Who Never Learned to Sing

Tonight, at a small brick-and-mortar music store (the last of a dying breed) in my neighborhood, it will be a game of "Spot the Faker" for bemused citizens sitting in folding chairs as the principals in a local production of Gilbert & Sullivan's Iolanthe will sing selections from the operetta as part of a First Friday event.

(Hint: I'm the faker. The tall, skinny one with the glasses and the airplane hangar-proportioned proboscis.)

See, I never learned to sing. Strangely enough, in middle school, you could find me in the chorus. Stranger still, in high school, I was in musicals. But the weirdness didn't reach its height until two years after college ended, when I auditioned for my first Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, and audition committee heads turned to each other in stupification as I crisply and excitedly sang "When I Was a Lad," the patter song from H.M.S. Pinafore, (a song I had been singing in the shower for years) memorized, with silly little homespun choreography.

And here we are, six years later, seven operettas later. One more under the belt. They only wrote fourteen together, as all particularly proper 'peretta pedants know.

Yeomen of the Guard
Patience
H.M.S. Pinafore
Ruddigore
Pirates of Penzance
The Sorcerer
Iolanthe

I'm halfway home.

And I'm as scared to death as ever, because I never learned to sing.

I barely learned how to read music. When I was in first grade, our overweight and impossibly coiffed and painted music teacher did a note recognition exercise with us. If she held up a drawing of a quarter note, you got down on your knees. A rest, you sat down, Indian-Style. A whole note, you stood up with arms outstretched, and so on. As we got better at recognizing the funny symbols, my music teacher sped up the game, frantically holding up one card, then another, all of us sitting and standing like it was some sort of crystal meth-infused, gleeful church service for kids. The glee came to an abrupt halt when my ankle snapped after we were shown a rest and I sat down too quickly, and too awkwardly.

And so I became the first child to break his ankle in music class. Of course.

It's a cute story, sure, though it was embarrassing for a while, especially during the b'pimpled era, but I think it speaks rather uncomfortable volumes about my relationship with music, but specifically singing. I never quite stood up straight again, and I don't mean that literally, although I do have scoliosis, as is required by Jewish law. When I sing before an audience, there is always something being held back, there is always a reticence, something that is not quite sure it's supposed to come out, or wants to. And so I hide behind the comic G&S roles-- those funny, silly patter roles that were never written for operatic singers, real singers. They're written for a "comic actor who can sing," in the words of Sullivan himself, as opposed to the more lyric roles for the romantic leads and the heavies, people who must sing first, and act second.

And I hide pretty well, even though, at least in my own mind, I out myself every time I open my mouth. Although, to be honest, there's always a piece of me that's waiting for my other ankle to snap out from under me every time I sing and prance about a stage.

It's a shame, really, because I never get to enjoy what I do. Never. It's also a shame because I think my continued participation in these shows, the portrayal of characters traditionally inhabited by seasoned, veteran, trained performers, smacks a little bit of disrespect for the material I love so much-- the joyous and jocular, sonorous and sweet, precious and precocious material of two obstinate Victorian gentlemen who should have been sainted-- not just knighted-- just for staying together as long as they did. But I mean no disrespect, Sir William & Sir Arthur. Like an altar boy, I just want to celebrate you through the only means you handed down to me. And I've been lucky enough not to be found out yet.

Shhh-- don't tell. Anyway, no time for that now. As Gilbert said, "I have a song to sing, O."

Smile

I have fucked up teeth.

My canines are perhaps more befitting their name than most. Actually, they should probably be dubbed "fangnines."

It's very appropriate, I think, that I have such disordered and discombobulated dentition, because, as an ardent Anglophile, my teeth are really the only thing about me that looks remotely English. I know, I know: and a thousand-and-three other stereotypes. So sue me, 'enry, 'iggins.

If I had my pre-teen, tween, and teen years to do over again, there are a few things I would do differently, knowing what I know now about how all that turned out. The biggest thing I would change, besides my name, would be that I would have gotten braces.

Kids are funny little bastards. Some are more delusional than others-- and I was more delusional than most. By the time I turned fourteen or fifteen, I was definitely operating under the misapprehension that, if I got braces, that would somehow be the tipping point (in the bad way) as concerns my personal, aesthetic appearance.

Post Bar Mitzvah, I was forty pounds underweight for my height, with angry, pugnacious acne, frizzy hair, oversized glasses and poor posture-- I was not winning any Campbell's Soup endorsements, let's just put it that way. Maybe I could have scored a March-of-Dimes poster, if my parents had hired me that agent they sometimes talked about back in 1994 when they humored notions that I might turn out to be the star of stage and screen that would save the family from an eternity of middle class doom and less-than-desirable retirement homes.

But, alas and alack-a-day, it was not meant to be.

Whenever my mother or a dental professional would approach me about braces to correct my wayward chompers, I would steadfastly refuse. There was one reason for this: I was awkward enough, and if I was ever going to be the recipient of a handjob performed by someone other than Leftie, I was going to have to at least maintain the status quo, as regrettable as my yearbook pictures evince that it was.

When I turned sixteen, my mother made the mistake of trusting me to drive myself to the dentist for the watershed appointment concerning braces. Out of her eagle-like shadow and presence, I pretended to listen closely as the dentist recited the litany of rational reasons why I should get braces. He handed me the business card of the periodontist who would perform the work and I shook his hand, promising to call that afternoon. As I walked out of the office, I slipped the business card under the windshield wiper of a white Chevrolet Cavalier with a spray-painted front license plate that said, "NIKKI." That was the name of the dental technician from the office.

If I can just maintain, I thought to myself as I got into my car and drove away from that dentist's office, surely the handjobs will follow.

They did not follow. High School was a period of unrelenting romantic failures. Actually, I can't even really honestly call them failures, because, for something to be a failure, it at least has to be attempted. You can't fail at climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro if you are sitting at home in your apartment in Des Moines, drinking Swiss Miss and watching "So You Think You Can Quieff." My high school experience was like a desert, with me occasionally rubbing up against a cactus for comfort.

And I thought it would have been bad if I'd had braces!

Of course, by the time I was handjob material, had I gotten braces when I should have gotten them, the braces would have already been off and my teeth would have been straighter than Bob Dole.

But that's another story.

Today, as a happily married man, I don't so much mind my teeth. At least, not until somebody says something about them. Once, when portraying Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B. in "H.M.S. Pinafore" a nice, elderly lady came up to me afterwards and said,

"Oh, my, you were so funny! Now, tell me-- were those joke teeth?"

A year earlier, a different leathery old crone came up to me after a production of "Patience" and asked if my eyebrows were real. Now that I'm doing "The Sorcerer" I suppose someone will ask me if my head is really a fucking decomposing pumpkin or if my nose is a partially regurgitated apricot.

There's a theory I'm quite fond of about humor, and the theory is that humor, when it's at its most effective, is painful. If that is true, and I believe fondly that it is (haven't you ever experienced acute pancreatic pains during an episode of "Maude"?) then I suppose most of our lives are pretty goddamned funny-- because it's all basically pain, isn't it? A pain in the eyebrows? A pain in the teeth? A pain in the ass. The head. The heart. But we laugh it off as we bite into the core of life, leaving our funny little teethmarks behind.