DEBUT

It was a dark and stormy night.

Sorry, but it was. Tornado warnings were in effect for most of the metro area, and while no one takes them very seriously until the big horn blows long and loud, they might have accounted for the moderate size of the audience. It was either that, or the fact that every possible family member of every performer had already been shamed into attending the recital.

Twenty-odd performers then, thirty in the audience at the charming and well-worn Catholic church, second oldest in the city. Two more men came in just before the starting gun, but were re-directed to the gymnasium, where the Spanish-language mass (every two hours almost around the clock) attracted much larger crowds in much less danger of being startled.

I say thirty in the audience, but of course that includes the twenty of us who will sing. Our voice teacher is at the piano, her husband beside her turning pages. We all know the teacher, of course; and a few of us know each other, but it's a wide net our teacher casts: we students range in age from twelve to 85, from those with years of training and experience in solo and choral work, to those of us making our singing debut. Some of us wear Sunday best and pearls, two sport cut-offs, and I counted at least three tattoos and a nose ring. Diverse we may be in experience, talent, dress and age; but the tingle of anxiety, not to mention the lash of fear, makes us one band for this evening.

Our teacher has encouraged comfortable dress and a relaxed approach, but before we start, she does remind us of a few matters of protocol: hands at our sides or held loosely in front of us, no beauty-contest smiles, use the music stand if we must, bow when finished. Oh yes, and be sure to stand parallel to the stained glass windows and just under the central chandelier. Nervous as a spooked cat, I fail to hear why this location is important. Only later do I find out.

There are no auditions connected to this recital. It's a "want-to," not a "have-to" deal. If you want to, you get to. Thus objective listeners might rank us, as to skill, on a 1 through 10 scale, and find the majority of us at the low end. But there are no objective listeners here tonight.

So one of the first singers is tone-deaf. Thoroughly. Doesn't really matter, except perhaps to Singer #3, who is her son and thus a little embarrassed. Just a little. He is not tone-deaf, and sings a lovely old folk song sweetly and simply. The boy is possibly twelve, slender as a sapling, not noticeably nervous, plain and unvarnished as a wooden flute. Seated in the third row, we can almost hear him.

Soon after him, a powerful young man in his twenties gets up. His chest is broad, his hair black and crisp; he exudes testosterone like an after-shave lotion. He has served in Iraq and competed several times for black belts in judo and other martial arts, but assures us that "the fear factor" of the present moment far outweighs the previous challenges. He then punches out "The Impossible Dream" with pleasing vigor and conviction.

The crowd favorite, by a country mile, is M, a tiny woman, now frail of body and mind, but with a heart and spirit more incandescent than any of the rest of us can muster at the moment. Her smile shines on us all; her quips and frequent asides during other numbers are merry and full of the spirit of the occasion. When she stands to sing, her sheets of music obscure her face, so close must she hold them, and there are more than a few wavers in her voice, but also many triumphs, good solid notes, great tempo, and no doubt at all about how clearly she grasps the intent of the flirtatious song she performs. Later she does a delightful Mozart duet with another singer plus our teacher, who sings backup in case M loses her place now and then.

My turn. In case you missed the earlier post about my voice lessons, they began last spring. First ever. I want to make this distinction clear: public speaking I have done and overdone. Years worth. And enjoyed it all. But public
singing in a serious vein, never. Ever. And I am coaching myself all the way through this program, prior to my little number, that there is to be no comic intrusion, no easy put down of my own efforts. All sorts of quips and asides and grimaces and gestures occur to me, but I edit them out fiercely in advance.

My song is very short, but it is by Scarlatti and it is in Italian. And I love it.So I position myself parallel to the stained glass windows, directly under the chandelier, and I sing.

And now I discover the physics of being directly under the great dome of the church. The sound of my voice rings out and up and around, full and BIG, so much bigger than in the small library at home where I practised! I make it through with no obvious goofs, and one corner of my soul newly lit up.

