A Little Bit Wicked (6 page)

But beyond the physical, there was an emotional, almost spiritual approach to the music. We learned a selection of art songs we called “The Italians’ Greatest Hits,” and one day Ms. Birdwell stopped me in the middle of Stradella’s “Pietà, Signore,” made me start over not once but twice, then stopped me a third time and told me to sit down because I looked out the window. Another day, she stopped me in the middle of Pergolesi’s “Se tu m’ami” and asked for the English translation.

“Not the book’s translation,” she said when I started searching for it. “Your translation. If you have it memorized in Italian, you should have it memorized in English. You may sit down. Please, don’t sing to me in another language without knowing what you’re singing about.”

So I’d go to the library, labor through every syllable and vowel, then show up to my lesson, eager to please her. Some days she simply brushed me imperiously aside with the nebulous criticism “This is not a singing day for you.” Other days, she offered a crumb of encouragement. Effusive praise such as “Well, do you feel you made a tiny stride?” or “I think you’re getting the gist.” Her relentlessly high standards made Miss Jane look like a regular Miss Noodle, but I loved that. Some kids had knock-down-drag-outs with her, and at times I wanted to, but I was so hungry to learn what she was teaching, while other people angled to get out of their lessons, I was badgering to get in and take their time slots.

My freshman year, I’d have to admit, I was a little party puppy. I’d never been much for that sort of thing in high school, but once I pledged Gamma Phi Beta, there was plenty of weekend activity. I got to drinking a little, and for someone my size, a little is all it takes. (Thank you, Heavenly Father, for delaying the invention of the cell-phone cam until after I outgrew that phase where the date has to hold the girl’s hair back as she leans over a bush.) I was one of the few freshmen getting cast in shows. No leads, of course, but I was grateful just to get onstage in
Annie Get Your Gun.
Of course my family traveled all the way to Oklahoma City to see me dash forward in my little towns-girl costume and deliver the sum total of my lines:

“General Grant?”

I was also in
The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd
and even had a small part in
La Traviata
.

“You were wonderful,” my brother warmly told me after his first opera. “Please, never invite me to one of those again.”

My sophomore year, I struggled with repeated bouts of strep and mono, and Ms. Birdwell cut me not one iota of slack. Going to a juried competition in Norman, I was feeling horrible, so she was driving. (And I need to say here that Florence Birdwell should never be behind the wheel of a car. She’s a menace.)

“I don’t think I can do this,” I told her. “My throat is—I don’t know. I can’t swallow.”

“You won’t be able to make excuses in the real world,” she said. “People will have more respect for you if you just sing through it. Do what you have to do. I don’t care if you have to drink a shot of vodka. You can’t go to New York to audition for an opera company or a show and say. ‘Oh, hello, I’m not at my best today, but I’m taking up your time anyway.’ No! You just sing. If it’s not your best, it’s not your best. Now, we’re in the car, we’re going, just
sing
.”

I sang. I got third, so I guess it wasn’t a complete cat strangler. (I’ve gotten onstage many, many times since then when I was sick or hurt. I do my best. If I don’t sound terrific, I hope my acting will carry it.) Not long after that, I was in her studio, charging through some hideous aria. She asked something of me, took me to task when I couldn’t do it, and it was finally more than I could take. I started crying and, for the first and only time, walked out on my lesson.

My mom always knows when I’m not okay. I don’t know how she does it—spiritual bond, finely tuned Mom-o-Meter, pheromones, covert operations. Whatever it is, I’m grateful. She was on the phone moments after I walked in the door.

“Kristi, are you all right? You’ve been so close to my heart all day.”

“Mom,” I sobbed in pure frustration, “I need to quit. I’m not cut out for this.”

“Kristi, are you sick? You don’t sound right. Dad and I are coming to get you.”

She gave me the nursing-school once-over as soon as she arrived
and took me to the doctor when we got home. The following week, I returned to school and told Ms. Birdwell I needed to have my tonsils taken out. She sat me down in the wicker chair. Serious. I didn’t know what she was going to say about my scholarship or if she still wanted to teach me.

