Voice Lessons

by Cara Mentzel

  Dad had been living in the city since he and Mom divorced, so visiting meant I could spend time with both him and Dina and we might all be able to grab a movie together. Mom was no longer living in New York. During my sophomore year at CU, she left the Long Island town house behind for a fresh start near me, in Colorado.

  I enjoyed New York City in bite-size pieces—maybe five days at a time. After five days, the pace was too swift for me, and I typically found I was ready to return to Boulder. But Dina loved the city and knew how to maneuver in its chaos. She knew how much tip to give the take-out delivery guy. She knew the subway, and when to get annoyed because a cab driver was taking the wrong route in rush hour. She even knew how to fall asleep in the clamor of sirens, horns, and drunks down on the street. It was different from Boulder. When I was with her in the city I didn’t bother to look at street signs; I just tried to keep up.

  I stayed with Dina that weekend. She shared a three-bedroom apartment with her best friends, Debbie and Suzy. Five-inch-tall glossy white colonial moldings traced the perimeter of the worn parquet floor. The narrow strip of kitchen was mostly the receptacle for take-out remnants, and the window at the far end made it the perfect place to smoke a few rare Parliaments.

  The apartment was the launching pad from which each of them dug into life after college. They often met on the fly or talked on the phone. Their schedules had them bumping into each other on the way in or the way out, but there was a warmth to their friendship that bridged the skinny, short moments. It was a warmth that thrived in every dried-flower arrangement—Suzy had taken up the art—missing hand towel, and Indigo Girls DVD. They knew each other well—Dina’s auditions, their job interviews, dating troubles, sexual encounters—the walls were thin. They knew how to navigate each other’s flaws, they’d argue and make up, and had free reign in each other’s closets. I was jealous of their connection. It was a connection I didn’t have with anyone, not even Dina. Their closeness wasn’t just about the trust and understanding expected of good friends, but also about knowing the details that took them from Sunday to Sunday. I didn’t have Sunday to Sunday with Dina.

  I imagine Dina and I were like a lot of sisters. When we were younger we shared a laundry basket and chores. We couldn’t veer farther from each other than a closed bedroom door. But we were getting older. We no longer shared a home, and no longer saw each other every day. Yet our bond was indisputable. There was a tacit quality to our closeness, an abiding undercurrent of security, unaffected by physical distance or the frequency of our phone calls. I often consider all the possibilities, the ways the bond between sisters is developed. For Dina and me, perhaps it can be traced to the length of time we’d known each other? The familiarity of each other’s face, skin, smell, or voice? Our shared gene pool or shared past experiences? Or maybe, as the younger sister, I was (and continue to be) bound to Dina because I know no world without her in it.

  Still, I wanted to feel like a friend to Dina, not a perpetual little sister. I’d hoped the difference between our ages would feel more narrow the further we traveled into our futures. But even in our midtwenties, I didn’t feel like it had. Moreover, I felt more self-conscious with her than with anyone else. I tried not to be, but trying not to be self-conscious is like trying not to yawn. I was even anxious talking to Dina on the phone. If I knew she was going to call I’d construct a mental list of discussion topics, news I could share with her and questions I could ask her. If I was prepared, I could avoid awkward silences, or worse, I could avoid her ending the conversation before I did, something I dreaded because I’d feel personally rejected. I couldn’t justify feeling rejected, but I also couldn’t help it. I didn’t have enough time with Dina as an adult to find the ease and confidence I wanted to feel when I was with her, an ease and confidence that in college I was beginning to feel more often.

  I was sitting cross-legged on Dina’s couch when she approached me and dropped a few pages on my lap.

  “Can you read this for me?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I have a callback for this off-Broadway thing called Rent, but the sides—the pages of the script—are of this weird monologue and I don’t get it.”

