Saturday, June 19, 1999
Tempo: moderato, but firmly

Mom is moving in with us next Saturday.

She was in the hospital again at the end of May, with pneumonia this time, and the doctor told us, kindly and plainly, that she shouldn't be living alone anymore. The choices were a nursing home or us. Mom said, "Over my dead body," meaning the nursing home, and then laughed at herself until she coughed.

So we're turning the dining room into her room. It has the bay window and it's on the first floor, and she can see the street. The hospital bed came Tuesday. The oxygen concentrator came Thursday: a machine about the size of a dorm refrigerator that pulls the oxygen out of the room air, and hums. It comes with fifty feet of clear tubing, so she can get from the bed to the kitchen and the bathroom and the front porch. Mark measured it all out with a tape measure to be sure.

My piano is in the dining room. I asked Mom if she'd like me to move it. She said, "Don't you dare. I've been listening to you practice through walls for thirty-eight years. I'd like to do it in the same room for a change."

Mark has had a Saturday job bagging groceries since March. Without saying anything to anybody, he traded it for two weeknights, so he can be home on Saturdays with his grandmother. Nobody asked him to.

Sunday, May 9, 1999
Tempo: andante

Mother's Day. Mark made breakfast: scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee you could stand a spoon in. Then we picked up Mom and Fred and drove down to the lake at Edgewater and parked facing the water, and sat with the windows down eating doughnuts and watching the sailboats. Mom said it was the best Mother's Day she's ever had, which she says every year, and which is true every year.

Aida closed two weeks ago. Four performances, four High Priestesses, and one cracked note on the closing Sunday that I'm told nobody heard. (Everybody heard. Carrie bought me a drink afterward and didn't mention it, which was the kindest thing anyone did all week.)

The post-show blues were bad this time. The Monday after we closed, I typed a will and felt like a pharaoh in exile.

Mark, at the lake: "So you were famous for two weeks and nobody saw your face." He's sixteen and a half and has started being funny on purpose. He's going to be a good man. Most days he already is.

Sunday, April 18, 1999
Tempo: I don't know the word for it. I'll look it up.

Opening night was Friday.

At 8:21 the stage manager touched my shoulder in the dark, I watched the assistant conductor's finger on the little monitor, the harps started, and I sang.

I couldn't see the audience and they couldn't see me. To every person in the Belmont I was a voice from somewhere behind a painted temple. I have never in my life felt less invisible.

Mom was in the wheelchair seats at the end of Row K, with Fred. Mark pushed her in. Randy came too, on his own, and sat with them, and at intermission he went and got Mom a ginger ale with a straw. I watched him do it from the wings, through a gap in the scenery. He brought me flowers again. Not from the grocery store this time.

Afterward at the stage door, Mom said, "I knew which one was you." I said, "Mom, nobody could see me. There wasn't a which one." She said, "I knew which one was you."

Mrs. Weaver came Saturday. She sent a note backstage with the doorman. It said, in its entirety: Breathed. N.W.

I'm going to frame it.

Sunday, March 28, 1999
Tempo: maestoso

Staging rehearsals for Aida, and this company has never tried anything this big.

The Triumphal Scene in Act II, when Radamès comes home from the war: the entire chorus, forty extra people from around town in tunics (supers, short for supernumeraries, because they don't sing), the dancers, and a row of trumpeters on stage with the long, straight, skinny trumpets everybody calls Aida trumpets. We do not have an elephant. We have a chariot made of plywood that Radamès stands in while six supers pull it, and Sharon says it's the most dangerous object she's seen in thirty years of nursing.

Here's my evening. In the second scene of Act I, I'm the High Priestess, offstage in the dark in the stage-right wing, in a black dress, with a music stand, a clip light, and a television monitor so I can see the conductor. The harps are in the pit just below me. Then I run down to the dressing room, Barb drops a gold headdress on me, and in Act II I'm a woman of Egypt cheering in the Triumphal Scene, back row. In Act III I'm a priestess of Isis, offstage again, in the temple on the bank of the Nile, singing a hymn in the dark while Amneris comes by boat to pray on the night before her wedding.

So I'm promoted in Act I and back in the ranks by Act II. Jay says it's just like the Army.

Mom says she's coming. With Fred.

