Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (6 page)

At that time, I had a classic, hearty, country girl’s steak-and-potatoes appetite and I liked my cookies. But I still wasn’t too much of an overeater, nothing beyond the sort of teenaged girl’s frenzied, emotional, hormonal overindulging that I had done with Sue and with Mom. It was the kind of eating that, given a few more years of maturing, I probably would have gotten a handle on. But if you tell me repeatedly that I’ve got a weight problem and to stop eating, well, dammit, I’m going to eat everything in sight.

“Debbie, get your hand out of that cookie jar!” I’d hear from somewhere in the house every time I lifted the jar’s heavy ceramic lid. So I’d sneak back later, when no one was in earshot, to grab twice as many. It was a power struggle, I suppose. (Later on, this dynamic would play out with my parents and me around the men I was dating: “Debbie, we don’t want you to be with that man.” It only made me want to be with him more, of course.)

My former binge buddy, Mom, became my new diet buddy as I joined her on various weight-loss diets. We had a little Weight Watchers scale that we used to weigh our three ounces of skinless
chicken breast as we forced ourselves to drink eight glasses of water per day. When we got home after going out shopping together, we both had to pee so badly it was a race out of the car to see who could get into the house and to the closest bathroom first. The loser sometimes ended up peeing in her pants.

Sweets became a precious, rare, and sought-after commodity in our household—even more than before. So much so, that Dad began to hide his own goodies. One day as I was setting the dinner table, I opened up a hutch drawer and found a dozen packages of my beloved Hostess Suzy Q’s—chocolate cake squares with cream slathered in the middle—lined up like diamonds in a jewelry display.

“
Mom!
” I yelled out to her, “
what are these doing here?
”

“They’re your father’s,” she said, standing in the doorway, hands on her hips. “Don’t touch them.”

Was she kidding? I was desperate and hungry, but not crazy. I was now, thankfully, past the spankings and soap-in-mouth punishments. They had ended once I started junior high school; but, in any case, I wouldn’t have eaten my father’s stash. I had too much respect for another person’s personal binge needs.

I TRIED NOT
to focus too much on my relationship with food, which was growing more complicated, and instead threw my energies into my new life purpose. That, to me, was clear and all mine.

You are here to sing
.

I JOINED THE
choir at El Dorado High School, where my vocal teacher, Mr. Fichtner, would soon become another key player to help me get onto my music path. He put me in his madrigal group, a dozen handpicked singers from the choir who sang Renaissance and Baroque music a capella. Outside of school, I threw myself into performing with a new fervor. I sang solos in the church choir and
helped run the music program there; I performed in local shopping malls and entered competitions; any opportunity I saw to get out in front of people and perform, I took.

To this day, my parents still talk about the time I decided to play all of Beethoven’s melancholic Moonlight Sonata at an evening church service during the offertory. It was always a small crowd at night, so the offertory passing was finished within a minute or two. Beethoven, not so much. When I glanced up halfway through the sonata, I could see the ushers standing in the back, politely but impatiently tapping their feet, and the pastor trying subtly to gesture to me from the pulpit, with an expression that said:
We’re going to go into overtime because of this, kid. Wrap it up, wrap it up!

With my love of drama, I signed up for a theater class and auditioned for the musical
L’il Abner
, winning a part as one of the Dogpatch girls. My skimpy costume consisted of Daisy Duke cutoff short-shorts and a checkered midriff-revealing blouse that tied above the waist. For this body-conscious, suburban, midwestern Southern Baptist girl, it was a racy outfit. But I discovered something freeing on that high school stage the first night I sang and hoofed my way across, pretending to be someone else. If I was playing a part, I could do, say, and wear anything, and it was allowed. There were no rules when you were acting,
because it wasn’t you.

My parents attended opening night, and I’m sure they were shocked when they saw me onstage in my sexy outfit, but they didn’t say anything about it. I think by now they had decided that acting in a school play wasn’t going to send anyone to hell. Grandma Voigt didn’t say anything about my outfit either, bless her soul. But from onstage, I could imagine what she was thinking:
Cover those things up!

