A Little Bit Wicked (5 page)

My aunt Roselan heard there was going to be an all-out national talent search for a little girl to play Little Orphan Annie in the movie version of the Broadway musical and declared that I could sing as well as anyone else they were going to dig up. She and Mom took me to Oklahoma City to audition, and I got called back and actually advanced all the way to the screen test with just a few other girls. I think what sank me was when they asked me if I was familiar with the comic strip, and my answer sounded something like “Ah don’t know innythang about it, but Ah kin larn it.”

Mom tried to coach me on the dialect, but that was the blonde leading the blonde.

“Think about that Barbra Streisand song,” she said, affecting a spavined Brooklynese.
“Sam, yuz made the pants too long.”

Mom should not be allowed to sing either. All that did was give us something to crack up laughing about all the way home after I didn’t get the part. Of course, I loved the idea of getting to be in a realiotrulio movie with Carol Burnett, whom I worshiped and wanted to
be,
but none of us seriously expected that to happen. The excursion began and ended as something fun to do, so there was no disappointment. Fun was had. Mission accomplished. Mom and I were entirely taken aback when we saw the way some people treated it like guerrilla warfare. Armed with professional headshots and résumés, they drilled and agonized and clearly regarded every other soul in the room as an enemy. Same with the little Oklahoma Kids talent competition I participated in. There were some rabid stage mothers in that greenroom,
let me tell ya, and for their kids, the experience neither began nor ended as fun. How sad is that for a little child? On the off, off, off, off—and did I mention
off
?—chance that such a thing would lead to a big break in showbiz, how likely is it that the person would enjoy a single moment of his or her working life?

My mom and dad didn’t know about professional headshots or any of that stuff. They didn’t even know what they didn’t know. They felt their job was to encourage me in whatever direction made me happy. I was a
kid;
happiness was the object of the game. Looking back, I see how this just-for-fun approach benefited me throughout my career. I’ve had to make some tough choices: a regular spot on
The West Wing
or a new musical called
Wicked,
a role in the solidly successful Broadway hit
Annie Get Your Gun
or a completely experimental character in
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
That’s just two. There have been many others, including the recent
Frankenstein
or
Daisies
jawbreaker. I never make decisions that angle for advance or grab for money; it’s always about the fun factor, the challenge, the joy of working with people I like and respect.

A room of my own. A big yard to roam.

Literally and figuratively, that’s what my parents gave me.

“‘As the clock was now half past the hour of noon’” Karla’s poem continues, sweet and unaffected, “‘he knew he’d better get home very soon.’”

It’s almost time for me to sing. I’m supposed to do “Amazing Grace.” A cappella. Which seemed like a good idea at the time I said I would do it. Now not s’much.

Keep on keepin’ on,
I tell myself, nails to my palm.
Keep on keepin’ on.

“Just look at the clock,” whispers my cousin Kim. “You’ll be fine.”

Kimbo’s always been a regular font of folk wisdom. When we were
little, she told me the best way to see if a cow pie was fresh or dry was to stick my foot in it. This worked especially well with my brand-new Holly Hobbies socks. Another time she told me, “A man and a woman go into the woods and get naked, the woman gets on the man’s shoulders, and they pray to God about what kind of baby they want, and that’s where babies come from.”

Something about this just didn’t ring right to me.

“Mom?” I said when I got home. “When people go naked in the woods, and the woman is on the man’s shoulders, and God gives them the baby—what if they get a baby with no arm? Do some people ask for a baby with no arm? Or do you have to ask specifically for a baby with two arms?”

Mom looked at me for a long moment, then turned her head toward the dining room door and called,
“Jerry!”
Dad came in, got a whiff of what the conversation was about, and experienced a burning desire to mow the lawn. Immediately. As the conversation continued, it became sadly clear to me that Mom knew nothing about the real facts of where babies came from. (She thought it had something to do with a
penis,
the poor dear.)

Karla keeps it together admirably, but I’m a mess by the time she gets to the end.

“‘But this last Sunday afternoon, they were reunited in Heaven, with so many other kin. But I’m sure Grandma was awaitin’ and wonderin’ where had he been? She probably met him and said,
What took you so long? For you always knew you were my very best friend.
’”

We hug each other as she’s on her way back to her seat and I’m on my way up to the podium, which I am now tall enough to see over. Just barely. I peek around it, step to the side. That gets a good laugh. But now my heart fills up. My larynx doesn’t feel right. Instead of looking at the clock, I look at my freshly orphaned father, and I’m crying. Sitting next to Dad is his sister Judy. She smiles at me, carefully forming silent words, just moving her lips.

You don’t have to,
she tells me.

