Leading Ladies
Today's guest blog celebrating Mother's Day is by Melissa Bradford, a published writer, independent scholar and mother of four children. She has performed professionally as a soprano soloist and actress in the US, Europe, and South East Asia. Melissa and her husband, Randall, have lived in Hong Kong and Vienna, and have raised their four children in Oslo, Paris, Munich, and Singapore, and at the time of this writing, the family is moving to Geneva, Switzerland. Melissa is the author of The 21st Century Mother, forthcoming from Familius.
Thank you, Italy, for giving us the term, prima donna. Generations ago, that title referred to the leading (prima) lady (donna) in a piece of theater. That donna was a far cry from today’s pouty, petty, pomp-and-paparazzi caricature we associate with a prima donna. The Italian prima donna wasn’t about stirring up drama around her; rather, she held the drama around her together. A real prima donna earned that label of respect and distinction by maneuvering on stage with dignity, grace and beauty. By doing so, she left an indelible imprint.
On this Mother’s Day, I find myself fixed on this idea of the prima donna. Why? Lean back a moment. I’d love to tell you.
With thick, waist-length black hair, hazel eyes, and a temperament like a mini-Vesuvius, Donna Charlene could have been taken for Italian. But if there were any Italians in Mesa, Arizona in the 1940s, she sure didn’t know about them. Alright, there were some Navajo Indians in from the nearby reservation, and there were the big Mexican families who lived on three intersecting streets near the borders of town. But Italians? No. The most foreign person young Donna ever knew, in fact, growing up as she did poor and isolated in Mesa, was a man named Enrico Caruso whose Italian tenor voice came spluttering into their screened porch from the radio station in Phoenix, the big city.
And boy, did he have a big voice.
When she outgrew selling eggs out of a rickety wagon she’d pulled along the blistering streets of her neighborhood while singing Caruso to herself, Donna began singing radio jingles for pay. (Caruso and a certain Sunday School chorister had lit a fire under her vocal chords, so to speak.) Before long, Donna was playing leads in local musicals, soloing with local choirs, and eventually landed smack dab front and center in the splashy (and by all points of comparison, sophisticated) A Capella choir at the big university several hours’ drive northward in Utah. Her mother, who for years had stood nine hours a day in the assembly lines of the local citrus packing factory, sorting and wrapping and stuffing grapefruit into crates, put Donna (as she did all Donna’s siblings) through college.
How Donna made it from Mesa to the Mamselles, a quartette with whom she cut a record with RCA Victor, is quite a story. But how she then made it from the Mamselles to Munich, Germany where she studied opera, and then from Munich to a Masters degree of vocal performance at one of the premier music schools in the US, and then from that Masters degree to performing on many concert stages around the world---well, that is quite another story. And from what I know if it, every page is written with grit and discipline, hope and love, uncompromising drive and compromising lives with her musician husband and their little growing family. There was also a heck of a lot of god-given talent.
But there is another story altogether. It is the one that unfolded behind those concert stages. It is the story that wrote itself into many lives, not just Donna’s, and is continuing, even as I write these words, to write itself into the lives of countless others whose lives come from hers. It is the story I can tell best because it is my story, and it is my story because Donna is my very own prima donna --- the primary, the foremost, the leading, and the inimitable --- the first lady in my life. She is my mother.
Some of my earliest childhood memories center around making music with my mother. She was my first piano teacher, bought me my first cello, bribed neighbors to attend our little house concerts she arranged (mimeographed programs, matching homemade dresses, pastel mints in Dixie cups for refreshments, the whole thing), and she sang me to sleep with me her favorite childhood songs. I have sung those songs to my children. They will most probably sing them to theirs.
She also brought me to her many opera rehearsals where I learned from the age of five to sit on a folding chair next to the pianist with his enormous score, wait for his nod, and hop up just in time to turn the page. After long, he weaned me from the nod and I was reading the score on my own. My, did I love opera.
I loved it so much, I tried out arias on the playground of the elementary school. They seemed as natural to me as nursery rhymes. Much to my chagrin, though, and in spite of my coaching, the other kids didn’t know their lines, didn’t catch their harmony, and once or twice I ended up ahhhhhhhh-ing alone on the far end of the teeter-totter, having just been abruptly thumped to the ground.
Unlike my grandmother, my own mother never wrapped and packed fruit in an assembly line. But she grew and bottled it herself. And while she bottled it, she repeated her arias. I remember vividly how she’d stand at one kitchen sink with me, a sullen preteen ho-humming at the adjoining one, and I’d peel while she’d slice, I’d toss the peach pit while she’d cube the apples, I’d drizzle in the sugary pectin waters and she’d let the big pressure cooker steam away while we waited together to hear the bottle lids pop. Right there against the backdrop such mundane tasks, my Mom would transform the kitchen into a private concert hall for me, running her lines, repeating the trills, polishing those fluidly gorgeous Italian arias. She did this, I am just understanding now, because she knew I hatedbottling and was basically lazy. She was singing decoy.
What makes my mother in my eyes today a bona fide genius, is not so much the tale of achievement that was her climb from radio jingles to the operatic stage, but rather so many small moments like the ones I’ve just described where she was caring for me, showing me who she was and what she loved---in the kitchen, in the car, in the garden, in so many of the inconspicuous corners of our family life---teaching me that no matter what other role she was playing at the time, her role as my mother was by far her biggest.
All four of Donna’s children have become musicians. Three of us, vocalists. And while I could never claim to have anything near my mother’s talent --- or her grit, or her discipline, or, heaven knows, her fruit-bottling faculties --- I still claim to have something of her. Many years after teeter-totters and bottled fruit, I’ve found myself singing on stages, my own four children sitting in the audience or sitting beside rehearsal pianists, waiting to turn the page.
And what awaits us at the next turn of a page? For our family, it is an unexpected turn of events, one that underscores for me on this Mother’s Day, that our mothers, conscious of it or not, exert a primary and infinite influence in our lives. Their centrality pulls us subtly, directing, at times, the course of our lives. Donna was tickled to learn recently that my only daughter (who, incidentally, has a lovely singing voice herself), is moving, of all places, to Italy.
Assolutamente.
Thank you, Italy, for giving us the term, prima donna. And molto grazie, Mothers, for giving yourselves to us, and for being our prima donnas.