“Listen to me.
Child
. Do you have any—you can’t—” She waved aside whatever she was trying to tell me, demanded the name of the surgeon, and had him on the phone a minute later. “This is Dr. Florence Birdwell of Oklahoma City University. You need to know that you have the voice of the decade—the voice of her
generation
—in your hands.”

The voice of
hummana-hummana-wha?

This was news to me, and I won’t lie: my heart soared to hear that from her mouth. For the first time, here was someone who truly believed in me. Someone beside my parents, I mean, and, yes, this meant more than that because she actually
knew
what she was talking about.

“You cannot cram things down her throat. You can not
snip
anything or
nick
anything or make the slightest error.” After she finally dismissed the surgeon, she demanded to be connected to the anesthesiologist and raked him over the same coals. Then she hung up and came to sit beside me. “You have to remind them, Kristi. Write it on your forehead:
SINGER
.”

“They told me my voice might change. Even if the surgery goes perfectly.”

“Don’t be afraid. We’ll do what we have to do. I don’t care if you become an alto. It won’t matter. You’re a singer
here
—and
here
.” She indicated my brain with one hand, my whole self with the other. “I lost my voice when I was getting my undergraduate degree. Studying under the great Inez Silberg. Woke up one morning and…nothing. Couldn’t sing a note. Couldn’t speak a word. She taught me how to talk again, as if I was an infant, and then we applied all that to singing.
Because that’s what it is, really. Speaking on pitch. You’re so in love with your voice—you’ve got to stop all that
singing
. Stop listening to yourself and
speak
to us.”

My voice did change. It actually went up a step and a half. The first month or two, it felt like a knife-swallowing act. Sitting at the table like the little match girl, watching the rest of the family eat pizza, I downed my nine hundredth meal of green Jell-O. My uvula felt odd and truncated, and I realized that two years earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to identify it as anything other than “that punching-bag thingy.” My throat felt strange for a long time, but my health was vastly improved. I was stronger, which pleased Ms. Birdwell, and pleasing her lit a whole new fire under me. My voice began to open up to a place I never knew I had.

Healthy food and rest became priorities. Wine coolers and late nights lost their appeal. I wasn’t willing to waste my energy anymore. Just like my old ballet days, I optimized my body for the task at hand. I stopped partying and focused on training and studies. Junior year, I got a lead: Adele in
Die Fledermaus
—second cast, so I only got to do one out of the three performances, but still—it was a leading role in a challenging opera. (Sorry, Mark.)

While I worked toward my degree in musical theatre, semesters were spent cramming for classes and performing in plays, and summers were spent doing summer stock, naturally. With the help of an excellent hair and makeup crew, I made a surprisingly believable Tuptim in
The King and I.
I played a Kit Kat girl in
Cabaret,
and years later, when I was doing
Wicked,
I couldn’t look at Joel Grey without singing a bit of
tweedly-deet-dee-dee two ladies
in my head. (
Und der is just one man, jah!
See how it gets stuck in your head?) Another summer job early on was singing and dancing in one of those high-kicking review-type shows at Opryland.

I loved Opryland. I wanted to
live
at Opryland. My parents had to come and drag me back to school. Opryland was, however, the scene
of an unfortunate incident I call the Cooter Smash. And now, as the Old Lady says in
Candide,
“I shall chill your ears with the tale of my many calamities!” (Feel free to cross your legs as needed.)

How I Acquired the Semimagical Power
to Predict Weather with My Cooter
or
Rebel Without a Coccyx

Our story begins when I was at cheerleading camp back in high school. As one of the smaller girls, I was strategically positioned at the top of a pyramid in what they call a monkey grab, which means one girl was holding me up straight while two other girls each supported a foot, and I was basically doing splits about eight feet above the floor. A girl on the bottom of the pyramid apparently decided she had to see a man about a Russian racehorse, got up without warning the rest of us, and I fell.

That. Really. Hurt.