  Dina had read a lot of scripts. When we talked she always seemed to be going on an audition, but nothing had panned out. I imagined she tried not to get too excited about auditions anymore, but I didn’t know for sure. If she was discouraged, she seemed too busy to feel it for very long.

  I sat with the script on my lap feeling hopeful. Dina was looking to me for an answer—maybe because I knew about postsynaptic potentials she thought I might also be able to explicate the poetic elements of her script? Suddenly, I wasn’t too young anymore, too inexperienced, or too annoying. I was a young woman, just like her, and nearly a college graduate. I took the script carefully into my hands like I was holding the beginning of our grown-up relationship. The one we would build on a level playing field.

  I looked at the first page and tried to focus on the print, but I couldn’t. I was preoccupied by my desire to impress her. I stared at that page, willing away the pressure to please. I noticed the title, “Over the Moon,” and read on.

  “Last night, I had a dream. I found myself in a desert called Cyberland.” At first, I was able to follow the script, though I wondered about the connection between deserts and Cyberland. Was it some kind of “wasteland” metaphor?

  “Out of the abyss, walked a cow, Elsie. I asked if she had anything to drink.”

  Weird, I thought.

  “She said, ‘I’m forbidden to produce milk. In Cyberland, we only drink Diet Coke.’” Definitely weird. I backed up and reread a little. A desert, Cyberland, a cow, Diet Coke. Shit. I read on, understanding the script like I understood Beowulf.

  “It’s like I’m being tied to the hood of a yellow rental truck, being packed in with fertilizer and fuel oil, pushed over a cliff by a suicidal Mickey Mouse!”

  Come on!

  I read the lines, tried to read between the lines, and eventually stared at the white space on the page and waited for an epiphany. After half an hour, the meaning of the short piece still eluded me.

  I pictured Dina and me on that couch in the ethers of an alternate universe where she hung on my every word as I postulated the piece’s themes and used multisyllabic words like “antiestablishment.” But that’s not how it happened.

  Instead, when Dina walked by I handed her the script.

  “That’s crazy, Dina,” I said to her, too afraid of sounding stupid to even guess at its meaning.

  “I know, right? Thanks for trying.”

  I was flattened.

  Dina continued to go about her business. She took care of mundane tasks like picking up in her room and chatting briefly with Suzy about what movie to rent from Blockbuster. I sat there on the cusp of Dina’s stardom feeling as inconsequential as a throw pillow.

  The following day, while I flew back to Colorado, Dina auditioned for Rent. She performed “Over the Moon.” She sang “When a Man Loves a Woman” and Bonnie Raitt’s “Something to Talk About” for Rent’s director, Michael Greif, and its creator-composer, Jonathan Larson. She scored the part of the raunchy lesbian performance artist, Maureen Johnson.

  Dina rehearsed for the show at the New York Theatre Workshop while, back in Boulder, I spent most of my time in the basement lab of the psychology building. I’d decided I wanted to graduate with honors, a recognition that required a minimum 3.5 grade-point average and the successful completion of an honors thesis. I was determined to put an exclamation point at the end of my undergraduate story.

  My Perception professor agreed to be my thesis adviser, and soon I was spending more time in that windowless psychology lab than in my apartment. I was particularly interested in unconscious perception. Unfortunately, as my research progressed, the fascination with which I began it was lost to the details of computer programming and statistics, and the fact that at the time, there was little consensus in the scientific communi
ty regarding the definition of unconscious. Which led to a thesis far more tedious than compelling as evidenced by its mouthful of a title, Perception Without Awareness and Signal Detection Theory.

  My visit to see the earliest off-Broadway Rent performances, including opening night, was supposed to be a welcome reprieve from school. But the visit was bittersweet—way more bitter than sweet. Mom, Dad, and I had planned to see the first preview together when Dina called to let us know that Jonathan Larson had been found dead in his apartment that morning. Jonathan had suffered an aortic aneurism that went undetected at two different emergency rooms earlier that week. He was thirty-five years old.

