Betsy Burke - Performance Anxiety

Second, Tina and I shared one big fundamental problem. Music theory. They had it. We didn’t. When the guilty party, the only floating elementary-school music teacher in the town of Cold Shanks, discovered early in our lives that we had voices, she’d done her best to bang the notes into us any old way she could, so we’d done all our learning by ear. Written music had no more meaning than mouse prints on train tracks for us. We had a lot of lost time to make up for when we arrived at university. But we had something huge in our favor:

We loved music.

I loved music so much that when I was a little kid, I used to grab other little kids on the playground, kids I knew who were getting more music lessons than me, and tell them, “Sing or I’ll hit you.” I never stopped until I’d bullied their whole repertoire out of them.

Tina and I missed Cold Shanks badly those first years. We would swap stories over beer and junk food and wax nostalgic about cowboys, big hair and big steaks. Together we worked on self-improvement. We practiced talking like high-brow musical prodigies and peed ourselves laughing. The other singers in the department were so smart-ass and vegetarian. And they were always going on about their biorhythms. I thought a biorhythm was a new kind of beat from the Bayou.

Later, I was sorry that I hadn’t known Tina earlier. That we hadn’t sat around on the porch on dusty afternoons snapping the ends off my mother’s garden green beans, singing duets. Mine had been a lonely childhood.

My mom, after leaving my father and dragging me back to Canada from England, had dated a series of losers before she met and married Lyle. Lyle had his own auto-body shop, and although he wasn’t quite a loser…more of a flatliner…the first time I had a part in an opera, his comment was, “Jeez, Miranda, I’ll come and see ya if I have to, but just don’t expect me to stay awake while a bunch of fags in tights scream their lungs out up on a stage.”

When I was sixteen, Mom and Lyle’s twins were born and I was ignored. They were both boys, both blond and adorable, and both a total eclipse of my personal sun.

Onstage in the first part of act 1, we twirled our parasols and shuffled along with that knock-kneed walk that was required of geishas. I watched the conductor as much as I could without falling over my feet. I love to watch Kurt at work. At one point, he winked at me. I’m sure he did. I know every other chorus woman was convinced he was winking at her. But there was nothing to be done about it. Kurt has charm and everyone wants to be touched by it.

Now, if you don’t know already, here’s what happens in Madama Butterfly.

In the opening, the geisha dancer, Madama Butterfly, better known as Cio-Cio-San, marries Pinkerton, an American navy officer. She’s only fifteen and she’s soooo stupid, because if she had stuck her ear to the shogi, the wall screen, before putting on her matrimonial kimono, she would have heard Pinkerton blabbing on about a real American wife that he intended to marry sometime in the future.

No wonder he’s so casual about his own wedding.

But Cio-Cio-San has cotton in her ears, and cotton between her ears, if you ask me. When she marries him, she renounces her own religion to embrace Pinkerton’s Christian religion. When her family and friends find out, they all turn their backs on her.

Take a lesson, girls.

Pinkerton then boinks his bride and leaves.

And stays away for three years.

Okay, so there were no airline seat sales in those days.

Cio-Cio-San asks Sharpless, the American consul, how often the robins nest in the United States. Pinkerton promised to return when the robins next nested, so they apparently don’t nest as often in the States as they do in Japan.

Nice reasoning, Cio-Cio-San.

So three years pass.

At this point, they all know what she doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know. Everybody’s trying to talk Cio-Cio-San into divorcing Pinkerton and marrying the wealthy Prince Yamadori.

Take the Prince! Take the Prince!

But this must be looooovvvvveeeee. Because she says that although the law in Japan might permit it, the law in her new country, America, wouldn’t.

Sharpless reads her a letter from Pinkerton that announces his marriage to an American woman. But Cio-Cio-San has difficulty comprehending (all that cotton between her ears) and then slowly she starts to figure it out.

Only three years too late.

She brings out her big surprise bomb, her and Pinkerton’s little boy. She’s named him Trouble.

Got the name right anyway, Cio-Cio-San.

Then Pinkerton and his American wife arrive in Japan, and come to see Cio-Cio-San. Pinkerton stays outside to talk to Sharpless. Cio-Cio-San, who has been hiding, wonders who this other woman is. Cio-Cio-San comes out of hiding and is polite as she and the American wife introduce themselves.

The American wife leaves and Cio-Cio-San learns from Sharpless that the Pinkertons are willing to adopt the child.

Naturally, she freaks.

Cio-Cio-San sends word to Pinkerton that he should come back by himself in half an hour and get the child.

Things go downhill from there. Cio-Cio-San gets even more freaked out and starts waving her father’s dagger around. She ties a blindfold around her little boy’s eyes, sticks an American flag in his hand, and when Pinkerton comes back, Cio-Cio-San makes herself into a human shish kebab and drops dead. All this before she’s even reached the age of twenty.

Who says opera is boring?

Out of the geisha clogs and into the Adidas. There was no women’s chorus in the last part of the opera, so Tina and I were dressed and out of the theater well before Pinkerton had moaned out his last grief-stricken “Butterfly.” Tina was on her way to the Media Club for a beer with some of the techies and musicians, but I had to go straight home.

I had loads to do before Kurt arrived that night. I’d given him a set of keys to my place. Caroline could get a little bolshie with me if she found out he had keys, but I didn’t care. She was paying less rent for the smaller bedroom, so I considered myself the major shareholder.

I raced up the front steps of my Bute Street building and on into the apartment. Caroline was out I quickly discovered. I gave the place a superficial cleaning. Then I took over the bathroom and set about scrubbing away all the day’s grunge before Kurt arrived. I had a long hot shower, then oiled my body with white-musk scent, put on my pale blue bathrobe and went into the bedroom to wait for him. I fell promptly asleep, damp bathrobe and all.

I was woken by the sensation of warm skin next to mine. Kurt had managed to slip into my room, undress, undo my bathrobe and press up next to me without my waking up. I pulled back and said, “Kurt.” His put his fingers up to his mouth to signal no more words.

I was perfectly prepared to let our bodies do the talking. In the dim lamplight, I studied all of him. He was very tall, with slender but muscular arms and legs, longish blond hair, piercing blue eyes and intelligent mouth. He had an erection, but when I tried to do something about it, he grabbed my wrist, hard, pushed me back down on the bed and began to move all over me with his tongue, exploring hill and dale. Well, more dale than hill. And then finally, when the orgasm swept through me, I realized he’d made me come with his hands. Abruptly and frenetically, he started jerking against me and came himself in a little pool on my stomach.

This wasn’t going at all the way I’d planned.

“Kurt,” I said, “if you’re worried about birth control and such things, I’m prepared for this, you know.” I rummaged in the drawer of my bedside table, pulled out some fresh new high-quality condoms, and held them up triumphantly for him to see.