Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (15 page)

When the day came to speak to the pastor about my upcoming wedding, Mom and I walked into the church like it was our second home. The pastor, an old family friend, greeted us and made chitchat, asking about my brothers.

“Oh, you know . . . Rob is doing this and Kevin’s doing that,” Mom said, “and Debbie and John are moving from San Francisco to New York. . . .”

The pastor’s face paled. “Am I to assume”—he looked at my mother—“that Debbie and John are living together?”

“Yes, we are,” I piped up. What was all this now? I was standing right there, why didn’t he just ask
me
?

The pastor cleared his throat, and this time he did look at me.

“You are living in sin. You cannot be married in this church.”

“What are you talking about? Is that church policy? I mean, we’ve seen plenty of girls walk down the aisle very pregnant.”

“It’s not a policy of the church,” he said. “It’s just the way I feel.”

Mom, meanwhile, burst into tears while I stood there in shock. The pastor hadn’t asked me about my or John’s relationship with Christ or if we wanted to do premarital counseling, none of the more important questions that really counted. If he had been just a bit compassionate, I would have told him that John and I intended to spend the next few months before the wedding living apart. (It was due to my busy schedule, but still . . .) But he was cold and immovable. I remember how disapproving he was ten years earlier when Mom and Dad got divorced and there was a bit of scandal in the church about that. It was payback time, I guess.

The pastor’s shunning of my mother and me at that moment affected me so deeply, it took many, many years before I could embrace the idea of going back to church again.

His refusal to let us marry in our church wasn’t the only omen before the wedding. A few weeks earlier when I broke the news to Rob that John and I were getting married, his reaction was less than congratulatory.

“Yeah, I’ve heard,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Everybody is wondering why.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Well, John doesn’t work or do anything. And you’re so . . . heavy.”

I froze. I looked at my brother, astounded by the words I’d just heard come out of his mouth. Did he feel I was somehow unlovable or not worthy of getting married because of my size? I knew he just wanted me to be happy and hadn’t meant to hurt me. What he was really trying to say was: “You have a problem, and this man is maybe not the right man for you.”

Still, hearing his words hurt.

JOHN AND I
got married at another church in Orange County, where the pastor didn’t ask if we were cohabitating and/or fornicating. My dear voice teacher Jane was my matron of honor (and her band played at the reception!), and at age thirty I walked down the aisle wrapped in so much virginal-white embroidered fabric, I looked like a walking tablecloth. I can’t remember how much I weighed, but I remember the size of the dress: 24. Still, against all odds, we managed to pull off a romantic do, and I remember feeling happy and excited. Although it’s a wedding taboo and bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the ceremony, we took all our wedding party photos before the ceremony instead of after. So the wedding planner devised a plan so that we could still experience our own version of “the big reveal”—that first moment the groom sees the bride in her dress. Before the photo sessions and ceremony, she put John up by the altar and flung open the front church doors for me to fake-walk down to him swaddled in my hundred yards of taffeta, twenty yards of tulle on my head, and a garden of lilies in my hands. He looked devastatingly handsome in his tails and even though he’d seen me in dozens of glamorous gowns before, when I reached the altar he was beaming and said, “You look very beautiful.”

The wedding was a fairytale moment, and for a brief time I did feel beautiful. Until a woman I didn’t know approached me during the reception to applaud me on my political statement.

“Debbie, I want to tell you how proud I am of you! You look so beautiful.”

“Oh, thank you. It’s such an important day, ” I said with a smile, trying to remember who she was.

“I think it’s just wonderful the example you’re setting for heavy women,” my unknown wedding guest continued, “by having this wedding, and even wearing a wedding dress.”

Her words rang in my ears with the echo of my brother’s words
weeks before.
How brave of you to display yourself like this
, she was saying, between the lines. And, furthermore,
How brave of him to love you, even though you are a big, fat person. Lucky, lucky Debbie to have found a man to love her.

I did my best to brush her comments aside and joined my bridesmaids—which included Lynn’s daughters, Melinda and Marianne—who were motioning for me to pose with them by the three-tiered cake. They surrounded me in their poufy pink-and-white Jessica McClintock creations like a cloud of cotton candy. The barrier was not so thick, though, that we all couldn’t hear Grandma Gruthusen, my mother’s mom, whispering (or so she thought) off camera a few feet away in her wheelchair.