  I knew Dina and the cast and Jonathan were close. He wasn’t only breaking new ground in theater with his rock opera about young artists in New York City’s East Village living in the shadow of HIV, but in the process he had created a family, and my sister was a part of it.

  Rent was the fruition of months—years, for many—of devotion and work by Dina’s Rent family. By Dina’s account, the dress rehearsal the night before had been exhilarating and sent the cast home eager and buoyant. But in the short distance between dusk and dawn the Rent world changed. Jonathan, a visionary, was dead. His vision was in limbo. And somehow, in a cloud of grief, a decision had to be made about how to proceed.

  A modified version of the show was performed that night. The cast honored Jonathan by singing his score to a theater filled with his family and friends. The cast sat in chairs that lined a series of long tables set end-to-end across the stage. No special lighting or costumes, props, or staging. The first half of the performance went as planned, but by the end of Act I when the cast sang the riotous ensemble piece “La Vie Bohème,” the cast was out of their seats, dancing on the tables, performing the piece as staged. A performance that began somberly grew into a cathartic celebration of Jonathan and his work. In the end, an audience of mourners were on their feet cheering and crying, all at once energized and exhausted. But afterward, the grateful noise quieted and the full theater shared a sustained silence.

  I don’t know if I was there that night or at the following night’s preview. I’ve heard the story so many times that I can’t be certain if the memory is from the story I’ve been told or from my actual experience. What I do remember is that I watched Rent for the first time while intermittently holding back sobs so big I worried they’d burst from me and disrupt the show. And I remember one of Dina’s lines, a line Jonathan wrote for her to say to Angel, but that from then on she’d always say to Jonathan: “You always said you were so lucky that we were all friends. But it was us, Baby, who were the lucky ones.”

  Rent became a huge success and was moving to Broadway. Dina was in newspapers and magazines and even on television; 48 Hours aired a piece on Rent that featured her. The highlight of most weeks in Boulder was my visit to the Eads News and Smoke Shop. In the pre-Internet era, Eads carried nearly every newspaper and publication in the United States, and it was where I found Dina’s press—each photo, article, and review that mentioned her name or included her picture. I spent months cutting them out and passing them around with bragging rights. Her success energized me and I needed to be energized. I was overwhelmed with school. My thesis had put my self-esteem through the wringer and I was bored with my daily tussles with self-doubt. By the time I flew to New York for the Broadway opening of Rent, my mini-vacation had been well earned.

  I sat in the Nederlander Theatre on West Forty-first Street in New York City, between my mother and father, and my grandmother to his right. It was April 29, 1996. And I was over the moon.

  The Nederlander was a regal theater housing twelve hundred red velvet seats, and like most Broadway theater seats, they were made for asses that find airplane accommodations roomy. The theater’s interior was a glossy wood laminate with ornate gold-leaf accents and layers of elaborate moldings. There were three sets of box seats on either side of the broad stage and front and rear mezzanines that helped fill the space between the floor and towering ceilings. The theater underwent significant transformation to achieve the East Village grunge atmosphere where Rent was set, and even the theater’s marquee and external facade were altered.

  In front of me, the stage depicted a sparse apartment in the Lower East Side’s Alphabet City. The back wall was painted faux brick, and a fire escape hung just in front of it with stairs that led to the floor. Off to the right was scaffolding and above it hung a massive sculpture, a pile of urban clutter including bicycle parts, a sidewalk grate, rebar, and a steering wheel. As a finishing touch, colored string lights were haphazardly twisted around it. Later in the show, when the lights were turned on, the sculpture would look like a Christmas tree, or like an amusement park ride had collapsed in the night. Several silver-and-red metal folding chairs were scattered on the stage and a few were set around a rectangular table.

