Growing Up Bank Street. Donna Florio
I was about ten, although he kept his hand in with operas here and there. One pact Mom and I never broke was our unspoken mutual agreement to be kind about his humiliating exile into the ultimate horror: a non-theatrical life.
• • •
I moved to our new Lincoln Center home with the Met in 1966. The backstage looked like a hospital: dull white concrete walls, red carpeting, and featureless blank rooms. The company wasn’t a high-spirited, rushing pack anymore. Soloists, chorus, orchestra, dancers, and stagehands had their own floors and corridors. It was certainly impressive: five underground levels and a stage that could revolve, rise, or drop two stories. But I was used to the bustling old Thirty-Ninth Street house by now and found this one ugly and boring. I had no opinion about the front of house since I was never there.
I took Ann’s realistic advice and worked to please the kid chorus master. Newbies kissed up. “Maestro, do we take this measure as a legato or continue the andante?” I’d snicker, knowing what was next. First, the cold stare. Then, the disembowelment. “You are, unsurprisingly, a musical idiot. Be quiet. You might learn something.” Rick loved to remind us that hordes of kids out there hoped we’d drop dead or flunk the yearly re-audition.
The Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera is cinema verité, down to scenery from other shows dropping onstage. As a little acolyte in Othello, I stared adoringly at Montserrat Caballé, the Desdemona, during her aria. When she threw out her hands, her ring caught my thick black wig and twisted it backwards around my head. The audience tittered, but I stayed in place, faceless but firm. Montserrat, still singing, twisted her ring off and gently tugged the wig around, squeezing my shoulder in apology. In La Gioconda, we little sailors scrambled up hanging fishnets into position before the act and stayed aloft for the entire act. I missed my grip in the dark and fell sideways, dangling ten feet overhead by one leg but maintaining the director’s scene one tableau as the curtain rose.
When a dancer accidentally kicked the prompter’s nose, Hungarian curses blistered the air as we sang. One Tosca soprano threw herself from the castle parapet and landed on top of a stagehand, snoozing on her offstage mattress. We held hands with a new Gretel and improvised a hopping dance in Hansel and Gretel’s final scene after the hot stage lights glued her false eyelashes together. When Larry’s Butterfly child refused to go onstage, he pushed his wrapped dinner into Suzuki’s panicked hands and Butterfly emoted to a meatball hero sandwich. The chorus women chased their own ravishers when the barbarian invaders were cued onstage first by mistake. No one else in junior high had a life like mine.
My parents were too busy scrambling for attention themselves to be stage parents or take my developing tastes into account. When I asked for dance lessons, they said that there was no time in my theater schedule. I offered to leave the kid chorus, but then Dad said no, dancers are too skinny and their careers are too short. I’d fallen in love with Broadway. By nine I knew I’d rather shake my hips and yowl as catlike Anita in West Side Story than bellow stupid old Aida any day. But my parents didn’t take me seriously and they ran my life so that was that.
Several years passed. One day, while the Met kid chorus was on loan to the visiting Royal Ballet, I saw Rudolph Nureyev backstage: a Russian sun god with tousled hair, pouty lips, and of course a rippling, perfect body. He looked through me, but his indifference didn’t steady my buckled knees. Neither did knowing that he was gay. Flushed and heated, I watched him glide towards the stage like a panther. Rudy’s effect had nothing in common with kissing Neal, another kid chorister, in a stairwell, my entire erotic experience at that point.
The chorus master finally laughed later that year when I sidled in to re-audition, trying to hide my new breasts, and we shook hands. The other kids, waiting their turn in the corridor, looked sympathetic for a moment and then turned away. Like so many others I’d waved goodbye to and forgotten, the curtain dropped on the enchanted opera childhood and I was gone, an outsider.
• • •
The Italian director Franco Zeffirelli was directing Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, two short operas often performed together. Zeffirelli loaded scenes with action and non-singing character parts, so Ann suggested that I audition as an actress. The concept of not being at the Met was too strange for me to handle so I agreed.
The other extras fussed and preened before we went to be “auditioned.” In my mind, being lumped with them was being flung into mud. Singers were far above extras on the opera hierarchy, and I’d never bothered even chatting with any of them before. And calling this an audition was ridiculous, I snipped to myself. We weren’t singing! We were being looked over like pork chops.
As we sat on the steps of the Cavalleria set I pushed dental wax onto my new braces so they wouldn’t flash in the lights. Franco, a slim man in his forties, with graying blond hair, introduced himself in soft, accented, English. Then he looked us over, making comments to an assistant, who wrote them down. I saw him point to me, mimicking my long hair and nodding. And so, at age twelve, I landed a big role in Cavalleria Rusticana as a village virgin—past all doubt the only genuine one in the company.
Directors try to minimize staging complications for kids, but I was an adult now and Franco made me work like one in Cavalleria. I waved to a church procession from a balcony, then scrambled back to stage level down two backstage flights of dark, rickety stairs, unbuttoning my heavy floor-length dress as I ran. I had to be in my second outfit and back on stage to flirt by a fountain in eight minutes. Zeffirelli was also adamant that I wear a lace-up corset with painful metal rib that left welts. “You are an eighteenth-century Sicilian girl and you have to move like one,” he said when I complained. Between the stair runs, the frantic costume change, and the heat from the lights, I was soaked in sweat by the last scene, when I had to rush up the church steps, yelling that the tenor had been murdered, then collapse with grief as the soprano wailed, my face planted on the dirty painted canvas, until the curtain dropped. It never came down fast enough for me.
Puberty, already bewildering me in the Village, rocked my Met world as well. I had a role in Pagliacci too, and a circus fire-eater Zeffirelli had cast in it suggested that we sneak downstairs for a quickie. He choked on his kerosene when I snidely told him my age. I shoved a chorus man’s hand off my behind as we walked off stage. Curious, I let a young stagehand kiss me in the blackout curtains as I waited for a cue and he grabbed my breast. I ran on stage, shaking, and never kissed him again. Rick was fired when a chorus kid’s parents accused him of molesting their son. He was hardly the only Met predator in those dismally incorrect times, but he had no star power or allies on the board of directors. I tried to focus on homework in the chorus ladies’ lounge as a stagehand’s wife cried and begged a chorus woman to stop sleeping with her husband and send him home to her and their kids.
On Sundays, glad for a break, my parents and I piled in the car for a day at Jones Beach and then lobsters in Sheepshead Bay, tanned and happy. They had laughing canasta parties with the Frydels, the adults calling Irene and me when the pizzas arrived. We read The New York Times over bagels on Sundays and went to museums and Broadway shows. I sent them dancing at the Rainbow Room for their anniversary. We wanted to make each other happy. We just weren’t any good at it.
I lived on the right street, though. “How are Sally and Tony?” I asked Annie Frydel in her kitchen. The Amato Opera was marching on, as it did until 2009, when it closed its doors. “Fine, honey,” she replied as we peeled carrots. “Come by and say hello to them, anytime. Stay for dinner tonight. You always have the best jokes, you little sparkler.” I could go see what Yeffe Kimball, the Native American artist at 11 Bank, was up to, I thought. She had just had an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Or I could check to see if Al, the bon vivant artist in apartment 2A, was home. He’d listen to my adolescent dramas with quiet respect.
Maybe Billy Joyce, the retired dancer at 113–115 Bank, was having another wine and cheese party down at the pier. I could help him carry stuff while we gossiped. And if Marty or Roz Braverman from 75 Bank Street were out with their dog, I could tell them my PSAT scores. They were so proud of me for going to elite Stuyvesant High School that they’d told the whole block. I had a street full of supporters, young and old.
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