Don't Dream It, Be It !

This week, the world lost Dolly Parton. So many others have written such wonderful tributes to her that I can't possibly add anything other than to say that when I saw her in "9 to 5", I didn't really clock she was the Grand Ol' Opry singer I had watched on the television with my parents growing up in SW Iowa. She seemed a seasoned actress and was sharing the screen - big time - with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. The film was one of my mom's favorites, and anytime it was on HBO or some other place, she would want to watch it and see the man get his comeuppance.

Now knowing what we all know about her life, career, and especially her philanthropy, she seems almost super human. To have been born so poor your family had to pay the doctor with a sack of flour and then to die so rich in love and giving that all over the world - from Buckingham Palace to the Empire State Building - nations came together for a brief moment to shine pink in memorials; what a great life, great lady, and great musician! (Plus she helped produce "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"!!)

The next day we learned Tim Curry, the eclectic actor/singer who starred in the most influential movie for my generation of burgeoning musical theatre actors, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", had also died at the age of 80. His career was much smaller than many actors, but in each of his roles he left an indelible mark of memorableness, almost eccentric in their diversity but all with his unmistakeable operatic acting that leapt across the screen. I loved him in "Annie" (the movie version of the musical that came out in the 80s) and he was hysterical in "Clue" giving a one-for-the-ages portrayal of the butler Wadsworth.

But it was as Dr. Frank-N-Furter where he gave the performance of a lifetime.

I'd never seen a man in drag. I'd never seen queer portrayals on screen. I'd never imagined the crazed world the characters of TRHPS inhabited - the costumes, the run down mansion, the B movie props, the nostalgia for a lost time, but especially the fact they were aliens (I loved sci-fi movies from an early age). When I was taken as a 16 yr-old sophomore from Council Bluffs, Iowa to a dirty old movie theatre in a crappy part of Omaha, Nebraska for a midnight showing of something I'd never heard of by a bunch of upperclassmen Thespians to "lose" my virginity, I was both petrified and exhilarated.

I'd been out and about already by that age because my parents had let me take part in community theatre shows, which meant I could come home way past midnight and my parents wouldn't bat an eye. The amount of freedom I had as a teenager in high school is staggering to think about. I was independently wealthy by the time I was 13 because I taught piano lessons to little kids. I started out charging them each $13 dollars per month for 30-minute lessons and I had about 6 to 8 students. The math here is hysterical: I'd bring in about $100 a month and that, my friends, was a huge amount of money back in the early 80s. Later I charged more and in my high school years was making about $200 - $300 a month just sitting and helping little kids read music and play simple songs. One Saturday morning of my time and I had money for gas, Taco Bell, movies, shopping at the mall, and taking dates out for dinner.

This gave me an independence that most of my friends didn't have. They had to ask for money from their parents or work really hard at a Long John Silvers closing down the place and cleaning up greasy counters. It allowed me to be my own person, wear the clothes I wanted to wear, and hang out whereever I wanted to hang and with whomever. It's surprising I wasn't doing drugs or having copious amounts of sex in the 80s. But I was having a great deal of FUN and I also figured out how to talk to adults (most of my community theatre friends were adults) and figured out my own set of morals. More importantly, I had a pretty good idea that I was an artist who needed to leave Council Bluffs. I had dreams.

And then that night, Tim Curry came down that elevator in his drag makeup and cape, strutted over to his thrown, surrounded by those quirky choristers, threw off his cape at the perfect musical moment, and revealed a whole new world. The fierceness and boldness of his performance was astonishing. With every subsequent viewing (I think there was a year in HS that we went over 20 times), I studied the moves, the eyes, the silences, and at the end, the vulnerability he showed not just physically, but in his singing voice as well. He taught me quite a lot about singing the truth, singing the lie, and singing the meaning of the text. He taught me many things about what it means to make sense of phrases in the same way that Stresiand and Sinatra did. Today, my sensibilities as a vocal coach, conductor, choreographer, and director have a direct link back to Curry's Frank-N-Furter.

But with all that, there was something in the show that hit hard and profoundly affected me then and still today: "Don't Dream It, Be It". One of the last songs in the final act when the Doctor calls the others (now themselves in corsets, heels and makeup) to "Give yourself over to absolute pleasure" in a floor show sung to an empty theatre. What was this?! Curry sings this short song after being revealed in a great curtain-up on an RKO tower shot. The camera moves in for a close-up thru the empty audience chairs getting to his face (in perfect makeup) for him to ask "Whatever happened to Fay Wray? (she was in "King Kong").

