“I hope I get it…..I hope I get it.”

 Most singers hate auditions. I love them!

Maybe it’s because I overcame my failed audition in sixth grade! The teacher walked around the room while we sang a song, listening for people to join her chorus. I wasn’t one.

My dad, who sang in the San Francisco Opera chorus, was furious. He met with the teacher and got me in.

I didn’t take up choral singing seriously until I was in my 60s, inspired by my daughter’s high school chorus. During voice lessons, I was amazed at the sound the teacher uncovered. I thought I was a bass. He insisted I was a tenor, just like my dad.

So I went auditioning. At one prestigious chorus, I was given a copy of “My country ‘Tis of Thee” to sing. Really? I can handle that one.

Later, I really impressed the director of one of the top choruses in a very big city with a solo while he played. But when he gave me a sight-singing test, I was terrible. “You are a follower,” he said. I got in on a conditional bassis. I have heard that “tenors get a pass.” I thought better of it and bowed out.

I failed an audition for a musical, but I joined the diector’s church chorus for the summer. He got to like me. Next year, he gave me a prized role in a great musical.

The oddest audition came at another big chorus.  The director stopped playing a couple of times while I sang. “This isn’t quite right,” he said. Really? I thought I was singing the right notes on a sheet handed me earlier by his assistant.

“Let me look at your music,” I said. “We aren’t working on the same song!” The director was embarrassed.  I got in.

Not all was smooth sailing. I had driven 200 miles to return home for the second re-audition of another chorus. I got a speeding ticket on the way. Traffic was backed up near the audition site. I got frantic.

I bombed the audition. They kicked me out! Well, I did blame the police stop and the fact that I was not planning to stay in that chorus anyway. But I was devastated.

So I found another prestigious chorus holding auditions that same week. I wasn’t sure I wanted this one, but I thought it would make me feel better if I tried it out.

It was a stormy night. The director gave me a song that I had just sung in church the previous week. I nailed it. After a stroke of lightning, the lights went out. When they came back on, the director looked confused. “You seem to know what you are doing,” he said. God wanted me there! I joined.

Childhood trauma from shrieking high notes

 

My friends know that I love jazz. Few know that I am really an opera child.

During World War II, the San Francisco Opera had trouble finding men for its chorus. So my  dad, Philip Doan, got one of the positions, partly because he had a deferment for working at Standard Oil.

He loved singing the great music of Verdi, Wagner and Puccini, but he was awfully loud around the house. He would swear when he missed a high note, unnerving us all.

As a baby, my parents played opera music around the house, hoping it would stick with me. I thought they said they did that in utero too, but that sounds ridiculous.

Opera didn’t really click with me, but I loved the pop tunes of the early 1950s. This was too early for rock ‘n’ roll. This was Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney and Mitch Miller. That irritated my father, no end. My youthful rebellion.

My biggest exposure to opera came on several train trips to follow my dad and the opera on tour. I’ve told this before: the great baritone Salvatore  Baccalone sat me on his lap and asked if I would be a tenor like my father when I grew up. “Nobody’s gonna make a tenor outta me!” I said (Wrong!)

 The opera company traveled to the unsophisticated sticks: Seattle, Portland, Sacramento. And oh—the sleepy hamlet of Los Angeles, which did not have an opera company!

In L.A., we always stayed at the Figueroa Hotel, which would serve Carmen Salad, Figaro roast beef and Faust potatoes for the whole opera company. I ca’t believe it—I actually sang my pop songs to the old ladies in the lobby.

Once, when I was 10, in 1952, the Long Beach Boys’ Choir did not have enough kids for La Boehme, and my father enlisted me to perform without singing.

Wow, what an adventure that was! They had huge doors at the Shrine Auditorium to  let in horses ocasionally. Really? On stage? I looked off the stage and realized that performers can’t see the audience because of the lights.

The role of a street urchin was a lot of fun, but I was jealous when I found out that the other kids had stolen real food off the pretend food carts (or was it backstage?)   Why didn’t I get any?

Though I was now a skilled, experienced opera performer, my next gig didn’t come for another 60 years. After I took voice lessons, I talked a singer I knew into getting me into a little opera company’s shows in Washington. It put on performances at embassies, inviting 100 or so wealthy guests to feast on dinner and see their costly shows. I found it challenging to learn the music for La Forza del Destino and Tosca, and I sort of tagged along with the professionals around me in the chorus. Best of all, they gave us free food at the end of the show.

For five years, I did publicity for Opera Nova, a small Arlington group that put on one-hour condensed operas for school children. Why would they like opera? Because the plots are ridiculous, there is sword-fighting and screaming. I loved interviewing the children afterward to get their reactions.

Do I follow opera now? Well, not really. I did go to some Metropolitan Opera performances in the movies but I always nodded off by the second act. And I fell asleep during my one visit to the real Metropolitan Opera 10 years ago during Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

But I do still sing, mostly choral music and old standards with my piano.  Now I am the one shrieking high notes at home, irritating those around me.