The final few pieces of the program reward the patience of friends, family, and other performers with the high end of the rating scale. Three or four truly delightful numbers merit the "Bravo's" and even the whistles they receive.

Outside, an Oklahoma storm is filling the sky from west to east with sheet lightning. The torrents of rain applaud, applaud, applaud;
and we head home, soaking it all in.

TAKING VOICE

In the fifth and sixth grade, occasionally a classmate would smugly announce, "I'm taking tap and toe." (These were always girls; we would have been slack-jawed with astonishment if a boy had said these words, even Stanley.) "Taking tap and toe"--the words made me giggle. "Taking toe" brought great visual images of contortion: where would you take the toe; what would you do with the toe? Of course we all knew what the phrase meant: skinny Helen was learning to tap dance and toe dance. (Ballet? Or just free-form en pointe?)

So all that is just to say, as unsmugly as I can manage: I'm taking voice.

The lead-in to the voice lessons can be found in an earlier blog. So why the delay in reporting on the lessons themselves? First, if I told you what happens, you'd think I was blowing smoke up your kilt. Second--well, never mind about the second.

So at 10 a.m. on Fridays I go up to this pretty little house and, without knocking, walk into the front room. The room is dominated by (in order) a very large piano; a long wall of shelves, floor to ceiling, crammed tightly with music scores and songbooks ("Songs of Old Italy," "Songs of the Pampas," "Songs of Porter and Gershwin," and 4,000 more such); and 1127 images of angels. Small plaster angels, large porcelain angels, medium-sized straw angels, copper, bronze, and resin cherubs, woven, water-colored, finger-painted seraphs. So far, no actual photographs.

I have not inquired about the angels, but clearly they bless the goings-on in that room.

So I go in, belly up to the piano and the tape recorder that lies in wait like a net, and we begin. First we make the HOOOO sound, a lot of wind, not so much voice. Think noise in the chimney on a stormy night. Then we leap up the scales on EEEEEEEEEEEEE, just as high as I can go. And then I screech five more steps, muscles clenching, eyes squinting with the strain, and the sound that cometh forth sets off the three or four Chihuahuas behind the dining room door. They are in anguish, and they're not the only ones. Soon we are making siren sounds, "siren" as in someone is dying, not "siren" as in seductress. I am singing EEEOOOOOEEEEEOOOO,
following instructions to "smear it," make one continuous legato noise, up, down, and up again.

The larynx muscles, which have for seventy years done whatever they jolly well pleased, now are in boot camp, at the mercy of the Teacher, she of the angelic eyes and voice and the focus of a drill sergeant. Unlike Sarge, she doles out praise and encouragement at each effort, however pathetic; then sets the bar a little higher.

The lesson ends with a new song to learn, often in Italian. It is the dessert, the gelato, the tiramisu. And after HOOOOing and EEEEEEing and YEEEWWWWing, no matter how I torture the new song, it sounds--okay. It's a song, real music, and in Italian.
(The English translation is better forgotten.) The teacher sings it, and the notes are balm to my shattered ego. It's on tape, for me to take home and learn, to layer her limpid voice with my limping vocals, all week long. Smiling and, yes, well, smug.

THE ORPHAN MONTH

"April is the cruelest month," whined T.S. Eliot. Maybe so, but August is not exactly Miss Congeniality either. To me, August is the Orphan Month.

By August, summer 's "short lease" groweth 'way too long for this lodger. (Besides, it was Will Shakespeare who spoke of the "short lease," Will, whose London shivers on the same latitude as Newfoundland, for pity's sake.) August doesn't really seem a child of summer, with its delights and charms, but clearly can't claim the vigor and anticipation of early fall either. Do you know what August's flower is? The poppy. That's August, all right: drowsy, dopey, drugged out. And August is (check it out) National Psoriasis Month. Let's all go out in the mid-day sun and scratch!

