by Martin Moran
“Who was that?” I asked Barb, one of the girls I’d seen speaking with her.
“Winnie. She’s an opera singer—Brico Symphony.”
“She’s a little eccentric.”
Barb shrugged. “Yeah, she is.”
“She said I should study voice with her.”
“Well, that’s cool. She’s got all the best students.”
“Really?” I felt flattered but, knowing that ultimately this whole theater thing was a lark and knowing that, if I lived, I was planning to be a lawyer, I forgot all about her.
Several months later, on the closing night of Oliver! she was standing at the cafeteria exit as I left to go to the cast party. She had on a different gown, just as bright, just as glamorous.
“Hello again,” she said.
“Hi, Mrs. Magoun.”
“Call me Winnie. I have something to tell you.” She laughed. “First of all, you were wonderful tonight. And second of all, I don’t care about schedule conflicts or money or any of that. I am supposed to be your teacher. You call me. I’m in the book.”
We shook on it, my one hand enfolded by both of hers, and she bid me goodnight.
I stood in the mist of her exotic perfume, wondering what in the world she meant by supposed to be.
I was instructed to enter her front door without ringing, take a seat on the blue couch in the living room, and wait to be summoned. I arrived a bit early and did as I was told. Among the books on her shelves, wherever there was a bit of space, little plaster and porcelain figurines of elves and knickered gnomes balanced on teeny tree trunks and dangled from bells. There were little white fairies and winged angels. I sat eyeing the knickknacks thinking, Oh dear.
The loud vibrato of a tenor wafted through the room. His voice emanated from somewhere deep in the house. I recognized the word Amore floating on a series of very high notes. Italian . . . love. I listened as love competed with the drone of a lawnmower somewhere down the block. I kept thinking of getting up and leaving. I felt vaguely embarrassed to be there, to be taking her, and singing, seriously. Soon, the cheery, chunky tenor walked through the living room and gave a wave as he moved briskly out the front door. I heard her call my name. I nodded at all the little tchotchkes, stepped around the corner past a hallway and into a large den.
Her flaming red hair—beauty-parlored to perfection—and laser-blue eyes beamed at me from behind the keys of a black baby grand. “Welcome to the studio,” she said. I glanced around at the walls. There were several photos of students, I figured, past and present, smiling in eight by ten or costumed and singing in various theatrical productions. There was a large mirror positioned behind the piano so you could watch yourself sing. Next to it was a chart of vowels and a colorful poster on the physiology of the throat.
“Come on in, stand there.”
She pointed to a music stand. A box of Kleenex sat on the end of the piano next to some vocal books—Vaccai, Marchesi. There was a stack of sheet music weighted with a rock on which was etched: On some other plane it already happened, and it was perfect. She took a sip of coffee, her pink lipstick marking the rim of the cup. She set the cup back down somewhere near the base keys. “That will be your bible,” she said, pointing to the book on the music stand: Twenty-four Italian Songs and Arias. “We’ll start with ‘Oh Love of My Heart,’ page 35. Do you read music?”
“No.”
“No matter. Put your hand on your breast.”
“OK.”
“Everything starts with the breath. Everything. Do you feel your heart?”
“Yes.”
“Rhythm, meter, is born with the beat of our hearts. Inhale through the nose, out through the mouth. Another.” She smiled. Her eyes looked as though they might burst blue all over the room. “Good to breathe, yes? Good to just stand and be, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Everything is vibration, dear. Light, sound. Your chords vibrate and the waves of energy coming from you affect, rearrange, the energy of the universe. That’s what I saw you doing in that theater—changing the energy. You have such full-being. Such joy.”
I dropped my head and laughed.
“You think I’m jesting?”
“Well . . . I’m not . . . I don’t know.”
“Well, I do. Sing an ‘Ah’ for me on this arpeggio.”
I sang up and down the scale, making as big a sound as I could.
