Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva (34 page)

Fitting into that little black dress in my triumphant return as Ariadne at the London Royal Opera House in June 2008.
Clive Barda / ArenaPAL

The role of my career; the fearless Brünnhilde in
Die Walküre
(with Bryn Terfel) in spring 2011.
Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Interviewing Plácido for a Met
Live in HD
broadcast; transmitting opera to audiences around the world.
Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

My constant companion and faithful sidekick, Steinway, helps out with an
Annie Get Your Gun
photo shoot.
Luke Ratray

Lifting my spirits—and perspective on life—during a recent break in the mountains of Kamikōchi, in the Japanese Alps.

A difficult year ends on an exalted note; singing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, December 2013.
Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

IN THE SPRING
of 2013, after I got home from Liège and as I was en route to my condo in Florida, I drove through a little town that looked like a forgotten corner of another world, lost in time. The streets were crowded with overgrown weeping willows heavy with hanging Spanish moss, giving them a spooky pallor, but for the tiny dots of light peeking out from the darkness. The run-down Victorian homes I passed were decorated with Christmas lights and burning candles on the front porches.

Where was I, the Twilight Zone? I passed a sign:
Cassadaga: The Psychic Capital of the World
. I’d heard of this town; it had been known for its “spiritualistic” camp a century earlier and was now declared a historic site, though most of its original characters were long gone and buried in the local cemetery, rumored to be haunted. The cemetery has a bench nicknamed “the Devil’s Chair,” where, legend has it, if you leave an unopened can of beer on it at night, you’ll find it empty in the morning—but still sealed.

That’s one desperate drinker
, I thought. I’d never been to a psychic before—it’s considered sinful in the Southern Baptist religion to do so. In our house, we weren’t even allowed to have a deck of regular playing cards to play crazy eights as kids. It was drummed
into my head that talking to a psychic was engaging with the devil himself.

But my thoughts on the devil and hell have evolved over the years since the fire-and-brimstone sermons of my childhood. I no longer believed hell was an actual physical place of eternal fire, tortures, and pitchforks. Or that people would automatically be doomed to go there if they hadn’t been dunked in baptismal waters and saved. I came to believe that hell was a state of mind, a place we put ourselves in when we veered off the loving path.

I drove by a pink clapboard bookstore with a hand-painted sign out front:
Psychic Readings! All Welcome!
and found myself pulling over.
What the hell.
I don’t believe anything is random or coincidental in this life.

Inside I met Shane, a tall and lanky twenty-two-year-old with tousled hair to his shoulders and puppy-dog eyes. He wore a faded, tie-dyed T-shirt and looked like a teen idol circa 1972. Just my luck, he was the psychic on duty that afternoon. Shane sat me down at a little table in the back where he’d lit candles and incense and began shuffling a pack of Tarot cards. Before we started, my Christian sensibility kicked in and I needed to clear the pot-scented air.

“Shane, where does God fit into something like this?”

He looked surprised. “What I do is all about God,” he answered. “It’s all about divinity. I get my messages from above. The longer I work on my own faith and ‘let go and let God,’ the stronger my connection with God is, and the clearer my messages become.” Hmmm. I recognized his “let go” phrase from AA and felt an immediate kinship with young Shane.

That satisfied me, and so we began. I didn’t say a word about myself; I wanted to see what, if anything, this kid would come up with. I wasn’t taking any of this too seriously. Shane placed the cards in rows on the table and studied them. A slightly pained expression spread across his unlined face.

“You’ve been through a very difficult several months,” he said,
“both physically and emotionally. You beat yourself up too much. You have to let go of this defeatist attitude, stop banging your head against the wall. It’s not going to get any better until you change your thinking. You’re rubbing two rocks together with rough edges, hoping things will smooth out, but they won’t unless you let go of some things.”

“What things?”

“Old attitudes, old habits, old information and ways of thinking . . . places and relationships that don’t serve you well anymore.”

