Performance Anxiety. Betsy Burke

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      Belinda smiled then made pathetic orphan eyes and stared at me imploringly.

      I backed up a step and held up my hands. “Oh, hey, wait a minute, Belinda. Don’t look at me like that. I can’t help you. I’m already working overtime.”

      “It’s nights. You’re asleep most of the time. Granny takes a sleeping pill.”

      I shook my head.

      “Ah, c’mon, Miranda. I’m sure you could use the extra money. You’re not doing anything special with your nights, are you? You don’t have a boyfriend…”

      “Hold on a second.”

      “What? Now you have one?”

      I backtracked quickly. “No.”

      “I’ll talk to Mike, Miranda. He knows you. He’d never accept a stranger, but he’d accept you.”

      She was right.

      “It’ll be easy,” she gushed now. “I work your mornings here so you can go to Cold Shanks for a few days, then you do this for me when you get back.”

      It was extortion, sort of, but I liked Belinda. And I was already picturing my plane zooming toward Ontario.

      I knew a little something about Italian grannies.

      During the summer between my second and third years of university, I went on a two-month work-study abroad program to Tuscany. I managed it all on the cheap, had the whole thing planned right down to the last nickel. I’d wanted to visit my father, but the pound was too expensive. Just setting foot in an English airport would have used up all my resources. And I had gigs to hurry back for.

      I was primed for the romance of Florence from the minute I arrived. What I’d seen from the taxi window looked promising; medieval stone buildings, huge elegantly carved wooden doorways, outdoor cafés and restaurants with bright Cinzano umbrellas, quaint marketplaces, impossibly chic and gorgeous men. The foreign girls, tourists like me, were easy to spot. They all drifted gauzily around in loose pale cottons, looking arty, as if they’d just stepped off the set of A Room With a View. I quickly learned that Italian women wore tighter, darker clothes not just to look fashionable, but because the streets were narrow, and it was easy to clean the sides of sooty buildings with loose flowing skirts.

      That first day, my taxi stopped in front of a large rundown palazzo just off Via de’ Bardi. I was ushered in by a Philippine servant and introduced to the Melandroni family, including all the in-laws and outlaws. Each time I thought I had a handle on how many of them lived under the same roof, a new one would pop up. My job for the next three months was to “accompany” the eldest family member, Baby Melandroni.

      Baby was eighty-nine years old and a Bette Davis look-alike, with crimson lipstick oozing into the creases around her mouth. “Accompanying” meant following her every demented move, repairing her wardrobe, peeling her grapes, cleaning up her accidents and making sure she didn’t fall down any stairs. She insisted that I call her Contessa.

      It didn’t take me long to realize that I was participating in a real-life version of The Twilight of the Gods. The Melandronis hated, tormented and plotted against each other at every available opportunity, but were scandalized when I naively suggested they might be happier if they didn’t all live in the same house.

      I barely got near those gorgeous chic men that summer. I spent most of my time in the palazzo, at one window or another, sneaking peeks at the outside world. Although two of the Melandroni men lost their way during electrical storms and ended up in my bedroom, it was no consolation. They both looked like beagles and were unctuous and overeager, a product of too much noble inbreeding. Both times I had to defend myself by beaning them with the six-pound Italian-English dictionary I was trying so hard to absorb.

      I was certain that all over Europe, inexperienced North American girls like me were submitting themselves to similar tortures. I had proof. Tina, for example, had chosen to do her work-study in Germany. I received a long, hysterical letter from her. It was written on toilet paper. She’d been locked into a supply closet while labor inspectors toured the hotel where she was illegally employed as a chambermaid.

      It was not so much a work-study program as a ball-chain program.

      The summer ended on a high note. I’d struggled the whole time to interpret Baby’s ravings and finally understood that she wanted nothing more than to escape. She was being held prisoner, she told me, by her very own family, and they had taken all her jewels from her and put them in the safe in the bank, and were taking all the rest of her money, stripping her of her wealth, not to mention the last shreds of her dignity. She wanted to dress up like the contessa she was and get back into society again.

      So one Sunday after lunch, when all the other Melandronis were napping after having stuffed themselves at the big meal, I got her all dolled up. I packed my bags quickly and we snuck out of the palazzo. We took a taxi to Piazza della Signoria. I deposited Baby at a central table in Caffe Rivoire, ordered her a big dish of ice cream drowned in kirsch, and left. Just before catching my train for Pisa airport (a day ahead of schedule), I called the palazzo and told the servant where to pick up Baby. I spent nearly the last of my funds that night on a pensione in Pisa. What a luxury. It had been a completely frustrating experience, but at least it had been frustrating in a new language.

      Chapter 6

      I stood at the bus stop, buzzing with the caffeine from Mike’s, mentally preparing for my lesson. Over and over I sang the audition pieces in my head. I’d chosen them carefully. Opera management around the world was growing less and less tolerant of singers who didn’t look the part. The days of the three-hundred-pound consumptive heroine were over, except in the case of the truly prodigious voices, like Ellie’s and Peter’s, for whom exceptions were made.

      Young singers just starting out were another story. You had to fit the role, and if you were willing to do cartwheels and lose your clothes along the way, all the better.

      I’d opted for something safe, with no potential for nudity. I was going to sing Cherubino’s aria “Non So Più” from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and “Iris, Hence Away” from Handel’s Semele.

      In Le Nozze di Figaro, Cherubino is a trouser role, a boy or man played by a mezzo-soprano. Cherubino is a youthful and buoyant, all over the place, lovesick puppy. I was pushing it, given my C-cup, but I’d bind myself up for the sake of art and a singing job.

      My other aria was from Handel’s Semele. Semele is hardly ever staged. It’s a baroque opera based on the infighting of the gods Juno and Jupiter. The aria is Juno’s fuming in a moment of vengeful plotting against Jupiter. “Iris, Hence Away” shows off a different style, my sung English and vocal flexibility in the middle range, as well as a character portrayal opposite to Cherubino. I tried to make my Juno dominant and alarming, a sort of Katharine Hepburn of the operatic stage.

      When I’d told Madame Klein a month before that I was trying to get an audition with the ENO, she’d said dismissively. “Dis vill be a gut exercise for you, ja? Strange city, strange theater, people you don’t know, ja, dat is part of de zinging experience. Und you can alvays zing in de chorus.” But she wouldn’t commit on whether I had a minimal chance of winning a solo role with the company.

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