After Grandma died, I brought Judy up to New York to see me do
The Apple Tree
and a concert at the Met, and while she was there, she gave me my grandmother’s diamond-and-opal ring.

“Here,” she said, pressing it into my hand. “I want you to have this.”

“Aunt Judy, no. I can’t. You should keep it.”

“It’s too tiny to fit anyone but you,” she laughed. “Wear it when you sing. That way your grandma will be with you.”

Aunt Judy and I have always been close, but it seems as if she’s been more expressive of her feelings since she came down with breast cancer. She’s a farm wife who also works a job in town, and she’s worked steadily through her chemo, scheduling treatments on Fridays so she could be sick over the weekend. She keeps on keepin’ on. How can I not put one foot in front of the other when I have women like this in my life to show me how it’s done?

I sing “Amazing Grace.” It sounds like I swallowed tacks.

“I’m sorry,” I tell Aunt Judy in the limo on the way to the cemetery. “That was awful.”

She takes my hand and says, “Kristi. This wasn’t a performance. It was perfect.”

“No one else can ask me to sing at their funeral. I’m never doing this again.”

“What? You’re certainly going to sing at my funeral,” says my mother.

I look at her as if she did actually reinstall the oven upside down. “Mom. Are you high?”

That gets a good laugh.

P
eople don’t believe me when I tell them about Hum Dum Ditty. It sounds too folksy to be true, but I assure you, it’s as real as Southern Comfort. Writers found the name so charming, they decided to use it in an episode of My Huge Hit Sitcom
Kristin
on NBC. (Huge hit. We’re talkin’ Zsa Zsa Gabor doghouse huge. Ask anyone in my extended family.) People called BS on it and said I was too nice to be true. That’s an image problem I’ve been aware of since eighth grade, when a girl named Jill cornered me in the girls’ bathroom and said, “Why are you so freakin’
happy
all the time? It makes me want to beat you up.”

Half her size and truly astonished, I stammered, “But—but look at me. I’m not even worth the punch.”

Substitute the word
critic
for
Jill
and you have a scenario that has played out several times during my career, and it never ceases to astonish me.

Anyway. Elvis had his fried peanut-butter, bacon, and banana sandwich; I’ve got my Hum Dum Ditty, a spectacular conglomeration of ground meat, corn, tomatoes, and some kind of gravy. Dip a biscuit in there, and you’ve got yourself a garage sale of gastronomic delight, a veritable trailer park for the palate. I can’t share the exact formula for Hum Dum Ditty because I think it partly depends on what’s in the “dented and expired” clearance cart next to the door at the supermarket, but I will share the recipe for my personal specialty, without which your life is a pale imitation of what it could be:

The Top Secret Recipe for Kristi Dawn’s No Calorie Left Behind Butterfinger Pie

• Crunch up six king-size Butterfinger bars. Smash them up in a plastic bag or beat them with a rolling pin while they’re still in the wrapper. Exercise your aggressions. Very therapeutic.
  
• Take a twelve-ounce deal of Cool Whip and mix it up with the candy-bar shrapnel.
  
• Plop all that into one of those graham-cracker crusts. (Just get over yourself and buy the premade kind. Don’t be all Barefoot Contessa about it.)
  
• Freeze! No, not you, the pie. I mean freeze in the freezer, not in the theatrical sense. This is important. If you skip this step, people will assume it’s French onion dip and stick their potato chips in it.
  
• Serve with a smile on paper plates. The kind with the rippled edges, whenever possible.
  

Everybody brings her specialty when we all get together, which is a rare occasion these days. Weddings and funerals. We saw Dad’s side of the family at Grandpa’s service in Hinton. Now everyone on Mom’s side has gathered in Tulsa to gab and eat, exclaim over how big the
kids are, eat some more, gab some more. It’s like that song from
The Music Man,
“Pick a Little, Talk a Little.”

I set my Butterfinger pie well away from the potato chips on Aunt Ginger’s long dining room table, which is heaped with a whole lot of everything. You can tell a lot about each of the fabulous Smith sisters by what she brings to potluck. Aunt Ginger’s warm and nonjudgmental biscuits and gravy are the ultimate comfort food because she’s always been the caretaker of the whole family and everyone else in town. Energetic Aunt Gaye serves up green beans and tabouli, which go well with her innate element of surprise. You never know when Aunt Gaye is going in for the love pat, but you know you’re gonna feel it when she does. My mom always supplies the dressing for the Thanksgiving turkey because she is a healer, a problem solver, able to transform stale bread and soup stock into something delicious. Aunt Roselan is an earth mother who goes for the organic. She’s a breast cancer survivor and in better shape than me, but I always feel a little heartier after a bowl of her special oatmeal with apples, nuts, and honey. Aunt Violet is the most liberal of the sisters, world-traveled and savvy, having lived in London and California. I nestle my Butterfinger concoction next to Aunt Vi’s stellar apple and pecan pies because she and I are on the same wavelength: “Life is short. Eat dessert first.” Sweet Aunt Tommie Jo is openhearted, a good listener who adopted two children after Mom and Dad adopted me, so it’s not surprising that Aunt Tommie Jo’s special dishes—banana pudding with Nilla Wafers and broccoli chicken casserole—combine elements that weren’t born together but belong together.