When I worked in Paris, August was eerie. Most of the population, rich and poor, abandoned the city to vacation the full four weeks in the mountains or at the seaside. Walking down a major boulevard, I could have been on the set of a sci-fi movie: no one strolling, shopping, no horns honking, the Metros echoing hollowly. One expected giant snails to slither out of the Bois de Boulogne at any moment, seeking revenge on escargot-loving gourmets.

And of course, for anyone who's ever been in therapy, August truly IS orphan month. All credentialed therapists, be they Jungian, Freudian, feminist or aromatic, must throw dust covers over the couch and close shop in August. Clients are left to deal with the unhealed wounds of abandonment, freshly salted, alone.

Even major league baseball, by August, is so deja-vu. The thrilling romance of spring training is long gone. Games stretch out like tired bathing suits--thirteen, fourteen, fifteen innings. Neither team can bring matters to a climax. Injuries sprout everywhere. The DL is no longer an elite club; it's homeroom. Summoned from the bush leagues, adolescents appear on field, disappear, and another lad has his brief stay in the show. You don't know any of their names, and you don't care. Not any more. It's AWGUST!

But up ahead, in the distance, cool and waiting, is October. Now there's a month!

MOVING ON UP

Friday evening Nancy and I went to a concert, a fund-raiser to send a friend's friend Joseph off to theological seminary to become an Episcopal priest. Ah, you smile: a young idealist with going forth to battle the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Well, not exactly.

Joseph , though surely an idealist, is not young, and he has already had battles with the world and the devil that only a fast-on-his-feet lawyer can boast. (We'll leave the flesh alone for the nonce. ) Moreover, Joseph, a handsome bearded fellow in the high prime of life, is married and a father, and enthusiastic about both callings.


Yet now in midstream, he's turning against the career current he has long known and is breast-stroking his way toward the priesthood. That far shore must seem far indeed, and I admire his courage and dedication. But my immediate question is:

What's with lawyers?

In recent years, almost a dozen lawyers of my acquaintance have given up thriving careers and begun anew as men and women of the cloth. They've started from the ground up to pursue lives as priests, pastors, chaplains, directors of religious education and theologians. It's as if , well, not sharks, but, say, swordfish suddenly opted to swins with the dolphins.

By contrast, I've never known a single academic to leap from the walls of ivy into the churchyard. (Maybe that's because academics know that addressing a captive audience is hard enough; they may cower at the thought of preaching to a volunteer flock not under the motivation of final exams. Well, of immediate final exams. ) Nor can I think of one real estate agent who spurned a lockbox in exchange for the keys of the kingdom.

And so far as I know, restless religious don't become laywers. They do join the military (if they have been nuns), or become teachers, social workers, often therapists. But not lawyers.

My favorite trivia question is: which creature on earth is the most adaptable to the extremes of climate? The answer: the human. With the same dexterity, many people change careers and jobs a dozen times in a life span. There's something I admire about that kind of courage and imagination, even when it oversteps the bounds of reality. (I confess to relishing the true story of "The Great Imposter," a charming con-man who posed rather successfully as everything from a Navy surgeon to a prison warden without a lick of credential to his name.)

My grandfather, on the other hand, began as an engineer on the Erie Railroad when he was 19 and only stopped (grumpily) when, in his sixties, he became color blind. I grasped the podium at 22, and never let go for 35 years. Haven't decided whether that showed a lack of imagination or the presence of foolhardiness. In any case, it warmly suited me. So may the priesthood suit Joseph, formerly Esquire.

Picture it: Tucson, Arizona, 1955. A very sophomoronic sophomore attending the sun-baked U of A longs for a dash of sophistication. But where to find it? Fashion? Forget it! Sexual panache? Puh-leeze! Global travels? Not for another five years.

So what's available? Foreign films, of course. A small theater near campus specializes in the flicks from afar. The tiny lobby boasts serious art posters on the wall (Van Gogh--even a freshman can identify Van Gogh and feel safe); and after the late showing, offers free cigarettes and tiny cups of CPR-certified black coffee to the movie buffs, who stand around exuding smoke and hilarious baloney-cum-critiques of what they've just seen.

