. Friday I didn't hit it so much as visit it. The partners' wives cried anyway, because that song was built to make partners' wives cry. A man from accounting told me I should be on Star Search. I didn't tell him it was cancelled.

But it made me decide something I've been circling for a year. I'm going to take voice lessons. Real ones. I haven't had a lesson since my high school choir director kept me after class in 1978. For three years I've stood in the back row singing mostly by ear and by elbow, leaning on the sopranos around me, and I'd like to know what I could do on my own two feet.

Sharon gave me the name of a teacher in Lakewood who she says is "terrifying, and worth it." I called her yesterday. Her name is Norma Weaver. On the phone she said, "What do you want to sing?" I said I didn't know. She said, "Good. Tuesdays at six-thirty. After the holidays."

Merry Christmas to the people who read this. Mark says the counter is over two hundred. I suspect he's been visiting it himself to cheer me up. That would be like him, though he'd deny it.

Friday, November 28, 1997

Thanksgiving at Mom's.

Mom is sixty-five. She's lived in the same brick house in Parma since 1963 and made the same Thanksgiving dinner in it every year: turkey, her mother's bread stuffing, sweet potatoes with the little marshmallows, green beans with the fried onions on top, and pumpkin pie from the recipe on the can. She refuses help. Every year I offer, and every year she hands me a dish towel and points at a chair.

She coughed all through dinner. She's had that cough since Labor Day. She says it's a cold. Between the turkey and the pie she put on her good coat and went out on the back porch to smoke, the way she always has. Pall Malls, since she was sixteen. I stood at the kitchen window drying a dish I'd already dried, and watched the end of the cigarette go bright and dim in the dark, bright and dim, and listened to her cough.

When she came in I said, "Mom, that cough." She said, "Jane, it's Thanksgiving." That's the whole conversation, and we've had it before.

Mark came at six, ate a full second dinner, hugged his grandmother hard enough to lift her off her feet, and asked for the drumstick. She saves one for him every year in a covered dish at the back of the stove. He's fifteen and six feet tall and still the only person allowed to have it.

Sunday, November 23, 1997

Closed this afternoon. A Sunday matinee, full of grandmothers and little girls in velvet dresses with their legs swinging. Those are my favorite audiences. They laugh at Musetta and cry at Mimì and don't care who sees.

Strike is quick when you're chorus. You turn in your costume and your wig, you pull the bobby pins out of your scalp (you always find two more in the car), and you hand Barb your shoes. The stagehands are taking the Café Momus apart before you're up the stairs. By Tuesday the set will be on a truck and the Belmont will be an empty theater with a dusty stage, and it will be as though none of it happened, except for the bobby pins.

There's a name for what comes next. Everybody in the chorus calls it the post-show blues. For six weeks you've spent every night with fifty people making something enormous, and on Monday you go back to typing interrogatories, and nobody at the office needs you to be a widow with a bad hip.

Thanksgiving is Thursday. Mark goes to his father's at one and to my mother's in Parma at six for a second dinner, which at fifteen he regards as no hardship at all.

And if anyone outside Cleveland has wondered why the whole city has looked like a funeral for a month: we lost the World Series in the eleventh inning of the seventh game. That was four weeks ago tonight. The city still looks like a funeral. We've had practice.

Sunday, November 16, 1997

We opened Friday.

A thing you might not know about singing in the chorus of La Bohème: you work very hard for about twenty-five minutes of the evening, and then you're done. Act I is the four young men in their garret, their landlord, and Mimì. Act II is us, all of us, everything at once. Act III opens at a gate into the city at dawn, in the snow, and a few of us cross the stage as milkwomen coming in from the country while a few of the men sweep the street. Act IV is the garret again. And Mimì dies.

So during Act IV the women's chorus sits in the basement with our wigs off and our faces half cleaned, in slips and bathrobes, listening on the little speaker over the door. Every Bohème I've ever been near, it's the same. Somebody turns the speaker up. Nobody talks. Twenty-six grown women who've heard this opera a hundred times, with cold cream on our faces, crying at a box on the wall.

Mark came opening night with Randy. They sat in Row M. At the curtain call I could see them, or two men who looked like them. Randy brought me a rose in cellophane from the grocery store. Then he drove Mark back to his apartment, because it's his weekend. I stood at the stage door holding the rose and thought, well, if that isn't a third act.