Home from Iraq for a brief visit, Aunt Tommie Jo’s son Robert is the celebrity in this gathering. A few years ago, he did a tour in Afghanistan and came back filled with pride and enthusiasm about the help being offered, schools being built, progress being made. Now he’s in Iraq, guarding prisoners, and when I ask him about it, a deep shadow passes through his eyes.

“You don’t want to know,” he tells me, and that makes me hug him even tighter.

“Thank you for doing what you do,” I whisper in his ear. “You’re a good man, and I’m proud of you.”

All we cousins are like siblings: Cheri, Shane, Clint, Richard, Pam, Mark, Kristi, Jason, Darin, Cindy, Allen, Katherine, Robert. I love being lost in that bunch. When I was little, Aunt Ginger would ask me to sing and dance at family gatherings, but now I get to be one of the grown-ups who sit on the sidelines in a bank of lawn chairs, getting up to chase a dog away from the table, wipe up a spill with a paper towel, wait my turn to hold the newest baby, or indulge in one of Cousin Cheri’s Hello Dollies, these seven-layer bars with chocolate chips, coconut, and I don’t know what all.

Hello Dollies were always on the potluck table when I was a kid, but I summoned my willpower and opted for fruits and vegetables. I was a picky eater because of my unswerving dedication to ballet in general and Miss Jane in particular. I wasn’t on the Gelsey Kirkland eating-disorder bus, but I was conscientious about the tone and strength of my body. As the years went by, it became apparent that I was never going to have the long, willowy limbs of a prima ballerina. But it’s funny…as my adult body emerged, I started looking like a tall person—only shorter. Mark says I only look short when I’m standing next to someone. I have long legs, proportionate to my torso, a good pair of “getaway sticks,” as we call them in the theatre. I also developed a pretty good pair of Mermans, for such a skinny girl. My interests expanded beyond ballet to tap, jazz, and modern. I was a cheerleader in junior high, but in high school I went out for drill team, which felt more like a dance performance. Of course, I was all about choir, and I went out for every play.

In ninth and tenth grade, I was in Larry Thompson’s madrigal group, and he told me about a phenomenal voice teacher at Oklahoma City University. Some of her students had gone on to excellent careers. Lara Teeter received a Tony nomination for
On Your Toes
and was a
going concern on Broadway. Susan Powell won the Miss America pageant in 1981, and I remember sitting on the living room floor, a bowl of ice cream clasped between my hands, watching her sing. Mr. Thompson was adamant that this was the voice teacher I needed to study with, and though I loved Mr. Thompson to bits (he’s one of those teachers you hope and pray your kid will get), I promptly blew that off. OCU was a pricey private college. My parents couldn’t afford that, and even if they could, all my friends were going to state schools. The fun factor had to be considered. But as it got close to decision time, Mr. Thompson went an extra mile, contacted my parents, and told them that studying with this OCU voice teacher could change my life.

“They’re having a high school weekend,” my dad told me. “We should check it out. You’d get to audition for a scholarship, stay in the dorm, see a show. It’ll be fun.”

The campus was a grassy, rolling, two-hour drive from home. On the way, I flipped through the catalog and brochures they’d sent. The OCU Mission Statement reads, “Oklahoma City University embraces the United Methodist tradition of scholarship and service and welcomes all faiths in a culturally rich community that is dedicated to student welfare and success. Men and women pursue academic excellence through a rigorous curriculum that focuses on students’ intellectual, moral, and spiritual development to prepare them to become effective leaders in service to their communities.”

In other words: fun factor zero. But I was intrigued by this voice teacher Mr. Thompson was so big about.

“Florence Gillam Birdwell,” the brochure said, “is a master teacher, performer, and force of nature.”

Whenever I’m in Oklahoma to visit family, I try to fit in a side trip to see Florence Birdwell. How to describe her here…hmm. She’s my
person
. Think Dianne Wiest in
Bullets Over Broadway
. That same “I never play frumps or virgins!” sense of self. Flowing fabrics. Orbiting,
kinetic earrings. Babe Didrikson hair. Fun, zany, and charismatic, but serious as a jackhammer about her art. I brought her to New York for the Tonys when I was nominated for
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,
and I loved watching her cruise the after-parties. The moment she walked in, the room expanded, and half an hour later, everyone in the place either knew who she was or knew they should.

