Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (29 page)

I also concentrated even more on my acting. I was surprised to discover that one of the biggest challenges to playing this role was acting the part when I had nothing to sing. I remember reading an interview with Meryl Streep in which she was asked what the most important quality a good actor needed to have, and she said that “acting is listening” to the other characters. As Brünnhilde, I had a lot of listening to do. The foundation of the opera’s story is the complex relationship between Brünnhilde and her father, Wotan, which I studied carefully. When we first meet her, she’s a young woman who is teenager-like, both vulnerable and willful. Her wrathful father, Wotan, who is the Chief of the Gods, passes harsh judgment on her for disobeying him by siding with her nephew in a battle. He strips her of her Valkyrie status and banishes her to an eternal magic sleep on the mountain, where she is prey to any man who happens by. (Hmmm. It all felt so familiar to me, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it . . .) For much of the opera, Brünnhilde must endure and listen to all of her father’s angry monologues, and it takes a lot of energy to absorb and react to all of that.

With all its physical and emotional challenges, the part is also a daunting one to play because it is such an iconic Wagnerian role, any soprano who sings it is automatically compared to the great performers who came before her, like Birgit Nilsson and Hildegard Behrens. Even Bugs Bunny played “Bwunhilde” and donned the
helmet! And in that same “What’s Opera, Doc?” cartoon, Elmer Fudd hums the leitmotif to the Act III “Ride of the Valkyries” tune when he sings his famous “Kill the Wabbit” aria. Now that’s a hard act to follow, folks.

Jason popped into my dressing room all through rehearsals to give me encouragement and kisses and was my date for opening night of the season at the Met in the spring of 2011. We were so crazy about each other that during the entire performance that night (it was the first of the Ring operas,
Das Rheingold
, the only one of the four in which my character does not appear) he kept rubbing his leg against mine in our seats in the audience. At the dinner party afterward, while I was seated next to director Lepage and having an in-depth conversation with him, I felt a foot crawling up my leg—Jason, from across the table, trying to distract me. We exchanged knowing smiles. I was so, so happy. I was in love, I had beat drinking, and I felt healthier than I had in my entire adult life—physically, emotionally, and mentally.

My family arrived for the premiere of
Die Walküre
a few weeks later and were amazed to see the gargantuan banners with my face, a hundred feet high and just as wide, hanging majestically from the rooftop of Lincoln Center. My mother and my brothers stood outside the Met and looked up at my face and their jaws dropped. I think they were proud of me. They didn’t say it in words, but I think they finally “got” how big a deal it was, and how famous and successful their sister and daughter had become.

Even I was impressed. One afternoon I hopped into a cab after rehearsal, and as I looked up at the banner and gasped, I did something totally out of character for myself.

“Hey,” I said to the cabdriver, tapping on the plastic partition to get his attention and pointing. “You see that face up there on that building? That woman with the long, red hair? That’s me!”

“Nah, get outta here! That’s you? Nahhh!”

I smiled. “Uh-huh.”

“Wow. That’s sumthin’ else. That’s really sumthin’ else. Good for you, lady.”

OF COURSE, ANY
bravado this diva might have been feeling was completely demolished on opening night, when I made my entrance onto
Her.
All I had to do was step from the apron of the stage onto the high-tech, mechanical, She-machine and walk up her. I was excited—it was my big moment, my first Brünnhilde! But I guess She decided the Met stage wasn’t big enough for the two of us, that one of us divas had to go, and the bitch took me down.

I stepped on my dress and slid—down, down, down—along the steeply inclined planks, landing with a thud downstage. I could almost hear Her yell out Brünnhilde’s “Ho jo to ho” cry.

The
New York Times
:

If you’d had a tape recorder inside my head at that moment, what you would have heard on playback was a rather more X-rated
fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
At least by now I’d learned my lesson and didn’t say it out loud.

The
New York Times
:

Playing such an intense role and hearing Jason talk about his relationship with his own daughter made me think a lot about my own sometimes tumultuous journey with my dad over the years. We’d both done some growing up and maturing since the days when he was my food and date marshal. We’d reached a better, stronger, place finally and I knew he loved me and I loved him, even though we didn’t say those exact words to each other and didn’t always know the best way to show it. I thought of my father when I was onstage and related to Brünnhilde’s struggles with Wotan. Every night at the end of each performance, I’d be drained. I wondered if the night Dad and Lynn sat in the audience he, too, might be moved by the story and the relationship between Wotan and Brünnhilde. A few weeks after he and Lynn saw the show, I received a letter in the mail from him.

I was shocked and I immediately phoned up my mother to confirm this new bit of family history Dad had revealed. “I don’t know what your father is talking about,” she told me. “We didn’t get pregnant on purpose. Why would he say such a thing?”

Of course, no parent wants their kid to think that she was a mistake or was unwanted, and perhaps he was trying to ease my pain in that area. Maybe he connected my suicide threat three years earlier to me not feeling sufficiently loved. If so, I had to give him credit for thinking about it and writing to me about it; trying to unravel the past was a big step for him, for both of us. Except for that brief moment in San Francisco when my father sort of apologized for contributing to my weight problem, we’d never talked about anything personal from our past—not the moment at the piano or the spankings and soap in the mouth or the food regulating or his breakup with Mom. With this letter, whether he was right or wrong in his facts, it was at least an attempt to reach out and help me, and I appreciated that.

