Random Childhood Memories 1

There was a hot dog cart on the corner of 66th and Broadway where I had to get my hot dogs from this one little old lady after music classes at the Hebrew Arts School (now the Lucy Moses School) where I first started violin lessons. No other hot dogs tasted the same. I have a picky son now. Some foods that he doesn’t want to eat make him gag. I look at him and completely understand his pain. Sometimes one hot dog tastes completely different from another and no adult understands.

Metropolitan Opera. To get into the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus, you had to sing Happy Birthday for the director. Both my sister and I got in. We had choir rehearsal once a week, and then I ended up having an extra session once or twice a week to learn the extra boys’ roles (composers seemed to like writing for boy soprano a lot more than girl soprano), and then when opera season was upon us, we had extra rehearsals for staging etc. I don’t know how my parents dealt with driving us all around to these things and music lessons as well.

Tannhauser. There is small ensemble solo (only a few measures long) for several boys. This was my first “big” solo as a member of the Children’s Chorus. I was not even 11 years old. I could always sing cleanly and in tune, but I didn’t have the strongest voice, so I never would get the little boy solo in Boheme, for example. I remember the experience to be actually quite stressful, but not due to the singing, it was due to the staging. One boy was to go around and "collect votes" from the adults, which then had to be passed on to the the other boys and we would announce (sing) who won. The boy who had to do this gathering was me. But the adult singers on stage were hamming it up. They made big theatrical gestures to "cast their ballots" which meant I had less and less time to get back to my place with the boys and sing our lines together. The opera is Wagner, not a Broadway musical, and the underscoring was not a vamp. Even while I was going around and doing the staging, I knew how many measures I had left to get back to my place. I barely made it, each time.... One night in particular, the singers were WAY behind. By the time I got to the last voter, I knew that I had very little time left. I was holding a chalice from which the votes were selected, and basically I grabbed one for the singer, and ran back to my spot… I have no idea what the audience thought. Or the singer…. I also still remember my costume, a burgundy robe that was heavy and itchy.

La Boheme. The set for the Met production was so amazing. It also took up the complete stage, so to set it up, the entire set was on a movable platform that would be pulled from Stage Right during the pause between acts. We would set up offstage while the first act was finishing up, and then they towed us into place. I had a big crush on this girl Adrien, who was also in the chorus and friends with my sister. I don’t think she ever knew this, or maybe she did totally know?

My mother would sign notes for my school teachers when I didn’t finish my homework. She would look at my page of math problems and see that 100 times they were the same thing, and I already understood how to do them, so I would just do a few examples and she’d sign off on the rest. Not all teachers were understanding. I remember crying in the cubby-room in fourth or fifth grade because I was afraid to go to my math class because the teacher was so mean and I didn’t have time to do my homework because, you know, I was in an opera until all hours of the night.

Sometimes carpooling was convenient. My mom had a concert at Avery Fisher Hall. I was performing at the Met (or later at the Mitzi Newhouse @ Lincoln Ceneter). Operas and plays can actually go longer than symphonic concerts, and often times she would finish her concert, change back into street clothes, get the car from the garage, and be waiting for me by the stage door for me to finish my show so we could go home. And then I went to school early the next morning.

I was an understudy for the boys in the Magic Flute. I loved sitting in the wings and watching the opera unfold, though I regret never getting to actually sing one of the boys’ roles outside of rehearsal. I was, and am, a big Mozart fan. We three understudies were relatively unsupervised during the opera. This was a terrible idea. We may have done some homework and then we had to amuse ourselves for several hours… which meant sometimes making paper airplanes and throwing them in the big ballet rehearsal room next to the kids’ chorus room. One time a paper airplane flew into one of the big indirect halogen lights that lit the room and burst into flame. We were freaked out, and then the other boys thought it was pretty cool and may have continued to “accidentally” fly paper airplanes into the lights and they too caught fire. Again, what a terrible idea. In hindsight I cannot believe we did this and didn’t set the building on fire. Another time one of the boys brought bouncy balls, and we bounced them all around the chorus room. It was like a squash court. Except there were mirrors and furniture and a clock high up on the wall. Needless to say, eventually the clock was hit, came off of its hook and came smashing down. The chorusmaster had a nasty temper. We were really afraid of her, and each of us said “it just fell.” How ridiculously obvious that we were lying??? We were into comic books at the time, and I think somewhere I have a one page comic that we drew to illustrate this very story.

The Museum School. I had returned back to public school after a year on the road with The Secret Garden (and a tutor for the four children on tour, sometimes more than four if someone’s sibling was with us). I learned much on the road, but pre-widespread internet, our curriculum did not align with my school. When I failed my first math quiz back in normal school because I had no idea what FOIL was, the teacher told me I was too far behind and she wouldn’t be able to catch me up. One of my best friends came over to my house one afternoon that week. In one afternoon he caught me completely up with the class.

ALSO – there was a kid whose name was Steve. He used to tease me incessantly before I went on tour. Actually these days it would be considered bullying what kids said to me. I was “different.” I played violin and didn’t listen to popular music. I sang in opera. I didn’t know the difference between College Football and Pro Football. In fact I had never seen a football game. I spoke English with a strange accent. I was an easy target. Anyway, a year on the road, among adults, growing up fast, contributed to perhaps a little more self confidence. Steve started harassing me when I came back to school. I remember shoving him up against a locker. This would be the closest I ever got into a fight at school. His eyes opened wide, he realized I wouldn’t deal with his attitude anymore, and I never again had to.

BECAUSE – not too long after (the following year) that my friend, the same friend who tutored me, and I were running down a back set of stairs after school to get to our school buses, and some older kids in school threatened us for money. Your basic run of the mill bully/mugging in school. Neither of us spent much more time in that school, by the next term we both left, I went to PCS, and my friend to a very good private school as well. No more muggings. (Although I did get mugged with my friends again in NYC not far from my new school… this was not IN school…)

AND ALSO BECAUSE – by that time I was in another professional stage production, this time a play by Tom Stoppard, called Hapgood, which was playing at Lincoln Center. It wasn’t easy doing 8 shows a week, practicing violin, and keeping up with school. I also missed every Wednesday because of matinees. That meant I was failing P.E. in school, since that pretty much went by a strict attendance policy. It is tough to graduate etc with failing P.E. and the school had no flexibility on this matter. I needed to go elsewhere and ended up at the Professional Children’s School, a small private school in Manhattan for children who already had some sort of professional career, usually in the performing arts. This was the first time, in a way, that I was truly surrounded by peers and other kids who did not fit in to regular school.