Flash forward a few years. Opryland. Warm-ups. I was doing the paddle-wheeling, high-kicking, Pepsodent-smile routine—specifically the heel-above-the-head-kick-whoosh-down-into-splits combination. I kicked. So far so good. I went forward for the splits, but the worn heel of my character shoe didn’t catch quite enough traction, and I ended up doing the pubic-bone-gravity-wooden-floor combination instead. (Okay, now I need to cross my legs just thinking about it.)

The official diagnosis was a fractured coccyx. I also pulled a hammy, but that was hardly noticeable, due to the profound agony radiating from the center of my poor little Georgia O’Keeffe. I missed a few shows, then returned to grin and bear it for the rest of the season with altered choreography and an unswerving devotion to Opryland.

I no longer do the splits. And I can’t tell you how happy I am that it’s no longer required of me. The lasting legacy of the Cooter Smash
is that I’m the first to know when it’s going to rain. That’s right. I both sing and predict the weather with my hoo hoo. Mozart, meteorology, plus all the usual stuff.

And yet I remain single.

’Splain it to me, Lucy.

As my priorities changed, so did my circle of friends. I drifted away from the party girls in my sorority and started hanging out with the music people, who became my dearest, lifelong comrades. Regina Dowling, who now does a lot of on-camera hosting gigs. Bill Shiflett, who leads a powerhouse music ministry. Destin Owens, who’s made his own mark on Broadway. Then there’s gorgeous Kandi Johnston, and fabulous Mary Milsap, and of course, then and always, there’s Denny Downs. We connected the very first day in choir. Just one of those fleeting “Hey, I know people who know people you know” things, but enough for us to say hello in the hallway and hope we’d have a chance to work together sometime. What eventually bonded us was our mutual lust for the cello player.

Carmen
. Bizet’s great opera. Originally denounced as “superficial and immoral” and declared a resounding flop. Not unlike My Huge Hit Sitcom
Kristin
on NBC. (Huge hit. Yak-dropping huge. Terribly misunderstood.) Denny was in the chorus; I’d landed a respectable secondary role. We had plenty of time for backstage kibitzing—my breakup with my boyfriend, his breakup with his boyfriend, what we had for lunch, who thought what about this or that current event. At a tech rehearsal, we were standing together downstage and realized we were both gazing into the orchestra pit, making eyes at the same cello player.

“What is it about cello players?” I mused. “Is it the way they embrace the instrument like a lover?”

“It’s the biceps,” Denny said pragmatically.

He nailed it. Cello players have great biceps. Who needs Bowflex
when you have the actual bow? This particular cello player also had a Tyrone Power jawline and tousled Clark Gable hair. He looked up and flashed a smile that hit us like a heat-seeking missile.

“Oh, my gosh. Did you see that?” said Denny. “He is so flirting with me.”

“What?” I elbowed Denny in the ribs. “He’s flirting with
me
.”

“Dream on, girlie.”

“You dream on,
Den-whah
.” Because that’s how we are sometimes. All classy and Frenchified. (Or is that
french fried
?)

After rehearsal, we found ourselves in the crowded hallway behind the dreamboat in question, and Denny kept grabbing my hand and trying to put it on the guy’s backside. We both flirted shamelessly with him for the entire run of the show and were inseparable from that time forward. I had a part-time job in graduate admissions and got Denny a job there, too, but he was much better at it than I was. Campus tours were my forte, probably because I loved OCU so much that with little provocation I was willing and able to wax poetic about it.

As an upperclassman, I was getting cast in leads. Guest directors came in from New York, and I soaked that up like a sponge, learning by doing, by bumps and bruises. Everything Florence Birdwell told me and my father that day about the highest highs and the lowest lows—it was all there, and I grew to deeply love this woman who’d lost her voice and had given me mine. I learned the most watching her in concert. I’d never seen a concert like that, but I imagined this must be what Barbra Streisand was doing in the huge venues, what Bette Midler did in the bathhouses of New York. She’d box your ears with “Where Is Flair?” then turn around and break your heart with “If He Walked into My Life”—a song she did for her son, who died the night he graduated high school. “Where’s that boy with the bugle?” She was never really able to get through it, but seeing her try was like watching a tall sailing ship leave a harbor.

Ah,
I kept thinking every time I watched her perform,
that’s how it’s done
.