In therapy, I had begun to see that choosing unavailable men in my life could be linked to growing up with a distant and strict father. Mitch was unavailable emotionally, the married Dane was unavailable technically, and Peter was unavailable sexually. Not to mention the strangers I dangerously picked up on the Internet. My therapist pointed out that those one-night stands were a way for me to get temporary fixes of the intimacy, attention, and love I craved, but with men who couldn’t possibly sustain it. They were more extreme
examples of what I was doing in my relationships—falling in love with men who were unable to give true intimacy and commitment. And then, when I tried to force them closer to me, they’d only distance themselves further.

With Jason, for the first time in my life, I felt I had found a man whom I connected with and could be close to.

AND RIGHT ON
cue, Jason pulled away.

The same month my father sent me the letter, I invited Jason to join me at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York, where I was singing
Annie Get Your Gun
. I rented a beautiful house in a wooded area and transformed it into a romantic getaway, filling it with beautiful flowers and all the foods and games Jason loved. We had a sweet, sexy, and easy time together doing jigsaw puzzles and swinging in the backyard loveseat and dipping our feet in the pond and laughing. After we got back to Manhattan, I reminded him he was my date for the openings of the New York Philharmonic (where I’d be singing arias from
Tannhäuser
and
Salome
live on TV, with Alec Baldwin hosting the event) and the Met—both of them black-tie galas and only a few weeks away.

He shuffled his feet. Keeping the dates will be difficult, he admitted, because he was seeing his ex-girlfriend again. He wasn’t breaking up with me, to be clear. He cared for me (like my father, Jason had difficulty saying the L-word). But he couldn’t bring himself to give up the chorus woman, either.

“And does your ‘girlfriend’ know of this new arrangement?” I asked.

He shook his head.

I went home and cried and analyzed the situation. It was easy to do intellectually: he told me that he could not and would not be available to me in the way I wanted him to be. This was my cue, I had learned in therapy, to break my unhealthy pattern and stop
seeing him. It was the only logical step a rational woman with a shred of self-esteem would take. Problem was, I wasn’t so logical, rational, or self-esteemed. So instead of breaking up with Jason, I spent the next seven months on one end of a tug-of-war, pulling at him, while the girlfriend pulled from the other end. I suppose my pride was hurt, never mind my heart. But I didn’t want to stop seeing him. So I endured months of broken and forgotten dates and vague texts, dotted with days of focused attention and intense intimacy that I gorged on like a feeding frenzy.

I once read about a psychological study in which a bunch of mice had to tap on a lever with their nose to get a dose of sugar water. Some were given the sugar every time they tapped; others were given the sugar only some of the time, and they never knew when they were going to get it. The second group went a little crazy, hitting the lever day and night, never certain if they’d get their sugar fix or if it was gone forever. “Inoperant conditioning,” I think it was called. I felt like one of those mice, furiously hitting the lever. Something had to give.

Jason usually walked me to the side of the stage before I went on to give me a kiss on the lips for luck, then he’d slip back to the dressing rooms. It was always dark in the wings, and we figured no one would see us. But on this one occasion, when he kissed me and disappeared, a fellow chorus member stepped out from the shadows. She was a friend of Jason’s other girlfriend, who was now his official out-in-the-open girlfriend.

“Wow. What was that kiss all about?”

I suppose I could have told her it was nothing, or that in the dark she must be mistaken about what she saw. Instead, I smiled mischievously.

“Well, what did it
look
like?”

The news got back to the girlfriend three days later, on Valentine’s Day 2012, to be exact. I didn’t hear a word from Jason. Several weeks later, I was standing backstage, chatting with the very
famous Russian baritone, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, when the chorus exited from the stage after a rehearsal. Jason walked by and I said hello brightly. He kept walking . . . right over to the girlfriend, who was waiting at the other end of the hall.

“Well, that was rude,” Dmitri said, watching Jason go by. “What’s the matter with him?”

Onstage that night I lost myself in the character of Brünnhilde. In the scene, the shieldmaiden’s world has just fallen to pieces. She’s been stripped of her Valkyrie status and punished and banished by her father.

They tell us in AA that relapses don’t happen in the moment you take a drink; the emotional relapse begins months earlier. The heart goes first and then the hand follows. About two months later, my hand followed my heartbreak, and I dialed a liquor store on my block.

My thirst was unquenchable.

ANOTHER YEAR LATER
, another Valentine’s Day.

For two weeks in Liège, Belgium, the sky had been a somber gray, just like my mood, and today I waited for Jason to send me a Valentine’s Day text.

It had not been a good year. Since I “went out” and “picked up,” as we call it in AA, taking that first drink ten months earlier, I hadn’t been able to fully stop. My on-and-off drinking mirrored my on-and-off romance with Jason. He had temporarily banished his Brünnhilde after my pre–Valentine’s Day transgression a year earlier, but we started back up again soon after in the same pseudorelationship we were in before. And here it was, Valentine’s Day 2013.

I checked my iPhone for the twentieth time to see if he’d sent me a few words. He hadn’t yet, so I typed:

No answer. He must be with her and she’s watching his every move.