“Debbie always insisted she’d never get married!” she said, loudly, to my grandpa, sitting next to her in his own wheelchair.

“We can hear you, Grandma!” I called out to her, as we all burst into laughter—especially me. But her comment, and that of my anonymous guest, lingered in my mind well beyond the wedding night.

THE INTERNATIONAL TCHAIKOVSKY
Competition is one of the most prestigious classical music competitions in the world and taken very, very seriously by the Moscovites. It gained fame in the United States at the height of the Cold War when American pianist Van Cliburn won the very first quadrennial competition and came home to a ticker-tape parade in New York. It’s most famous for its piano division, but it also awards prizes to violinists, cellists, and singers.

A colleague of mine who’d entered the competition in the past and placed second with a silver medal gave me advice on the most important items to pack: cans of tuna and toilet paper. Food was scarce, and their toilet paper consisted of little waxed squares. “It’s a smearfest,” she warned me. I also went to the nearby dollar store and bought loads of nylons, Tic-Tacs, bubblegum, cigarettes, lipsticks, and condoms—everyday items that were impossible to get
over there—and made up little packages as gifts to give to housekeepers or people working at the competition.

Unfortunately, my luggage took a wrong turn and didn’t get to me for days. For once in my life, I’d decided to travel comfortably and had only sweatpants to wear. So that’s what I arrived in for the first day of competition—stretched out, navy-blue Gap sweats and a T-shirt that had been slept in and spilled on during the long flight. I couldn’t buy anything to wear because . . . there was nothing to buy. To make matters worse, what scant clothes or food that might have been available for purchase had been scooped up by the La Scala Ballet troupe, who’d been there weeks before and cleared out any bottled water, potato chips, chocolate bars, and T-shirts. I did my best to tart myself up with the curling iron in the bathroom—a tiny room with a shower in the center, out in the open without a screen or curtain, and two towels that had holes in them and were rough as sandpaper.

On the first day, we had to draw numbers to decide what order we’d compete. The competition took place at the Bolshoi Theatre and at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall; and it was broadcast live on TV all over the country from start to finish for the entire two weeks.

Picture me there, surrounded by beautiful girls in silk dresses and every hair in place, while I look like a lazy American couch potato.

“Deborah Voy-yeeeeeeeeeeeet!” someone calls. I go up on to the stage like a shlump, reach into the barrel, and pull out my number . . . 13.
Oh, hell. I should just go home right now
. . . .

A moment later, I hear the theater of over a thousand spectators burst into cheers and applause. “It is good luck here, the number thirteen,” a theater page next to me whispered. Well, that was the first bit of good news I’d had in days.

The competition was very thorough, in that the first day you offered them five opera arias and they pick one and you pick one,
and you sing those two—that’s normal competition procedure. Then there was a section where you had to do a forty-minute recital, which had to include songs by Tchaikovsky and another Russian composer (I chose Rachmaninoff) plus a folk or pop song from your own country. All I could think of was “Beautiful Dreamer” which I’d heard Bing Crosby and Roy Orbison sing when I was a kid, a song my mother dreamily sang at the piano when I’d sat next to her.

The next day at the hotel I’m primping in the bathroom with my curling iron (my luggage finally arrived!) and the black-and-white TV set is on in the other room, when all of a sudden I hear myself singing “Beautiful Dreamer.” I look at the TV and see the gauzy, slow-motion image of little girls running through a park with big bows in their hair, and couples lovingly looking at each other, and my voice in the background. Someone had turned my audition song into a music video! To this day I have no idea who—I assume it was the people involved with the competition. But there on the television was a bootleg recording of me paired with a video, or maybe it was some sort of commercial, I don’t know. It was hysterical!

By the second week in Moscow, John and my brother Rob—who had joined us in week two for the semifinals—suspected we were being watched. Our hotel stood kitty-corner from the theater, on the other side of a huge, busy, six-lane boulevard. To get across, we were sternly warned, we had to use the underground pedestrian walkway. One night John, Rob, and I left the theater at two a.m. and were feeling a bit loopy. It was a beautiful summer night and the boulevard was completely empty.