When Dad took me up for the high school weekend, I got to see
Carnival
and fell in love with the part of Lili (which I never have gotten to do). The girl playing it was awesome. (Seriously. Lili girl? Whoever you are? You were
awesome
.) As the big fish in my little high school pond, I’d gotten pretty confident about being cast in leading roles; I could not believe the caliber of the talent on this stage. It was going to be mule-hard work to even get in the game here, but I knew this was the school I needed to be at. As it happened, Florence Birdwell was also performing in concert that weekend, and by the time she left the stage, I was her disciple.

“This is where I want to be,” I told Dad on the way home. “I want to study with that bird lady.”

He brought me back several weeks later to audition for a scholarship. I followed Ms. Birdwell to the Oriole Room, where master classes were held, and she politely listened as I sang Edvard Grieg’s “My Johann,” a playful song for a good soprano, and “New York, New York,” complete with choreography.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

The quiet space that followed seemed like plenty of time for her to think of something nice to say. Cue the clock ticking…crickets…tumbleweeds…she just sat there nodding as if she hadn’t gotten the memo about how amazingly talented I was.

She finally said, “I want to show you my studio.”

Entering Florence Birdwell’s studio for the first time was like looking through the wardrobe into Narnia. Glossy black grand piano. A high, upholstered stool, which I always called the perch. Tons of music in heavy file cabinets. A metronome I can’t believe she still has. Lots of
decor—rich colors, wood, brocade, a table with a plant—the most perfect, unplanned form of shabby chic. The walls were adorned with pictures of her most accomplished students and of herself performing in concert. In the corner, there was a wicker chair where you sat if she wanted to talk to you.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “If you come here, I will take you as my student. And I don’t take everyone. You will have the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. You’ll have them both. But”—she laughed a little—“you’ll figure all that out when you come.”

And she was right.

Any separation anxiety I may have been experiencing the day my parents dropped me off at OCU evaporated when the fraternity guys stepped up to help me carry my things to my dorm. These enterprising youths offered Sherpa service to all the girls as they arrived on campus each year, and if there isn’t already a statue of the frat brother who came up with that brilliant idea, there ought to be. Mom was crying. Dad was emotional. I was like
See ya!
—and college life began. I wasn’t Galinda Upland rolling in on a luggage cart, but I was thrilled to be there and ready to hit the ground running.

“I’m going to have one of our upperclassmen sing for you in a moment,” Ms. Birdwell said, indicating a girl we knew to be one of her prize students. “I want everyone to know where they’re headed. But before we do that, I’m going to ask Kristi Chenoweth to sing.”

Her eyes swept the room like a lighthouse beam sweeps a coastline, her unruffled gaze settling on my face, which felt frozen in one of those classic
Hummana-hummana-wha?
expressions. She directed me to meet quickly with the accompanist, and I went to the piano and exchanged a flurry of questions and answers with him. I chose to sing “New York, New York” because I knew I could deliver that puppy like a wrecking ball. It was my ace in the hole. I belted it out. Everyone applauded madly, but before I could take the
she came, she saw, she conquered
vic
tory walk back to my seat, Florence Birdwell pressed her hand to her heart and said, “Oh. I can’t wait to teach you how to sing.”

The prize student sang then and blew everybody away. I can’t tell you what she did—some aria in some language. I sat there agog. Humiliated. Ms. Birdwell had quite obviously meant to display the
before
and
after
. For the first of many times I left after class struggling unsuccessfully to swallow my tears. But during that first year, I started to get what she was talking about. She took an extremely technical approach. The apparatus of the voice. The nomenclature and physical science of singing, what it is and how it works, control and relaxation of the larynx—a lot of things I was doing naturally, but she wanted me to understand why it works when it works and what to do when it doesn’t.

“This is the instrument,” she said with a gesture that encompassed my entire body. “The jaw, the mouth, the teeth, tongue, lungs, stomach. You must sing from the vagina! That’s how low the breath is.”

(While trying to explain this to Ellen DeGeneres on her show a few years ago, I was suddenly unsure about the okayness of saying
vagina
on daytime television, so I ended up blurting, “You have to sing from your—you know—your
hoo hoo
.” She never let me forget it. She even produced a big Broadway spoof episode—
Ellen: The Musical
—and had me float in as her musical fairy godmother. The big finish had everyone onstage belting,
“You gotta siiiiiiiiiiing from your hoo hoooooooooo!”
)