Notes from Under the Piano

Sometimes right in the middle of making dinner or playing Encyclopedia, my mother would just start doing Diamond Lill. She loved many of the characters she inhabited on midwestern community theater stages (and one riverboat) in those years, but her attraction to Diamond Lill was special, joyful. Brought the twinkle to her eye like men on motorcycles with rolled up sleeves.

I can still see the twinkle, but I had to turn to The Great ReSource for the rest.

Turns out distinguishing between Diamond Lill myth and reality is impossible, and it’s more fun not to try. Any literary folk looking for a dissertation topic, this might qualify.

The Real Diamond Lill(s)

Just as unlikely is pinning down the origin of Frankie and Johnny. I thought it was either Cash or Dylan, and I learned it on my first guitar.

Here’s the list of more than 250 recordings of “Frankie and Johnny”, if anyone wants to join me on a quest to listen to all of them.

I read that Mae West, as Diamond Lill, sang “Frankie and Johnny” in the climactic scene of her play Diamond Lill in NY in 1928. I can’t untwist it all. There’s a character “based on” Diamond Lill in a play a few years later called “She Done Him Wrong”.

Oh, and neither has anything to do with the play Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune, or the exquisite film version that followed (Pacino, Pfeiffer).

The next year she was Bloody Mary in South Pacific. I was about five, and it was dress rehearsal. I knew her name was Bloody Mary and she wiggled her hips a lot. I knew “Bali Hai” was a beautiful song and “Happy Talk” was kinda stupid. My dad was a sailor; he had a cool hat.

I was just rolling along, clueless and happy, until my daddy said “You never give me nothing for free” and my mother spit (!) at him and said: “You no sexy like Lui-tellan”.

I cried and told her I didn’t like her being mean to him. He assured me that the spit was fake and he was unharmed; he promised I would get to see him dance in the grass skirt with the coconut boobs later.

This little empathology plus the forgetfulness memorialized elsewhere led to my rejecting acting - or acting rejecting me, early on. In a high school speech class, we attempted a scene from Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. I was playing the kid who whispered the Big Secret into the ear of whomever was in the chair with her eyes covered. She was to leap up in shock, so I had to provide the cue for the leaping up. The secret itself was unscripted and no one hears it, so we decided that the cue would just be for me to whisper “go” in her ear when everyone was in place and the tension was right. Well, the tension was right because instead of whispering “go” to cue the leap, I shouted it. Right in her ear. I might’ve also stamped my foot a little. The leap was quite convincing; that kid became the actress. I decided I’d stick to singing songs dramatically.

My mom had long wanted to play Golde in Fiddler on the Roof. Back in the day, she and my dad would sing Golde and Tevye’s “Do You Love Me?” I frequently requested it because I liked the idea of them loving each other and I knew singing together was love. There was even a little harmony at the end.

She almost got her wish. She was selected at audition to play Golde to Shelley Berman’s Tevye at the Genesee in Waukegan before it died in the eighties like our innocence. Anyway, Berman threatened to pull out if they put him opposite a non-union actress, and she didn’t have enough qualifying stage hours to join Equity. She ended up getting wasted that night and making a comic drunken horror story out of my sister’s birthday. I’ll write that once I’m sure the waiter can’t still be alive.

She then did pure heartbreak as Fraulein Schneider in Cabaret. Besides the laryngitis that plagued her up to the week before the show, another challenging feature of this part was the German accent. She was hell-bent on getting it right. We worked the line ten thousand times, her in a whisper at times, all Rs and Gs.

“I regret… very much… returning the fruit bowl. It is truly magnificent. I regret… everything.”

Every musical from that era had a buxom brunette with a spine to complement the breakable blond lead. My mother felt resigned to those roles; she made it about her body - that she’d somehow fallen short and fat of being that other, prettier, girl.

I didn’t understand all the stories in those shows but I knew when she was happy or sad or proud or scared and no matter how the story went I always thought her character was the hero.

All the roles my mother loved were women who did what they had to do to survive. She loved a story - like Diamond Lill’s - where they got their reward at the end. She loved a happy ending where it’s an earned rescue - a heroine, not a damsel in distress. She loved funny parts, flirty parts, and she always played the strongest woman in the room.

Most people think of Man of La Mancha as a silly story about a crazy old man. The singing disguises the casting of hope as an act of rebellion.

One doesn’t consider Aldonza. Her big song has this fun flamenco movement, and the words easily trip our biases; mostly male directors have treated her role as “color”, “tragic romance”. It seems she’s saying she’s not good enough for Don Quixote, and the classists in the theater seats agree.

Only she’s really making us see she knows he is not strong enough for her. Somehow we’re still supposed to let his heartbreak eclipse hers.

I was a single digit age, lying on the floor under the piano, admiring the shiny wood of its underside. I felt her every tiny shift on the bench; I always knew when she was gonna press the pedal. The little rod rose and fell in the opposite direction of her sneaker. She was wearing those little socks that aren’t even socks; they’re like shoe underwear that sticks out a little at the top.

I felt every word of Aldonza’s song, the pain, the rage, but shame? Not a drop. Anguish and strength were equal, at first. But grief and rage subside, while strength keeps building itself. And strength is something to be proud of.

A Horse Named Sue

Beltane