“Oh, fuck it! Let’s just run across the damn street!” Rob yelled. We started running and laughing . . . until we heard a booming
Russian voice from above—from loudspeakers—scolding us. “Oh my God, we’re going to get shot dead right here in the middle of Bolshaya Sadovaya Ulitsa Smirnoff . . . or whatever the hell it’s called,” I yelled to the guys. “Run!”

The next week was July Fourth, and as much as we loved standing in food lines and searching for borscht, we were aching to do something embarrassingly and thoroughly American. We hopped a cab over to Red Square and threw a Frisbee around for a few hours under the statue of Vladimir Lenin. Back at our hotel room (John’s and mine), the three of us sampled every vodka known to humankind—that was one thing that was easy to get in Moscow. And we got tipsy, and rowdy, and we started mouthing off about how bloody hot it was, and why is no place here air-conditioned, and why are these wool blankets in our hotel rooms so itchy and horrible.

The next day, when we returned to our rooms after being out all day, the heavy wool blankets were missing, replaced by lightweight summer ones. How odd, and what a coincidence, we thought. But we didn’t want to get all paranoid. Besides, we were hungover and couldn’t trust our perception skills. But the next night, we were sitting around in the room when Rob tried to turn on the radio on the desk. The knob wouldn’t budge. He picked up the radio to look behind it—the back part of the radio was hollow except for a cord coming out of it leading into a wall—no outlet, no jack, no nothing. John and Rob couldn’t figure it out, and went out to the balcony to get some air.

“Debbie, Debbie! Get over here!” I rushed out and looked. Across from us was a huge government building, and lining the balcony directly opposite our room were rows of guards with binoculars to their eyes, staring right at us. We kept the curtains closed for the rest of our stay there.

The civilians, though, could not have been more warm and welcoming and passionately devoted to their music and to this competition. At least a thousand of them would line up every morning to
buy a ticket to the competition that day, which would start at ten a.m. and often go till one a.m. They treated us like rock stars and brought flowers for the singers.

After more than two weeks of singing, I won the gold medal and first place in the female vocalist category—very rare for an American. I was the second American to have ever won it at that point.

To celebrate, we took my 5,000 rubles of prize money (which equaled somewhere between $140 and $480, depending on the day) and went out to eat at the best restaurant in Moscow. By this time, we were starving. We’d run out of tuna and Lipton Chicken Soup packages.

They didn’t speak any English at the restaurant, and we couldn’t understand the menu, so John attempted to draw a picture of what we wanted to eat with a pencil and paper. He was trying to draw a chicken and potatoes, but John’s no artist. His potato looked like it had a head growing out of it; and he had placed it under the ass of the stick-figure chicken so that it looked like some sort of mutant egg alien monster.

“
Da, da, da!
” the waiter said, nodding. That worried me; what the heck was he going to bring? Thank goodness he arrived at our table with two of everything on the menu, and we devoured it all. The day before we left, I gave the rest of the rubles to Katja, the very sturdy woman who had been my translator for the duration of the trip. There was nothing to buy, and I couldn’t exchange them for U.S. currency. The girl was in tears and hugged me; you’d have thought I’d given her a million dollars.

Back at home, I got the modern-day version of Van Cliburn’s ticker-tape parade—an interview spot on
Good Morning America
with Joan Lunden. The
L.A. Times
even called my mother for a quote: “I’m thrilled,” said Mom. “I’m so excited for her. This is the highlight of her career. I’m sure it will open many doors for her.”

The win was a very big deal because the Russians really don’t
want to give it to an American. After that, I was off to Fort Worth, Texas. I’d gotten a phone call at home from Van Cliburn himself as soon as I returned to New York; he wanted to hire me to come sing at his mother’s seventieth birthday party a few days later, which I did. I sang my one-hit-wonder, “Beautiful Dreamer,” now famous on late-night Russian television. After the party, he invited me to his home for a private soirée and showed me his souvenirs from his many travels. Every table top, every wall, in every room was adorned with memorabilia.