Madame Galina's Doings Diary

Wasted Sympathy

Sharing a recital evening with Galina. Photo: Herring Bone Design.

I hear that people are wasting sympathy on Maria, the insane soprano mentioned in my Look What I Did, Mum blog.

Don’t.

I met Maria when we sold programmes at the Royal Opera House. Among the foyer staff then were a future Creative Director of Classic FM, an Evening Standard fashion editor, a Living TV producer, the winner of the Royal Academy Portrait Competition, Janine Limberg’s son, a dominatrix, and Dominic. Maria and I were starting out on the road to fame in the top flight opera houses around the world.

When Maria, from a rural backgrond, was exposed to the fags front of house she was desperate to be hag to them. Simon and Alessandro, the two most outrageous ones, used to dress her up. After a trip with them to Brick Lane one Sunday, she came to work wearing a Soviet Army coat dyed canary yellow, green dm’s and a bowler hat tied on with a veil.

Maria is a walking How Not To of a singer. She has a rare and outstanding natural instrument and had good solid training. When she graduated from Music College, she got a number of tours singing Queen of the Night in progressively bigger companies. It may have led one day to the major ones, who knew. She was on the ladder. Covent Garden and Glyndebourne to aim at, ENO, Opera North, Scottish Opera, Opera Northern Island, down through the regionals and the taking-in houses, the catchments getting smaller as you go. Opera East of England, Opera West of England, Opera South of the M25, right down to Opera the Two Men Who Wear Cravats and run the antique shop in the village and have opera in their barn.

But for Maria, singing is a spiritual calling.

“You put out into the universe what you want to achieve and breathe yourself into a performing zone where inspiration comes from above. What people want from you onstage is a gorgeous frock, fabulous hair and passion. Oh, and arias with top e’flats. Then the standing ovations will happen automatically. And you can spend your time off-stage having a lifestyle”.

She actually spends her time off-stage earning her living as a nurse. And even then her nobility gets in the way of her lifestyle. I did a lot of house-sitting in Aldeburgh, and advised Maria to register with the local private nursing agency.

"The place is teeming with bed-ridden ex-debutantes from the pre-war era, Maria. You could make a killing."

I swear she missed that one.

"Thank you for putting that out into the space for me", she said. "But I prefer to work in the National Health Sector."

She likes the little victories.

“There’s no achievement in running one, as you call it, bed-ridden ex-debutante from the pre-war era ship shape, it has to be a ward full of the working class. And I can see a difference in two days of me getting in there. Up and down taking them to the toilet all night? That stops. I tell them “no second cup” at Horlicks time”.

She prides herself on her very high patient recovery rate. See, what I skirted tactfully round saying before was that she got a lot of Queen of The Night gigs because she is a fright to look at. Six feet tall. Six feet two in her special nurses’ shoes, black and cherry shaggy perm, face like a jugged hare, bedside manner that led to her nickname Attila the Honey. Wake up to that looming with a bedpan. You would recover. Out of that bed, down the old flesh, piss and Dettol smelling corridors, out through the doors of A. and E. like a scene from Holby City played on fast reverse. Arse hanging out of your backless gown.

But, as I say, don’t waste any sympathy on her. Do you know what she did?

Late last century, we split the costs of hiring Lauderdale House in North London and tried out appropriate repertoire, inviting expert friends along with family and accepting their feedback in a considered and professional way, with a view to giving a second recital to an audience of agents and opera producers. In your dreams. We diva’d around like idiots for the night.

But the point is, the only people I knew that came to see us were my mother and her three gay friends. They were lovely, cuddly, theatre-going gays, with an odd hobby in common: seeing how many things they could buy from Marks and Spencer and return. Once a month they had a race from the branch in Oxford Street to the one at Marble Arch. They were a gang mainly because they had all lost their virginity to American GI’s during the war. As Philip said:

“That’s why everyone thanks the yanks for joining in the wars. Providing everyone with chewing gum, nylons and all their front and/or back bottom needs”.

Don’t look like that. You know what Sol Bernstein said, don’t you?

“You don’t have queers, Jews and gypsies, you don’t get theatre”.

Anyway, Maria had lots and lots of gays out front. Gays love a mother earth figure giving it her all. Or, in Maria’s case, making a dick of herself dressed and made-up by Alessandro and Simon. They had put her hair in ringlets, overdone the autumnal colours and squeezed her into a white envelope dress draped in a green diaphanous cloak. She looked like the brunette Fat Slag in a tableau depicting the Titanic and the iceberg.

During one of her arias in the first half she counted the gays. In the interval she said to me,

“Out of the audience of nineteen, four of them belong to you, fourteen to me, and there’s the usual barmy woman who comes to everything like this dressed as a bridesmaid. I don’t think it’s fair you should get to sing the whole of her song cycle in the second half. Based on the percentages, I think you should sing only two out of the eight songs - and that’s being generous - or take a smaller percentage of the takings.”

“That’s not fair…”

“I’ll go to town with the encores”, she threatened.

I went home with slightly more than my return tube fare. But anything to stop Maria singing (all of) The Saga Of Jenny, Climb Ev’ry Mountain or I Feel Pretty -which she delivered with no hint of self-parody and had the audience not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Or, as the woman who always comes to these things dressed as a bridesmaid said in the interval of the recent sell out one off spectacular Maria Live At An Islington Old Peoples’ Home,

“Feeling rather queasy.”

Posted by Madame Galina2 at October 27, 2006 10:26 AM