I remember this scene initally not being my favorite scene. Often I would become a bit bored by the over-the-top camp of the floor show. I wasn't aware of burlesque back then, but something about it didn't quite hit. I did love the fresco in the pool (Michelangelo's creation of the spark of life from God to Adam really pleased the atheist in me) and it's subversive message. However, one night I remember finally hearing the text and understanding that this was about releasing your worries, releasing your dreams, and embracing yourself. It just clicked. It gave me a strength of purpose in my life that was hard to explain to others. I didn't need to dream it to be it. I know it sounds simple, but in my 61 years of experience, I can't tell you the thousands of people I've met who never get past the dreaming part.

They never accept who they are, fully released into the world.

Why didn't I drink and party with the adults as a high school kid? I certainly had ample opportunities! Why did I have zero interest in drugs? Why didn't I have sex with all the women in my life who wanted me (some quite desperately if I may so humbly admit)? Why didn't I have sex with the many men who flirted, touched, groped, and frankly got a bit rapey with me from the age of 15? It wasn't a moral high ground, it wasn't a religious upbringing (I was an out atheist and recovering Catholic by the time I was 14). It wasn't fear.

It was that I knew, deep down, that I was my own person and I knew I wasn't ready to share myself with others in any of those ways. I knew I was special, literally, because I could play the piano in ways no one else in my circle could (although that's not something I really ever admitted to anyone because I was from the Midwest!) But I wasn't a "pianist" in high school. I was a theatre nerd, a chemistry geek, a swing choir guy, a tap-dancing chorister, a singer and actor in musicals and plays. Those were my hobbies and pursuits that I could see were adding up to some new version of me the artist. I had never listened to pop music really, but after Dr FnF called me to give myself over, I went out and bought albums by Prince and Michael Jackson and U2 and DePeche Mode and English Beat and The Police. I discovered "The Last Temptation of Christ", "The Inner Game of Tennis", and "Flow". I re-read the Dune books and all of Tolkien's works. I don't think I slept more than 4 hours a night for those three years of high school. I devoured - DEVOURED - pop music, literature, movies, and theatre. Every waking hour was spent doing something other than practicing Ravel or Brahms. But all the rest was getting stored in my brain so I could mix it all up a few years later and break into the one genre that needed all of that: Opera!

But the personal message, "Don't Dream It, Be It" was drilled into my pysche upon so many repeated viewings. I realized I was already in the "Be It" part of the song. So many peers and theatre colleagues had dreams to perform, dreams to maybe be a different kind of person, dreams to find the right partner. But I didn't need dreams, I had myself. I was already in the "It' part of my life.

And I never turned back, except during a brief and incredibly dark period of my life in my sophomore year of college when I almost took my life. Since then, I've embraced the ups and downs of my emotional life. I've embraced the fact that I'm quite eccentric in my habits, I'm quite autistic in my dealings with strangers, I have strange quirks and obsessions that my oldest son calls "Aviator" traits (as in Howard Hughes...) in a fun, smiling, but dad-you're-being-weird-so-stop-it moments. I found a partner who gets me more than I get myself. I found a life in opera that has allowed me to play in all the different playgrounds that the genre allows. Truly a lucky man who sometimes looks back to his high school self and wants to scream "you could have been even more if you'd just practiced your scales!" However, when I'm more at rest in my life, I look back and think just how great my life is and how those formative times in HS really gave me the skills I needed decades later.

So this personal blog is really my simple call to anyone reading this to stop your dreaming and inhabit yourself! Stop looking for others to tell you that you are special. Stop trying to please everyone else by being the life of the party. Try saying 'yes' to life, saying 'yes' to opportunities. Walk through all those doors that open to you and discover if those rooms are places you can shine in, or places that you have no interest in being a part of. Make your own luck by keeping your pores open, your mind open to new ideas, and yourself open to new experiences, people, and ideas.

Stop judging yourself.

Stop judging others. Let them be. I never - never - judged my peers for their choices in life. I did judge their voices, their musicianship, their ability to act - that's different. The minute you stop judging other's choices in life, you can start to ease up on your inner judge telling you you're not ready or not good enough. Stop waiting for a teacher to "fix" your voice. Stop waiting for a coach to give you the right repertoire. Stop waiting for life to begin, start living it now.

And in the immortal words of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, "Let the party and the sound rock on, we're gonna shake it till the life is gone!"

Those are great words of wisdom all young singers and pianists should take to heart. Shake out the music, rock your sound, party the ideas given by the creators, and do it until you can't anymore. It's solid advice for finding Handelian ornaments, working on your top, finding the meaning in symbolist poetry, or for your life in general!

And thanks to both Dolly Parton and Tim Curry for being fantastic and unique persons who were also one-of-a-kind artists. They certainly didn't just dream it, They Were It!