The following year, I played the plum role of secretary Agnes Gooch in
Mame
and found I had a flair for comedy. At the school’s
thespian banquet I won several awards, including the Best Supporting Actress award for my Gooch turn, and returned home that night buoyant with an armful of certificates and trophies. One by one, I took them into my parents’ room and showed them—“You were wonderful in that part, honey,” Mom said; and they were both genuinely happy for me. I was trying to be proud, but not prideful, and I wanted them to take my singing seriously.

It worked. Soon after, my parents asked around about voice teachers and heard about Seth Riggs. He was the preeminent voice teacher in Los Angeles, with a specialty in pop music, and he’d worked with vocalists like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and Barbra Streisand. My parents, to their great credit, may not have understood exactly what I was doing, or where my talents might lead me, but once they saw how hard I was working—and that I did, indeed, have talent—they were supportive of my goal financially and in other ways. They drove me for the audition with Mr. Riggs, who wanted to take me on; but the hourlong commute seemed too much.

That’s when my music teacher, Mr. Fichtner, suggested his wife, Pat, as a singing coach. She was a former opera singer and taught classical vocal technique. It was “an operatic approach,” he explained—not like the pop music I was fond of, but it would be good for me.

Opera?
Never heard it. Wasn’t that old people’s music? But Mrs. Fichtner taught within walking distance of my high school and charged only a quarter of Seth’s fee, so I signed up.

During our first warm-up, I discovered my vocal range was two and a half octaves, which was quite good. (Mariah Carey claims to have three or three and a half). Mrs. Fichtner started me off with the beginner’s “bible” of classic Italian art songs,
Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries for Medium High Voice.

Soon enough I saw my first opera, with Grandma Voigt as my date. She knew I’d been studying classical music—“Much more dignified than Broadway show tunes,” she said—and thought it was high time we heard some. At the San Diego Opera we saw Prokofiev’s
The Love of Three Oranges
, a very random choice for one’s first opera and one that is rarely staged. The cast didn’t have any famous singers, and I don’t remember being moved by the story or acting. Grandma, too, was a bit confused and didn’t know what to make of it. But the beautiful stage in front of us, the majestic way the curtain rose, and the power and passion of the singing overwhelmed me.

AT FIFTEEN, I
wasn’t officially allowed to date yet.

“You can date when you’re sixteen and not one day before that,” my parents informed me. As if something magical and miraculous would happen to me the night before my sixteenth birthday that would make me mature and wise enough to venture into the dating world. I’d go to bed and wake up with the ability to tell the good boys from the bad ones.

That, I already knew how to do. The trick was convincing oneself to
want
to date the good boys, and not the bad ones—I still haven’t mastered that one. A few months later, my parents chucked their rule when the preacher’s son, Randy, came to call. Naturally, they adored and trusted him and their trust was well placed. He was a good and respectful kid—too good and respectful for my taste, it turned out. Randy was one year older than me, but even less experienced. On the advice of his church buddies, we drove up into the hills on Skyline Drive where all the teenagers parked. The trick, his friends instructed, was to tear down the road when you saw a patrolling cop car approach, which they did on the hour, and then return ten minutes later.

Randy had a car with a flat console between the two front seats and once parked, I hopped over the console to try some French kissing and nearly scared poor Randy to death.

“If I wanted to kiss your tongue”—he pulled away, in disgust—“I would have kissed your tongue!”

If Randy was too slow, my next beau was too fast. I still wasn’t officially dating age, and Richard was two years older than me, but he was on the football team and told me he’d noticed me in the halls wearing my silky blue dress with the elastic top—how could I say no to a man with such an eye for detail? Apparently, I could. If my parents were worried I was going to be taken advantage of, I wish they’d seen how I handled Richard. He was the kind of guy who knew exactly where to park and always kissed with his tongue. Making out one night on Skyline Drive, he kept slipping his hands under my T-shirt and inside my bra. Believe it or not, I still considered myself a good Christian girl and I had my boundaries.

