Growing Up Bank Street. Donna Florio
every note and perform while moving around on cue and in character, under hot lights, wearing costumes that can weigh fifty pounds. I was allowed to rehearse with a score in hand only for a brief period. I was expected to memorize fast and to make note of the interpretations that each conductor gives to a score. Tony Amato was charming, but if I missed the downbeat a third time, he’d bang on the podium and I’d cower. When Mom and I moved from Amato to the Metropolitan Opera, the stakes were far higher, but the rules were exactly the same. If Leonard Bernstein wanted a legato here or a forte there, I had to memorize his wishes, and fast.
In addition to the conductor there was the stage director. The director told me how (running, sneaking, marching) and where (stage left, stage right, or in position before curtain) my character entered the scene and what I did as I sang. If my role called for using props, like tearing the Hansel and Gretel gingerbread witch into pieces, I had to have the right prop at exactly the right musical moment. If I had to change costumes too fast to reach a dressing room, I had to wriggle out of one and into the next in the wings. And whether I was dancing, fighting, or climbing a ladder, I had to watch the conductor’s baton as if it were the eye of God.
La Bohème, a perennial favorite, involved a crowd scene and was relatively easy because chorus ladies usually held us in place and sang with us. Tosca was harder. We were altar boys with a priest who had his own music to sing while we skipped around. Carmen was the hardest opera for me. I had to spit staccato French lyrics, usually at breakneck tempo, while marching in a crowd. I often stomped on someone’s foot or got my own shins kicked. But I had to stay in character and keep going, even if the scenery fell on me. I didn’t mind. My parents were right to be theater snobs, I thought. Nothing felt as alive as being onstage.
There is an offstage child shepherd’s solo in Tosca. A solo is another universe. No hiding behind others if you go off pitch or muff the lyrics. I was deemed ready at seven at the Amato. The shepherd’s aria is a soft, plaintive poem to the dawn. It was my own golden moment, just Tony and me, face to face in the tiny orchestra pit. A flute and oboe played quietly, letting my voice glide above them. I remembered Mom’s instructions. Breathe deeply. Get onto the first note right away. Hit the descending line just so. Hold the final note until he moves his baton sideways and cuts it off. When the audience applauded and Tony bowed to me from the podium, I felt like a queen. Backstage, my parents hugged me with tears in their eyes.
In addition to working at the Amatos’, Dad went on road tours with other companies when I was little. One morning I ran into the living room, thrilled that Dad had come home during the night. A Chatty Cathy doll, my biggest wish, sat in our yellow butterfly chair, and my parents smiled sleepily as I grabbed her and climbed into their sleeper couch. I bragged for days that he’d remembered his special girl on tour until Mom snapped, “Please. I got that doll in Macy’s.”
• • •
Two huge changes came in 1963, when I was seven: Mom’s dad died, and Grandma moved into apartment 1A of 63 Bank Street. Her presence allowed Mom to audition for the Metropolitan Opera chorus, performing their final seasons in their original theater on West Thirty-Ninth Street. The old Met was to be demolished and the company moved to a new theater in Lincoln Center in 1966. They were accepting girls in their children’s chorus for the first time that year. I passed an audition, and I too joined the Met. My parents were proud and happy and therefore so was I, although I didn’t know that my cozy theater world had just turned upside down.
At first I was scared to death. The old Met had been built in 1898. Backstage looked like a haunted house that went on forever. I was afraid I’d get lost and no one would find me. It was all dusty carved wood and splintered floors, a rabbit warren of lopsided steps with cast-iron banisters leading to dimly lit corridors and strange, hidden rooms. Thick metal pipes ran everywhere: in dressing rooms, through rehearsal halls, and high above audience view onstage. Roman soldiers lumbered by, checking the Daily News for the racing results at Belmont.
The chorus women were in a communal dressing room at the top of worn wooden stairs by stage left. Mirrors were ringed with tiny light bulbs in metal cages. Chipped coffee mugs held eyeliners and grease sticks. Wiry old Rosie, one of the ladies’ dressers, had been a circus trapeze artist. She coached me through skin-the-cat on a costume bar while the chorus was onstage. The ladies had photos and cards tucked into their mirrors. “See?” Mom pointed to my Kodak picture, missing front teeth and all. “I always have my little girl.”
Since I had to wait for Mom to go home, I sat at her cubicle after I’d dressed and studied the mimeographed chorus makeup charts she’d taped to the mirror. Faces were drawn on papers marked “Faust—Peasant, Act I” or “Turandot—Courtier, Act III.” The sketches pointed out correct circle widths under eyes using number 12 brown pancake makeup for the starving Faust peasant and white greasepaint with red lipstick and heavy penciled eyebrows for the Chinese royalty. Powder clouded the air and made me sneeze as ladies flicked matte finishes over their faces with thick brushes and rose like a flock of swans, hurrying to their next entrance.
Rick, the man in charge of the children’s chorus, met us at the stage door lobby, signed us in, and marched us upstairs to our dressing room. I was awed the first time I followed him into the wings for an onstage rehearsal. The biggest scenery and black side curtains I’d ever seen towered stories above my head. Stagehands swarmed around us, scrambling up metal side balconies and across high walkways, tying off scenery ropes and positioning floodlights.
In La Bohème, my first Met show, I was a Parisian street urchin following a toy vendor, so the costume was easy: ragged pants and a torn jacket. I already knew the music, making the dour chorus master nod approvingly when I jumped in without the score at the first rehearsal. I was supposed to be a boy, so I tucked my hair into a black wool cap and lined up in front of the waiting makeup artists, who swabbed Max Factor pancake and greasepaint dirt streaks on with brisk snaps of the wrist. Rick clapped his hands, calling out “Hurry! Places before curtain!” as we rushed to line up.
When I ran onstage, I tried not to stare at the flashes from necklaces and jeweled gowns in the first rows or up at the golden carved box seats. Huge floodlights, embedded in the wooden stage, sent up waves of heat. The prompter’s head peeped out of his little covered box onstage, hidden from the audience. If someone forgot their cue, he’d whisper it. All in all it was a dazzling world: too much to take in all at once.
• • •
I didn’t understand until I was much older that Mom had just started a twenty-five-year prison sentence. Movie extras and corps ballerinas rose to stardom, but in the hidebound opera world, choristers were typecast for life. The steady paycheck came with watching stars like Renata Tebaldi and Maria Callas sing roles that she’d studied for years at her parents’ kitchen table. This time, saddled with bills and a family, there wasn’t going to be another break. When I complained that the chorus master was mean, she told me to work harder and toe the line. I bragged about being a Met singer to my uninterested second-grade classmates at St. Joseph’s School, but I had to force myself to forget the warmth and fun of the Amatos.
The easygoing Frydel apartment, 4B, was my second home. Irene and I played with our parakeets and watched The Man from U.N.C.L.E., but we didn’t perform together anymore. I rarely saw my father’s shows anymore either, even when they were just a subway ride away at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It felt like we’d left him behind.
Dad was struggling with his theater career too. He was offered the Met stage manager job, Mom told me years later, but the price was having sex with a man on the board of directors. Dad’s immigrant parents started businesses and bought real estate, bulldozing their way up the American ladder, fierce and tough, ordering him to become a doctor. Dropping out of NYU pre-med and taking up theater was his one and only act of defiance.
“You ruined my life by being born!” he’d sometimes snap. While I cried, he’d pat my back and bang his fist. “Dammit! How could I say that to my own child? Oh, God, I’m sorry.” If he’d been drinking, the cycles of venom and remorse could go on for hours. “Your father needed a mentor,” his conductor friend told me. “He needed guidance and he never got any.”
My