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 father bowed to financial reality and took a sales job in plastics when 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