“No, Richard—no! I don’t want to do that. I told you, I’m not ready!” I pushed him away. “Why do you keep insisting?”

“After the games, all the guys in the locker room talk about what they did with their girlfriends the night before,” he said, “and I never have anything to say!”

I made him drive me home and I dumped him along the way.

THEN CAME JOHN
. I’d noticed him at the public library, where he worked in the audiovisual department with a friend of mine and I had a major crush on him. He was tall with long, dark hair, and handsome. He loved to sing, like me, and was into jazz, another genre I knew nothing about. He was also twenty-one and had no idea how young I was. A few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, we were both at my friend’s house for a swim (by now, I’d succumbed to the bathing suit pressures of my new environment. I couldn’t get away with wearing a cover-up for the rest of my life while living in California).

John sat at the edge of the pool, watching me as I lingered in the shallow end, still shy and keeping submerged. He gave me an intense look from the pool’s edge like no guy had ever given me before, so I paddled closer.

“So, when can we go out on a date?” he asked.

“Well . . . my parents won’t let me date until I’m sixteen.”

He looked momentarily surprised, but that didn’t stop him.

“Well, when are you going to be sixteen?”

“In two weeks.”

“Okay, then. Two weeks it is.”

On the morning of my sixteenth birthday, when my mother asked me if I’d like anything special for my birthday dinner that night, I nonchalantly broke the news.

“Ma, I can’t. I have a date!”

I lied and told my parents John was twenty, thinking he’d sound safer if he was under legal drinking age. I’m sure they were still freaked out. What would a twenty-year-old want with their barely sixteen-year-old daughter? Well, they knew exactly what—but what could they say? They hadn’t given me a ruling on the age of my date. John picked me up that night with a wrapped birthday present tucked under his arm and took me out to dinner.

We spent the next few months making out in his blue, two-door secondhand Monte Carlo, and I was crazy about him. With John, I broke from the confines of my strict childhood for good.

He’d take me into bars and order me colorful, frothy girl drinks that tasted like fruit punch but were loaded with gin. And after my years of being held under lock and key by the Food Marshal, John offered this starving girl a banquet, and I devoured it all. We were regulars at Shakey’s Pizza, where we’d have seconds and thirds at their all-you-can-eat buffet and wash it down with cheap, warm beer. Ours was a young love of appetites. After years of pent-up desire and denial, John was my portal to all the pleasures of the senses.

Almost all. After months of making out, I still insisted on saving myself for marriage. It drove John so crazy that one rare night when my parents and brothers were all out of the house, he drove over, parked his car on the street behind ours, and climbed over
our neighbor’s fence to get to me. It was very
Romeo and Juliet
. We always had an incredibly hot time together, but still I refused to “do it.”

Until the day came when I changed my mind.

I’d kept in touch with my junior high buddy Sue since I left Illinois, and we updated each other about our various shenanigans with constant letters. She was the first person I consulted about my monumental decision:

WITH ALL THIS
drama going on in my life, I didn’t notice what was going on with my mother.

First, there was the sudden departure of our poodle, Fluffy. We’d brought her with us from Illinois, and she was more mine than anyone’s—she often slept in my bed with me. But she was a mean dog, the kind who’d growl if you nudged her with your foot. And she also was epileptic, and she’d have seizures on occasion. I loved her, but I was never home, and my mother was having a tough time taking care of her.

One day I came home from school and Fluffy was nowhere to be found. I checked inside my closet, where we kept her bed, but it was gone. I found my mother in the backyard, watering the flowers.

“Mom, where’s Fluffy? I can’t find her!”

“Well, honey,” she said, as she kept watch on the water, “I decided Fluffy needed a new home. You kids don’t pay any attention to her, so I found a home for her with a woman and her young daughter out in the country where she can run and have fun. She’s gone to live with this lady.”

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe she’d gotten rid of the dog without talking to any of us first. I burst into tears, and when my
brothers got home from school, I dropped the bomb: “Mommy gave Fluffy away!” Soon we were all crying, and my mother felt terrible.