The sophomore (that's me) doesn't take advantage of the cigarettes or coffee,
and, being alone, lacks an audience for any baloney she might serve up. But, boy, does she soak up the atmosphere of the films. It doesn't get any more sophisticated than black and white cinema in French, Italian, German--and most high-falutin' of all--Swedish.

The great Swedish director Ingemar Bergman died today. And I'm here to say that I never really got a grasp on any film he made. Even the later masterpiece, Fanny and Alexander, which earned the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, left me somewhat mystified. Even the first film of his that I saw, that 1955 movie that had my classmates buzzing over their coffee cups, Smiles of a Summer Night, floated just over my head like a tantalizing balloon.

Doesn't matter, though. The bits and pieces I did understand, the scenes that did leave a lasting impression on my "inward eye," were more than enough to let me see a new vision of cinema, give me to understand that things would never be the same after this man had done his work. If nothing else, Bergman set me up for the countless ways Woody Allen would spoof and salute his acknowledged
hero. Smiles of a Summer Night would spawn Woody's own film, Midsummer
Night's Sex Comedy; Allen's Love and War is filled with parodies of a dozen Bergman films--well, that list goes on. But a dozen dozen directors did things differently because of Ingemar Bergman.

It doesn't matter if I understood only glimpses of what the Swedish genius tried to show us. Seeing his art drew me out of the sophomore playground and a bit further into the wider world. So rest in peace, Mr. Bergman, and thank you.

FOR THE BIRDS

We all know that three-year olds ask "WHY?" roughly as often as two-year olds say "NO!" My problem is that I never got over the Why's. And many of my "why's"are about as weighty as the three-year olds'.


For example, this week I 've been wondering why, in our vintage years, so many of us become enchanted with birds.


Take JD (retired Texas cowboy, age eighty-something). He shouldn't even be maneuvering without his walker, but last year he came perilously close to breaking his saddle-bones because he insisted on toting a 50-pound bag of birdseed out to the back yard over icy ground. The Bird Man of Ageless Acres, that's JD.


Nobody in my family ever tossed a crumb to birds, or knew a sparrow from a seagull. But now, as I thrash my way deeper and deeper through the tall grass of cronedom, I find myself spending long minutes staring out the kitchen window watching the birds at our feeder while my oat bran withers in the milk. I still can't tell a grackle from a cowbird (though I'm a whiz at spotting the cardinal couple). So my question is Why?

What's so fascinating about the birds?


I don't know. But last Tuesday, as I watched, four or five sparrows flittered down to peck at scattered sunflower seeds in the patio. It was the flittering that got to me. The way they drifted down from nearby trees, or from the rooftops where they hang out. Now, a variety of things sift down from the skies, at various times--the leaves of the great cottonwood that presides over the yard, each leaf on its own flight path, unhurried, floating. And snowflakes, of course, magical and forgiving, turning unsightly into spectacular in about twenty minutes. Sunlight sifts through the branches of the massive tree.


But the birds are best of all. Especially when they drift down, flittering. Sometimes, yes, they zoom in, hungry and intent. Or they dart, shooting down as though aimed.
But when they flitter, two, three, four at a time, gently, trustingly, as though they know they are welcome and wanted, and each so very alive, self-contained, they seem like a gift from the skies, separate small messages orbiting our anchored, earth-bound lives.

MATRIOTISM

(I first published this little piece years ago in a magazine called network. Later it appeared in a collection of my stuff titled Only When I Laugh (Signature Books). So it's hardly new. But, the state of things being what it is, I felt like putting it on the blog this month. So here it is. )

July is, of course, the stellar month for displaying the flag, setting the porch on fire with firecrackers, and otherwise celebrating our nation's birth. But during my childhood, February always headed the hit parade as the most patriotic month of the year. In school, we seemed to spend forever cutting out black paper silhouettes of Lincoln and smearing brown Crayolas over our wobbly drawings of log cabins; no sooner had the library paste dried than it was time for cherry trees, hatchets, and pictures of George Washington with his funny pony tail and grim smile. (Both birthdays were celebrated in those bygone, less hurried days. "Presidents Day" came later.) July couldn't touch February for patriotism, mainly because we weren't in school and thus didn't get so worked up with arts, crafts, and classroom pageantry.

