Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (32 page)

They told me to start, so I told my parents what the counselors had already said—the unresolved tension between them was keeping me locked in the unhealthy emotional patterns I’d learned as a child in order to cope with it. Amazingly, my parents got to the heart of the matter in the first few minutes.

My father, who had been working very hard on learning to express himself, spoke first.

“I don’t think you ever forgave me for marrying Lynn,” he said to my mother. “I know I cheated on you and left you to be with her, but you have to forgive me for this, for everyone’s sake. It’s been long enough.”

“What are you talking about?” Mom answered. “We had that meeting when Debbie sang at Carnegie Hall seven or eight years ago and we all went to see her together and you told me you were sorry, and I told you that I forgave you.”

Dad looked surprised. He could tell Mom wasn’t making it up. “Well,” he said sadly, “I guess I didn’t feel you really meant it, that you hadn’t really forgiven me . . . because of the way you still treat Lynn and me.”

Over the next thirty minutes, I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. My head swiveled back and forth like I was following the ball in a tennis match. My parents were communicating with each other—calmly—in a way I had never seen.

As they talked together and sorted it out with the counselors’ help, I had a sense memory—my very first memory from childhood: me as a little girl, age three, watching them argue as Mom cried and packed a suitcase and Dad slumped against the bedroom door frame. The image had been frozen, stuck, deep in my memory, and now it began to rise and dissipate. The pain linked to the memory began to fade. As Mom and Dad talked in front of me and forgave each other and even smiled at each other, I felt a childhood burden lift from my shoulders.

AS FOR THE
men in my life, I already knew I’d been picking men who resembled my (formerly) distant and temperamental father because it was familiar to me. They were men to whom I could never say what I thought or felt for fear there’d be some sort of repercussion—I’d either be punished, hurt, ignored, or abandoned. I also saw that I’d spent time with them no matter how horrible they were, just so I wouldn’t be alone.

“What is it that Deborah Voigt doesn’t like about Debbie?” asked Daniella during one of our last sessions together. “What makes you not want to spend an evening with yourself?”

I wasn’t sure. Maybe I wasn’t even sure who “Debbie” was. Over the last three decades—role by role, trait by trait—I had become Amelia, Ariadne, Minnie, Brünnhilde, Lady Macbeth, Salome, and Isolde. Where do these characters end and where do I begin?

“Here is your homework for tonight,” she instructed. “I want you to write down on a piece of paper who you are offstage. I want you to give me five sentences.”

I lay down in my little cot while my roommate was out on the
cool kids’ patio that night and thought about it. It took me a long time, but I came up with three.

I’m a sister.

I’m a daughter.

I’m an aunt.

One of the last exercises we did at rehab was to draw our lives. The counselors put on sappy music (think: “Wind Beneath My Wings” and “You Light Up My Life”) and gave us each big sheets of paper and a box of crayons. We had to draw a “Tree of Life” that showed our past, including both good and bad, and a “Tree of Hope” that showed where we wanted to go for our future.

My Tree of Life had musical notes and God in the sky and little Steinway playing on the branches, and me as a little girl singing in church, and in the branches’ shadows I drew the men who had broken my heart and bottles of liquor with a poison “X” over the top of each one. My Tree of Hope also had God, Steinway, and music . . . but it included an added feature: me in love, happy, and free.

That’s why one morning, the day before leaving rehab, I was ready to do what had previously been impossible.

Jason and I had kept in touch a little by e-mail while I was away, and now I was ready to send him a last one—a final goodbye letter. Both my counselor and psychologist drilled it home to me that I had too many issues with attachment and abandonment that made our romance dangerous for me.

“If you go back into this relationship,” the psychologist told me, “you will pick up a drink. You can’t afford to wait until you don’t want Jason anymore to break up with him. You have to change your behavior first,” she said. “The emotions will change as a result.”

My team decided I should do it while I was still in the controlled environment of rehab, in case I went into an emotional tailspin. They looked over my shoulder as I logged onto my e-mail at the computer in the common area and began typing:

I logged off and closed down the computer.

The next day was Sunday and I’d promised my new friends I’d sing in church—there was a little chapel on site that held nondenominational services. At the end of the sermon, I went up front and sat at the piano. I started with the song, “This Heart That Flutters,” based on a poem by James Joyce and composed by Ben Moore. Then I segued seamlessly into my favorite gospel hymn from my childhood church choir days, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

It felt so comfortable and familiar up there, singing a hymn I loved for people who did not come to judge me but came to listen to a beautiful tune and root me on. I felt five years old again, singing in church, or in Grandma Voigt’s living room.

My rehab-mates sat on the edges of their plastic chairs with their mouths open. Not one had ever been to an opera before, never mind felt the goose-bumping effect of a big-voiced dramatic soprano ten feet away from their eardrums, belting it out for God.

As I sang, I could feel that indelible, mystical connection between me, the song, and the audience—a bond I’d felt since childhood, an invisible force of sacred energy and light we shared together.

When I finished, there was a moment of silence. Then all thirty of them jumped to their feet, clapping and whistling.

There’s a ritual audiences used to do in my early days of performing that I always loved. At the end of an excellent show, they’d stand up and rip their programs into ribbons and toss them into the air. Joe Volpe hated it because it meant so much cleaning up afterward—which is probably why no one does it anymore. But I loved it; it was like being showered with confetti and streamers like at a big birthday celebration.

That’s how I felt when I saw my audience jump to their feet—like it was my birthday and the start of a new life. Even though they were somewhat captive, like my family in Grandma’s living room, they were one of the best audiences I ever had.

As I stood there, I realized that no matter what happened in future days, months, or years, no one could ever take this away from me:

You are here to sing.

God told me so, and I was going to keep doing it—on the opera stage or on the rooftops of the world.

I stood up from the piano and smiled, giving my rehab-mates an overly dramatic bow with plenty of melodramatic flourish. I wanted them to receive the full diva effect, after all, and get their $33,000-per-seat money’s worth.

The next morning I packed my Bible, libretto, and Trees of Life and Hope into my suitcase and left the facility, stepping into the sunlight.

I wasn’t afraid. I had faith in myself.

And if Puccini and Verdi didn’t see fit to compose happy endings for their tragic heroines, then this reluctant, down-to-earth diva was going to write one for herself.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practicing my scales while still in diapers, age two.

One of my early acting roles at age seven: a Southern Belle in Mom’s homemade costume.

A churchgoing family, on our way to “dedicate” baby Kevin in the Southern Baptist faith, circa 1968.

By thirteen, my new repertoire included ballads by my idol, Karen Carpenter, and Broadway show tunes.

Hiding my braces in my grad photo at El Dorado High, the year I performed in
The Music Man.