Sunday, February 28, 1999
Tempo: largo

Mom spent four nights in the hospital this week with a bronchitis that was trying to turn into pneumonia. She's home now. She's on oxygen all day, not just at night: a little green tank on a two-wheeled cart that she pulls behind her like a poodle on a leash. She's named it Fred. She says Fred goes everywhere she goes and never says a word, which makes him the best man she's been out with since Dad.

I learned the hospital this week: the parking garage, the faster elevator, the vending machine that takes dollar bills and the one that eats them. I practiced the High Priestess under my breath in that faster elevator, between floors, going up and down.

Wednesday night at about two in the morning, when neither of us could sleep, Mom asked me to sing it for her. Very quietly. So I did, sitting in the chair by the bed with the curtain pulled around us. A night nurse came and stood in the door and listened, and said afterward that she'd seen Aida in the old Roman arena in Verona on her honeymoon in 1975, with the whole audience holding little candles. The man in the next bed, behind the other curtain, said, "Encore."

Mom slept after that. I didn't, but that was all right. I had a lot to think about, and a long line to think it on.

Tuesday, February 2, 1999
Tempo: fortissimo (I know that's not a tempo. Leave me alone.)

I got it.

Galen called me at work. At work! The receptionist put him through and said, "A Mr. Mello for you," and I was so sure something had happened to Mom that I stood up. He said, "Jane, it's yours. Don't let it go to your head. Nobody's going to see you."

I hung up and typed the rest of a deposition summary with my hands shaking. At lunch I went into the ladies' room and sang the first phrase into the paper towel dispenser, very quietly.

Carrie called tonight before I could call her. She's the cover, which means she learns it too and sings it if I'm sick. She said, "I'm so happy it's you, and I'm going to be so happy if you get a cold." I love that girl.

Mom cried on the phone. Mark said, "Cool. Can I tell people?" which from a sixteen-year-old is a standing ovation. Jay brought over a coffee cake with a candle in it, which is silly, and I ate a third of it.

I called Mrs. Weaver last. She said, "Of course." Then she said, "Tuesday, six-thirty. Bring a pencil."

Thursday, January 28, 1999
Tempo: agitato, then calmando

The audition was last night at 6:40.

Five of us went in, one at a time, to the big rehearsal room, where Galen, the conductor (who flew in for the day) and the stage director from New York sat behind a folding table. Carrie auditioned too. We waited together in the hallway beforehand on a bench, with Sharon between us holding our coats, like a nurse at the dentist's.

Galen had an idea. Since the High Priestess is never seen, he had each of us sing it from behind the upright piano at the end of the room, with our backs to the table. The conductor said he wanted to hear the voice and not the face. So I stood looking at the wall, at a fire extinguisher and a calendar from a piano store, and the accompanist played the harp part on the piano, and I sang to the fire extinguisher.

My knees shook the whole time. My breath didn't. That's Mrs. Weaver's hand on my back, a year of it.

When I finished, the conductor said, "Thank you," which is what they say to everybody, whether you were wonderful or the building's on fire.

Carrie went in after me and sang it beautifully. I could hear her through the door. I hope she gets it. No, I don't. Yes, I do. That's the truth both ways, and I'm not proud of the middle part.

Sunday, January 10, 1999
Tempo: andante sostenuto

Learning the High Priestess.

Some background, since a couple of you have written to ask. Aida is Verdi's, and it opened in Cairo in 1871. Aida is an Ethiopian princess who's a slave in Egypt, and she's in love with Radamès, the Egyptian general, who loves her back, and the pharaoh's daughter Amneris is in love with him too. It ends with two people sealed in a tomb, singing. (It's an opera.)

In the second scene, inside the temple, Radamès is being made commander of the army, and the priests consecrate him. The High Priestess is out of sight somewhere deep in the temple, calling on the god, and the priestesses take up her call, and the priests answer, back and forth. Her melody winds up and down in a scale that sounds nothing like the Methodist hymnal. It's meant to sound ancient and Egyptian, the way a man in Italy around 1870 imagined ancient and Egyptian, and it works. The harps play underneath it like water.

Mrs. Weaver has me singing it on one vowel all week, "ah," so I'll stop thinking about the words and start thinking about the line. I practice it in the car on the Shoreway with the windows up. Mark, from the passenger seat, Saturday: "You sound like a car alarm in Cairo." He's been sixteen for four months and thinks he's hilarious. Sometimes he is.