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."

An Open Letter to the D-Bags Sitting in Front of Us At the Opera

Dear D-Bags,

Hi.

I'm the guy who was sitting in back of you last night at the Academy of Music for the Savoy Opera Company's production of The Pirates of Penzance. You probably don't remember me, but I remember you.

What I remember vividly was you screwing around on your fucking Blackberries. During the overture. It's funny-- Sullivan didn't compose many of the overtures himself, usually leaving that task to colleagues like Alfred Cellier, who arranged the Pirates overture. Do you know why Sullivan didn't compose many of the overtures himself? Because of inconsiderate, shitnecked little fucktitties like you.

Sullivan was extremely dismayed after opening night of Yeomen of the Guard. He took great pains to compose a beautiful, soaring overture-- and the audience talked all the way through it. He swore that he would never compose another overture himself again. Of course, he also was always swearing that he would never work with Gilbert again. And again. And again. And he always did. And he wrote two more overtures himself, for the Gondoliers and The Grand Duke. And I'm sure people talked all through those, too.

People like you.

You see, people have been rude dicklicks in every century. They've always found ways to be self-important little tadgers, but now cellphones make it so much easier to be an asshole in a dark theatre. The iridescent glow from your screens are so distracting and so obnoxious.

I realize that you must be extremely important, you waifish, slightly intoxicated blonde tramp with your metrosexual husband thing. An on-call neurovascular surgeon, perhaps? The mayor of Seattle in for a visit? A CIA operative? Or maybe you're General David Patraeus after undergoing a covert gender reassignment procedure.

Maybe.

But you're probably just an asshole.

Did you like how, after the overture concluded, I made it a point to clap extremely loudly and extremely close to your left ear? That's my passive/aggressive way of saying,

"Hi. I'd like to bury your Blackberry inside your cerebellum."

You're lucky it was me and not my hotblooded, Israeli father sitting behind you, or he would have killed you with a Mossad tactical maneuver that involves the rapid insertion of a big, hairy thumb into the back of your skull.

It's funny-- I was outraged at paying $50.00 for a theatre ticket, but I did it anyway because a friend of mine was in this show, and I love Gilbert & Sullivan like I love little else. I thought that, by paying $50.00 for a seat that I had paid for my right to witness this show in relative freedom for annoyances or disruptions. You paid $50.00 for a theatre ticket, and you believe that paying this amount gave you the right to behave like a total asshole-- snickering at your texts and private, very loudly whispered jokes all through the first act. You obviously wanted to be somewhere else, and that was clearly indicated by the fact that you and your annoying companions left at intermission.

I realize that you're too uncultured to appreciate Sullivan's music and that you're too stupid to understand any of Gilbert's humor anyway, so it's just as well that you buggered off to go get even more drunk at some ridiculous hipster bar where you pay way too much for drinks you don't even like and drunktext your soulless, vapid friends who don't care about you.

You had no business being at that show. You weren't socially awkward or wearing a bowtie, you didn't have buck-teeth or a back-parting or seersucker trousers or saddle-shoes. Gilbert & Sullivan is clearly not your speed. And I'm glad you realized that early, so that my wife and I could enjoy Act II-- the entrance of the delightfully timid constables, the clever device of invoking Queen Victoria's name, the delightful plot contrivance and the most ingenius paradox.