“Now, easy jaw. Give me an E on each note of this chord.” Her fingers moved across the keys, her eyes fixed upon my face. “Relax your forehead, darling. Good. Again.” She stopped playing. “You have a beautiful sound, you know. And the world is in need of beauty.” She leaned back, her swivel chair squeaking loudly. She fiddled with the top button of her fluffy white blouse. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
This delighted her to no end. We both laughed.
The half hour passed quickly. She stood and crossed around the piano. Her sensible black shoes and polyester pants suddenly made me see her as the housewife, the mother of four sons, that she was. She put out her hand. “Come again next Thursday at four o’clock. Does that work for you?” I nodded, taking in the scent of her.
I stepped out with my vocal book, with my instructions to learn “Caro Mio Ben.” She’d given me a cassette on which she’d recorded the Italian pronunciation and the melody. A young woman was sitting on the couch near the knickknacks, waiting her turn. I drove off thinking how unfortunate that this woman Winnie didn’t live in the real world, how I’d return next week and thank her and explain that this just wasn’t for me. I turned onto Colorado Boulevard aware, suddenly, that the lovely smell of her was preserved in the folds of my shirt. I drove north, humming the whole way home.
The following week I arrived and sat on the blue couch. This time there was a soprano in there and it wasn’t Italian but French. Something about a white moon, about tranquillity. Glancing up at all the little elves and fairies, I prepared to tell her how I just didn’t have the time for these lessons.
The soprano departed, I entered, and when I saw Winnie sitting behind the piano grinning at me, what I’d planned to say vanished. I was aware of a swell in my chest, wondering if it might be related to the word she so often repeated—joy.
“You’ve been raised Catholic, haven’t you?” she asked after we’d sung a few scales.
“Yes.”
“Me, too.” She got up from the piano and took a huge paperback book off one of the shelves. “We Catholics—lapsed or not—are steeped in the mystical. Don’t you think? We’re primed.”
“Primed for what?”
She sat back down and studied the big green book in her hand as if deciding which chapter she meant to look at. Then she stood and held the book across the piano. “Here,” she said, “I got this for you. Keep it. Read it. I have a feeling you’ll find it fascinating.”
The Nature of Personal Reality, it said. A Seth Book.
“Who’s Seth?” I asked.
Winnie laughed. “Oh, darling . . . well, I’ll just tell you. Seth’s an entity from beyond this physical plane. A wonderful woman named Jane Roberts channels him.”
“Channels?”
“Yes.” She was smiling at me. “I wish you could see the look on your face. Listen, I’m not sure why I’m giving this to you. It’s just that I’m supposed to.”
“Supposed to?”
“I can’t really explain it. An intuition, an instinct. In any case, it’s good to read new things, isn’t it? Get another perspective.”
I nodded, flipping through the big book. “Thanks.”
“You read some and let me know what you think. Like most things, some of it may speak to you and some not. We’ll talk about it.”
“Does it have to do with singing?”
“Yes . . . in that it has to do with everything . . . with how you perceive this life. Your life. You are a very old soul, you know.”
“Seventeen.”
“I’m talk
ing about other dimensions. Your body may cease to be, Marty, but you will not. You’ve had and will have many lives.”
“Are you talking about reincarnation?”
“Yes.” She sat back down and took a sip of coffee. I felt a certain thrill and fear at discussing what struck me as vaguely blasphemous, crazy. In my head I saw cows in a field in India. I saw dark-skinned Hindus with turbans. I saw a wacky suburban voice teacher. But, at the same moment, I realized everything she was saying struck a chord in me. Every word—and the way she spoke them—seemed to loosen a knot within, to land in my gut with the comfort of truth. “Read a sentence or two,” she said.
I glanced through the first few pages.
The great creativity of consciousness is your heritage . . . each living being possesses it. . . . What exists physically exists first in thought. . . . The spirit becomes flesh . . . each individual’s soul, then, is intimately connected with what we will call the world’s soul, or the soul of the earth.
I looked up.