Everybody in this opera has a secret. Mimì has one. Marguerite has one. The oranges are the only honest thing on the stage.

Sunday, November 9, 1997

Tech week starts tomorrow, which means the Belmont every night until eleven, standing still in costume while they focus the lights on the spot where we'll be standing still.

Let me tell you about the women's chorus dressing room. It's in the basement under the stage: one long low room with a counter down one side, a row of mirrors with light bulbs around them (about half the bulbs work), twenty-six women, twenty-six folding chairs and nineteen hooks. You learn to hang things on top of other people's things.

On my left at the mirror is Sharon Hagins, an alto, a nurse in her other life, who brings a thermos of hot tea with honey and lemon for whoever sounds scratchy that night. She's been in the chorus since 1985 and knows everything that has ever happened at the Belmont, including some things about the trap door I'd rather not know. On my right is Carrie Oldham, who's twenty-three, teaches music at an elementary school in the suburbs, has a voice like a bell, and does her stage makeup in four minutes flat.

Barb Santamaria runs wardrobe. Barb has pinned me into eleven costumes in four seasons. At my fitting Tuesday she looked at me in Marguerite's skirt, took in the waist, and said, with pins in her mouth, "Separation?" I said yes. She said, "It does that. It comes back." Then she went and found me a better shawl.

Mark put a counter at the bottom of this page. It says 34. He says that's very good for a page about opera. I asked him how many people have visited his computer game page, and he went upstairs.

Wednesday, October 22, 1997

Staging rehearsals started this week at our rehearsal hall, an old union hall on the near west side with a wooden floor and radiators that knock in four-four time.

Our director this fall is a woman from New York who has staged Bohème, she told us, nineteen times, and who has decided our Act II will be "specific." Specific means every person in the crowd needs a name, an age, a reason to be out on the street on Christmas Eve, and a secret.

My orange seller is named Marguerite. She's forty, a widow, with three children at home and a bad hip, and she's out on Christmas Eve because oranges don't keep. Her secret is that she's in love with Parpignol, the toy seller, who comes through with his cart and gets mobbed by children and never once looks at her. I gave her that secret so I'd have something to look at across the stage besides the conductor.

Act II is the shortest act in the opera and the hardest to put together. Twenty minutes, about. The vendors, the students, the café, the children's chorus, Musetta and her waltz, and at the end a military band that marches through and carries the whole crowd off with it. Six things happening at once, and Puccini wrote every one of them down so they'd fit together like a jigsaw. When it goes right it's like standing inside a clock.

It did not go right tonight. Half the men had transistor radios with earphones tucked under their caps, because the Indians are in the World Series. At one point a baritone in the back let out a yell in the middle of a held chord. Galen Mello, our chorus master, didn't even turn around. He just said, "What's the score?"

Sunday, October 12, 1997

Hello. My name is Jane Yingling. I'm thirty-six, I live in Cleveland, Ohio, and I'm a legal secretary at a law firm downtown, where I type depositions and interrogatories and wills from eight-thirty to five, with forty-five minutes for lunch.

Three nights a week from September to April, I'm also a second soprano in the chorus of the Lake Erie Opera Theatre, and have been since 1994. We're a regional company: three productions a season at the old Belmont Theatre downtown, an orchestra of about forty, principal singers who fly in from New York and Chicago, and a chorus of fifty-some local people who get a small check per production that just about covers parking, if you park far enough away.

I stand in the back row because I'm five foot nine. I sing second soprano because the firsts get the high B-flats and are welcome to them, and because the seconds are where the harmony lives, and I like it there.

The season opens in November with La Bohème. I'm in the crowd in Act II, which is the Latin Quarter of Paris on Christmas Eve. I sell oranges. Puccini gives the street vendors a few bars each of hollering their wares, all on top of one another, and from the audience it's supposed to sound like a whole Paris street at full tilt. From the inside it sounds like a church rummage sale where everybody's arguing over the same lamp.

My son Mark, who turned fifteen last month, made this page for me. He made one for himself last spring about a computer game, and I said how hard can it be, and he said, "Mom, you can't set the clock on the VCR," and here we are. I type it in Notepad. He puts it on the Internet and sighs.

One more thing, so it's said: Mark's father and I separated in April. That's all I'm going to say about it tonight.