“As
opera singers who are trained to have excellent diction,
we spit a lot on stage while emoting or attempting to
get out those consonants. It’s an interesting thing to
have gotten used to my colleagues spitting on me.”
we spit a lot on stage while emoting or attempting to
get out those consonants. It’s an interesting thing to
have gotten used to my colleagues spitting on me.”
--Betany Coffland, opera singer
The Daffy Duck Syndrome
In the novel Operaville, blogger Mickey Siskel finds
himself in a budding friendship with his idol, the international diva Maddalena
Hart. He’s doubly surprised when Maddalena, suffering from some mysterious
malady, asks if she can stay the night at his cabin in the Santa Cruz
Mountains.
Next to me, something is
moving. I squint at the ceiling, pull my arms under me and roll over. It’s
Maddie, in striped yellow pajamas.
“Mickey? Are you awake? Are
you conscious?”
I’m self-conscious. Because I tend to sleep in the nude. But I notice
that she’s lying on top of my comforter, so we still have one degree of
separation. A whisper of light seeps through the windows. I’m guessing it’s
six, six-thirty.
“Um… Hi.”
“Hi.” She’s wide awake, full
of energy. “I owe you an explanation. But I can’t tell you unless you’re fully
conscious.” She taps a fingernail against her teeth, perhaps the habit of a
reformed chewer.
I rub my eyes, throw out my
arms and stretch everything else, gaining an immediate preview of all the aches
that will follow me for the rest of the day. I manage to generate one-half of a
smile.
“Shoot.”
“It’s those goddamn minor
characters. I’m rushing through costume changes, making my way to the stage,
running parts through my head, and I pass the green room, where I see Monsieur
Triquet and Olga and they’re playing cards with the techies and laughing, and
I’m thinking, Why do I have all this freaking
stage time? This is crazy! Why am I doing this impossible thing? I have placed
myself in a position where the Sunday afternoons of thousands of people, the
day’s wages of a couple hundred musicians, ushers, administrators, et cetera
and a notable percentage of the local economy depends on my doing this horribly
difficult thing. Stepping onto that stage is like a bungee-jumper stepping off
the platform. Every instinct of self-preservation tells you that you are
putting your trust in a thin elastic band – your training, your memorization,
your rehearsals, your stage skills – to prevent you from becoming a messy
smudge on the rocks below. But I do it. I take that leap and these sounds fly
from my mouth and I fill the artificial soul and emotions of this fictional
character. And I do understand that I’m very good at what I do, but sometimes I
don’t really understand how I do what
I do. What I’m afraid of is…”
An idea lands on her
satellite dish, her eyes widen. She grips my shoulder.
“When I was a kid, I would
watch these cartoons where the character, let’s say Daffy Duck, would be thrust
out over the edge of the cliff. But he wasn’t aware of it, so he would just hover in mid-air. However, the second
he looked down and realized where he
was – that’s when he would fall. (Of
course, part of the joke was that Daffy kept forgetting that he was a duck, and
could fly.) But here’s the lesson: it’s not the gravity that makes you fall,
it’s the realization of gravity.
“On Sunday, during the final
act, for the briefest of moments, I realized that I didn’t know my next line,
and for just a moment I froze. Jesus, bless him, saw my predicament and bought
me a second by kissing my hand. Then the conductor, Donald, slowed the tempo
just a bit – a grain of sand, but just enough for me to recall the next line
and smuggle it into the flow of the music. I’m sure that no one in the audience
knew a thing. But for me, for just that one lightning-flash, a chink opened up
in my little world, and through that chink I glimpsed the enormous void of
gravity and impossibility that underlies everything I do. It scared the hell
out of me.”
I fully expect her to break
into tears, but this is not a crying thing, it’s something closer to the brain.
Anxiety. Fear. She tucks her head into my shoulder, I wrap an arm around her as
best a civilized-but-naked man can, and I stroke her hair. I am Mickey, who
solves all problems by stroking hair. We lie in pools of faint light for
fifteen minutes. Maddie’s breathing slows to a regular pace and she says,
“Mickey? Could you make me some breakfast?”
Photo by MJV
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