“Food for thought,” she said. “Look, put it aside for now. Just check it out if and when you want. How’s ‘Caro Mio Ben’ coming?”
We worked on the song awhile and then, just before our time was up, she stood and said, “Marty, there’s no place within you that isn’t creative. You are a part of all that is. You can accomplish whatever you set your mind to.” She came around the piano and embraced me. I let my head rest against her shoulder. “You know,” she said, “all I’m doing is reminding you of things you already know.”
So it went for months. Music and metaphysics. My lessons grew from a half hour to an hour. “We need more time,” she’d said, “to talk.” Walking into her studio, sometimes, I felt as though I was stepping through some invisible door into an alternate, neighboring reality. A wild new terrain with a redheaded guide. A guide who suggested: Look at it another way. Listen to your intuition. It’s guided you beautifully so far, hasn’t it?
We’d be in the midst of working on a song, me belting . . . Maria, Maria, say it loud and there’s music playing . . . she’d lift her fingers from the keys and start speaking, our eyes locked, her crows’-feet radiating from bright pools of blue. “We are completely free of space and time, Marty . . . breathe. Breathe. You’re holding onto those notes as if for dear life. Notes are not for holding. They are to be lived and let go of. A note lives even as it dies . . . like us.”
Much of what she spoke of baffled me. I disagreed; I didn’t know what to think. But our conversations stimulated and comforted me in a profound way. Her presence, her ideas, the music, brought to me miraculous moments of serenity. I experienced a palpable sense that my body was a vehicle of spirit (as Brother Tom had once suggested), a porous collection of molecules, not a limited sentence of doom, a weighty problem. Sometimes, in the midst of our discussions, it was as if the room cracked open and I saw everything (including my own being) in some eternal, larger way. I couldn’t have put it into words but it was the rush, the delight of perceiving separateness as an illusion. A shimmering sensation of all being one. (A few years later, when I dropped acid on a glorious evening in California and the world revealed itself as one continuous tapestry of love, I thought of Winnie and her lessons.) Our talks made me feel—if even for a moment—that my fate wasn’t sealed by the trouble I’d been in. That despite who I was (perhaps even because of it!) I had a real chance at being good.
Often, I’d leave her house as if on a cloud, flying from our discussions about dimensionality or past lives. And very often, the farther I got from her home, from her lessons, the volume of other voices would grow and crowd in to tell me that she was nuts and that these ideas were nothing more than a cheap way to escape the hard truth of living on a troubled planet.
I did share with her, at times, how much I struggled with depression. I wasn’t specific, I didn’t know how to speak of the fear that I harbored regarding my sexuality, what I saw as the darkness of my desires, of “what I’d done.” That locked in me was a belief that I was an aberration. That I wrestled with the desire to kill myself. I remember asking her,
“What if who I am . . . authentically, is bad? Wrong?”
“Not possible.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“But you don’t really know me.”
“I know that you have love. That you honor life. Of course you struggle. I see that. We all do. I’m terribly sad at times. There’s a hell of a lot of pain to be experienced on this dimension. But, I remind you, there’s infinite joy too. And there is much you are meant to do, to give, in this life. And I know that you are preparing for it, for what you are to give. That’s why we’re here, after all—to serve. To serve others. What I am doing for you, you will, in some way, do for someone else, for others, one day.” She spoke so matter-of-factly. I looked at her, at her flaming red hair and bright eyes, and dared to believe her. “Our brains are not capable of grasping all the dimensions we are working on, living on, at once,” she said. “It’s our intuition that guides us.”
“Faith?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes . . . a knowing.”
I think hers was the most vivid faith I had ever encountered. Strong, like Aunt Marion’s, full of joy like Sister Christine’s, but connected to a secular world, a singing world. She offered a glimpse of God, a vision of light, in daily doings, in art. A light that I sensed could outshine the dark, that could begin to mute the shaming voices of a Catholic upbringing.