All this nostalgia got me thinking about whether I am really patriotic. And that's when I decided we needed a new word; so I coined one.

Matriotic.

Think about it. "Patriotic," of course, comes from the Latin pater, meaning father; a patriot is one "who loves and loyally or zealously supports his own country," his fatherland. A perfectly good word for a perfectly good feeling.

"Matriotic," by analogy, comes from the Latin mater; a matriot is then one who loves and loyally or zealously supports her motherland, her own planet--Mother Earth.

The two words are not perfectly analogous, fortunately, otherwise people might see conflict of interest where there is none. Patriotism, as we use the word, is about the flag and the history of a nation; in our case, it's about the Bill of Rights, free elections, and the peaceful transfer of power, even after a national trauma like the assassination of John Kennedy or the Watergate scandal.

Matriotism, on the other hand, is yin to patriotism's yang. It's about the Earth, not the world. It's about what those fortunate few have seen from spaceship portals, not what we see on a map or a globe with regularly updated borderlines and political color-coding. Matriotism is about one sun by day and one moon by night, a moon that waxes and wanes and marks months and menses whether you live in Moscow, Idaho, or the other Moscow. It's about what human beings have felt since the dawn of time when we lay on our backs on the ground and looked up at floating clouds or winking, wondrous stars.

Patriotism has always had a lot of the zest of competition in it--rival teams, us and them, Britain's battles being won on the playing fields of Eton, and all that. My country, right or wrong. My country over other countries.

Matriotism, by contrast, recognizes that while there may be six- or seven-score fatherlands, there is only one motherland. Untold political divisions have risen, prospered, and utterly vanished, myriad civilizations and great cities that are no more--too many to count or name. But while we have her, there is only one Mother Earth. And every person alive knows her intimately.

Standing on a grassy meadow in England once, I was told that the same huge old trees I was seeing, the same pitted boulders, the same streambed, had been seen and touched by Normans, by Anglo-Saxons, by Romans, by Stone Age Brits. They had been patriots of many cultures, many states, but children of one earth.

So it's not either-or; it's not a matter of matriotism vs. patriotism. But perhaps it is a matter of bringing our matriotism a little more to the forefront. For instance, we could start with a holiday. A matriotic holiday, a worldwide day of celebration, gratitude, and rededication to the planet. We'd need a flag, of course. There is that Olympic flag with the colored rings, but frankly I can't get very stirred up about what looks like beer-mug rings on a table. But that would do for a starter, until we got something better. And we'd need a song--an anthem, really. Wouldn't it be something to have an international anthem (no, no, not the Internationale) that little kids all over the world would learn to sing, a hymn about the oceans and the mountains and the sands and the snows of Earth? We could certainly work up a pledge of allegiance: "I pledge allegiance to the soil, and to the air we breathe, to every species beneath the sun. . . ." Well, you get the idea.

We'd certainly need a Matriots' Hall of Fame someplace--maybe aboard a ship that would sail from country to country, celebrating the great matriots who toiled to defend Mother Earth, whether by saving the whales and the gorillas and the snail darters, or by engineering new strains of seed that would feed more people per acre, or by finding the keys to practical mass use of solar energy instead of fossil fuels.

Some people might not get too excited about being matriotic, seeing that it lacks that old competitive edge. On the other hand, remember what Pogo said: "We have met the enemy, and they is us." This fight to save Mother Earth could end up being the most glorious battle of all.

And besides: just think what first- and second-graders could do in the way of decorations!