I didn’t say a word. He flipped a few more cards and smiled.

“There’s a lot of transition that’s going to happen for you in the next six months—a
lot
. It’s going to be a big year for you, a lot of good change—with career, with personal life, with your living situation. You are going to make your life smaller, get rid of excess . . . but that will make your life bigger. You tend to pick up the crumbs, especially in your romantic relationships. It’s going to be a year of less picking up the crumbs so you can be ready for an entire pie.”

I appreciated the kid’s food imagery. I wondered if he was having a psychic vision of me from my old bingeing days. “It was vanilla-coconut cake,” I wanted to correct him, “not pie.” Young Shane kept talking for another twenty minutes about how my entire life was on the verge of a major overhaul, and I silently thought to myself,
I hope so . . . I hope so.

“It will be a year of renewal,” he said, with assurance, wrapping it up. “And now, I’m going to pick two cards from the bottom of the deck. These will be your two dominant cards for the next year.”

He took out the cards and placed them on the table, face up.

“Happiness,” he said, with a grin, “and . . . Peace. Two very good cards indeed.”

I nodded and agreed. He’d said a lot of things that could be true for anyone, I suppose, but they definitely resonated with me in particular. And even if guys like Shane were what the Bible called “false
prophets,” I imagine his words could still be used to inspire a person to make positive changes.

I got up and thanked him, and as I turned to go, Shane asked me his first and only question of the entire thirty-minute session.

“Hey . . . do you sing?”

IT TURNS OUT
that Shane, the teen idol psychic from the mysterious commune of Cassadaga, had been right on all counts.

A few months later I was in rehab, dumped the sometime boyfriend, sold my Florida condo, and broke the lease on my Manhattan apartment. In September, I found a cozy little house in Fort Lee, New Jersey—a fifteen-minute drive over the George Washington Bridge from Lincoln Center but worlds away from the life I’d led for decades. After making such sudden, major changes in my life over the summer in rehab, I wanted to plant myself somewhere solid where my new life could take root and where little Steinway could have a yard to run in. I wanted new scenery and new people to go with my new life choices. I took Steinway for walks and met the neighbors. When they asked me what I did for a living I told them, and I usually got the same amused reaction.

“I thought opera singers were, you know, bigger,” both my plumber and the guy who delivered my new couch said.

“Yeah, well . . .” I smile, but I don’t go into the whole story about my eating addiction and my 333 pounds and all that drama. I take their words as a compliment and move on. As per Shane, I’m letting past information and attitudes go.

Here on the other side of the bridge, I spend my days rehearsing at my piano and going to AA meetings, and my nights learning how to be comfortable by myself, in my own skin. I think of Daniella’s question to me in rehab: “What is it that makes Debbie not want to spend an evening with herself?” I try to examine that as I busy myself reading, watching TV, and writing e-mails. And if a moment pops up when I want to anesthetize myself with drink, and
those moments do come, I remind myself of what they say in AA: “There’s no bad situation that can’t get worse with a drink.” Sobriety is an ongoing process, I have learned—a building upon building of new habits and rewiring of thoughts.

EVERY AGE HAS
its transition, and today, in my early fifties, comes another one as I enter a new phase in my life.

Like many artists who reach success in their field, I’m finding great joy in giving back to young singers who are entering the opera scene. Amazingly, I’m now the age that Jane Paul was when I showed up one day at her studio, a green kid with no direction. Several years ago, my dear friend Jane had a stroke and it’s difficult for her to speak now. But when I gave her the news during our most recent visit together that I was going to sing Brünnhilde, Jane got teary-eyed and mustered up the shieldmaiden’s battle cry as we said good-bye—
Ho jo to ho!—
as her way to say to her student, “I knew you could do it. I’m proud of you.” Had someone told me that day I first met Jane that I would later accomplish what I have, I never would have believed it. I don’t think my family comprehends it, either, even though in our hometown of Placentia there’s a street named after me: Deborah Voigt Avenue.