Winnie attended all her students’ performances. She had a little purse into which she’d snap away the evening’s program. She’d bring them home and put them on the piano so that her students could witness the achievements of their colleagues. She took all that we offered, onstage and off, very seriously.
As my senior year was nearing an end, I received news that I’d been accepted to Stanford University. I told Winnie of my plans to head for Palo Alto.
“What will you study there?”
“Pre-law, I think. I plan to be a lawyer. Like my grandfather.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll do well in whatever you choose. But someone should tell you, darling, there’s no doubt that, if you want, you could enjoy a career in the theater. It can be a wonderful life, you know.”
“But that’s not a real life. A real living. It’s crazy.”
“Not crazy, it’s important work. It’s a way to channel the divine, Marty. Music, theater, can be a passport to the infinite. Healing for you and for others. It’s a way to reach people.”
“It’s so competitive, though. It would be impossible.”
“Most of the great, challenging things in life seem unattainable. But if you set your mind to it. . . .” She stopped herself and picked up a volume of arias, set it on the piano. “Whatever you choose, your life will be beautiful. I just know it. All I’m saying is that, if you want, I believe you could be a professional.”
Professional.
The word moved through me as something sacred. It rang in my head like a distant, impossible dream.
4
IT’S 1982 AND I’m living in a big loft with three friends. The corner of Broome and West Broadway, SoHo, New York City. Raw space, raw talent, four crazy kids, cheap rent. There’s Kim—actor/puppeteer. Amy—actress/chanteuse. And my old friend from high school days, Jodi, who’s attending film school. We call each other “Broommates,” and all of us are pounding the pavement, waiting tables, serving drinks, singing show tunes, whatever it takes to make ends meet. On the sixth floor lives a cranky young woman who (though none of us know it yet) will soon be introduced to America as the “Material Girl” and whisked away in a limo by Sean Penn. On the first floor is a store featuring a fat man who guards shelves of live chickens and rabbits. He butchers them there, or you can take them home and do it yourself. We figure that that’s what the many Italian families in this Italian neighborhood must do. He sits next to our stoop in a folding chair. When friends come over, they scream toward our third-fl
oor window and we throw down a stuffed sock with the key attached. Chicken feathers scatter everywhere. We four are consumed with the push, the drive, to unlock the secret, discover the combination, that will bring success. I buy Backstage, the actor’s rag, and go to any audition I can find—up back stairwells, into the basement of churches, to sing an uptune or deliver a dramatic monologue that might land me a job. I wait tables, sell typewriter ribbons over the phone, sew buttons on the eyes of Woody the Woodpecker for the Macy’s Parade, model naked for an art class, hand out fliers in Times Square for an aerobics studio, wait tables. And more tables. Ballet becomes my religion. Ten dollars a class with Maggie Black, a small and mighty New Englander. The finest dance teacher ever in the whole world. She strengthens my spine, lengthens my muscles. “Wide back, long neck, Marty. Straighten your standing leg. Good!” She talks about line and simplicity as Plato discussed the Forms of the Good and the True. Her discipline and grace remind me of the nuns back at school. She’s as rigorous and positive as the electrified city that surrounds us. The ninety minutes of her crackling voice over the live piano, the physical repetition, the routine, is a godsend. Her daily class pulls me through the ache of being unemployed, misemployed . . . nowhere. The daily angst of doubt and fear. Doubt that I’ve got what it takes, fear that I’ve made all the wrong decisions.
In the space of three years, I’d matriculated at Stanford, come out as gay, quit Stanford, entered an acting conservatory in San Francisco, and moved to Manhattan. Now, instead of taking classes in public policy and economics, I was scraping together rent and cash enough to study pirouettes and pliés. To learn to belt high notes and croon Broadway ballads. Instead of studying Tocqueville, I was memorizing Cole Porter. Eating pizza for dinner, bran muffins for lunch. It occurred to me regularly that I might be insane. But I was also replete with the resolve to give this artist’s life a go, to see if I could make it. And even in the darkest moments, I knew there was no going back. At least, not to Stanford.