  That night the Nederlander was filled. Theatergoers moved through aisle thoroughfares and ushers handed out playbills. I thumbed through mine. I flipped past advertisements and tried to find a table of contents or Dina’s picture and description in the “Who’s Who in the Cast” section. Finally, I found “Maureen Johnson, Idina Menzel,” with a tiny version of her headshot and a short bio noting Rent as her “Broadway debut.” Dina had recently taken the “t” out of our last name to help with pronunciation. People had often said “MEN-sul,” like pencil, and she wanted her name to be pronounced “Men-zell,” like gazelle or mademoiselle. It occurred to me that Dina removed the better letter. That if ever I wanted to change my name slightly, I’d have to remove the “z” and be Cara … Mentel. Oy.

  The lights dimmed and brightened a few times. A voice through the speakers said, “Please take your seats.” The last few people squeezed past those of us already seated. I was sweaty and shaky, but not because I was nervous. I wasn’t worried that Dina would forget her lines or that her voice would crack on a high note; I’d never seen Dina screw up a performance. I knew she got nervous and was nervous backstage somewhere, but Dina was the kind of performer who knew how to harness adrenaline to strengthen her performance.

  It was anticipation that made me shaky. My dad turned to me wearing a stiffer smile than his usual one, probably because he was so happy, that his mouth had been locked in that position for an hour. My mom had her hand in mine the way we’d done just months earlier for the off-Broadway show, and the way we always did at Dina’s performances. In those last few seconds before the show began, it occurred to me that Mom, Dad, and I loved Dina so deeply that we held her dreams as if they were our own, maybe even tighter.

  Roger, played by Adam Pascal, walked out onstage and sat down. He began fiddling with his amp and guitar and the theater grew quiet.

  Casually the rest of the company, including Dina, joined Adam. The audience stood and cheered. When they took their seats again, Anthony Rapp, Rent’s Mark, said, “We dedicate this opening night and every performance to our friend Jonathan Larson,” and the audience stood again and cheered. I wasn’t sure how long the cheering would last, but no one was in a hurry. Soon enough, the show officially began. Within the first minute Mark was interrupted by the phone ringing, and he and Roger let it go to voice mail. It was Mark’s mother. They listened as she left a lengthy message that ended with, “We’re sorry to hear that Maureen dumped you, I say c’est la vie. So let her be a lesbian, there are other fishies in the sea.”

  It was hard to imagine I could be any more excited than I had been moments earlier, but the mention of Maureen sent a shiver through my body and Mom must have felt the same way because she squeezed my hand. I knew it would be nearly fifty minutes before Dina made her official entrance. I watched each of them, knowing that each brought me closer to her debut.

  When that fifty-minute mark neared, tension in the Nederlander started to build. Not just on the stage where plot lines came together, but in my stomach. If the seat hadn’t been so small, I would have been on the edge of it. I returned Mom’s squeeze from earlier.


  “Christmas bells are ringing…,” the ensemble sang. “Got any C Man. Got any D Man,” junkies asked as they followed their dealer around the stage. Angel and Collins haggled for a coat with a street vendor: “Fifteen. Sold!” “I should tell you, I should tell you,” Roger and Mimi sang from their earlier duet. The key characters were all making their way to Maureen’s performance and I knew somewhere behind it all my sister was taking a deep breath. “And it’s beginning to, and it’s beginning to, and it’s beginning to…”

  Pitch black.

  The sound of a revving motorcycle.

  A headlight.

  And then Dina.

  She stood alone, center stage. She pulled off her helmet, let the teeming locks of early nineties curly hair fall around her face, and with the melodramatic fervor characteristic of Maureen, she said, “Joanne, which way to the stage?”

  “Snow!” the ensemble sang their final beat.

  The stage was Dina’s.

  Brace yourselves, I wanted to say to the strangers in front of me who had never experienced an Idina Menzel performance. Instead of sitting next to Dina, watching a Broadway show like we had when we were young, or talking about starring on Broadway or wishing, hoping, working for it, Dina was there. Dina had arrived.