The Maiden in my voice and some wigs.

So it starts.

Sitting here stinky from my garden.  Quite a crop I have gotten.  Fried Green Tomatoes here we come!   Anyway.

Full Moon last night.  Now that she is waning or getting smaller I thought I would begin to write about the Maiden so that I can be finished or maybe near finished  when the moon is new and then celebrate with her.

The maiden in my journey represents the young female child.  She is considered a maiden until she reaches  her puberty.  In most Wiccan systems of thought the maiden is any woman who is not pregnant or a virgin.  Not so here.  If I am to break up a life then I must do it with more divisions than the usual Maiden, Mother, Crone thing which I think is far too limited for our longer lives and different ways of thinking now.

The maiden is also the new moon in my outline of life here.  She is the moon until it reaches it’s crescent, thin and white and so beautiful in the sky.  She is the moon with it’s dark potential showing.  She is a little girl.

So the maiden. My Maiden.

My earliest remembrances of theater and being a theater artist do stem from this time in my life.  I think because my father was a frustrated singer he was always playing music.  Always.  There was never silence in my house.  My grandfather, the Italian one who was a glorious leather artisan and made hand made, custom shoes below us in the “store” (which was really a workshop) listened to opera all day while he worked.  I can remember him fighting with my father because my father listened to that “American Crapa!” he hated so much.  Sinatra, Bennet, Williams and on to Petula Clark, The Carpenters, Dionne Warwick…uh oh….I bet I am giving away my age!

So,  between the older generation living below us in an apartment smelling like Espresso, Anisette, Pasta and glue which was constantly drenched in opera whilst the canaries (always seemed like 500 of them, cages and cages) sang along and the younger one upstairs asserting his first generation  American self and bathing me in sweet voiced crooners.  I became a singer. I probably had no choice, for it was sing or die in my house.  Sing or die.

I sang all the time.  I never didn’t sing.  I sang to my dolls, to my dog, to my poor brother. Later my poor sisters too.   I memorized every song on every record my father played on the very new and modern stereo and I danced.  I danced a lot.  When I moved I could feel the prodding of the violins sweeping me along and the orchestra behind these wonderful voices moving me.  So, I sang and I danced and I did it all the time.

I remember at this time asking my mother if I could become a ballerina.  I was told in that I would never go to dance school because I was too fat.  I was as I look back on it a little chubby, a big and very tall girl….but not fat.  My mother was afraid to subject me to the torture ballerinas go through and she was sure I was a klutz, she told me some years later.  Still, I dreamed of the ballet and I still danced.

My father was also a good dancer, kinda famous for it in our little village in Brooklyn called  Bensonhurst.  He had been a Lindy-Hop  champion in his youth and supposedly won many a girls heart at the JCH on Bay Parkway when he danced with them.

So,  I danced and sang and so did he.  My mother did not.  Not well and not ever and the fact that I did,  and was beginning to get good at it confused the shit out of her.  She was never raised to think a girl should be anything but someone nice and religious who cooked and made babies.  Unfortunately for my poor mother, even at this age which I am remembering was around 3 or 4, I was not at all normal ” mommy material” .

I had dolls of course.  Loads of them.  I was the first child and very spoiled by not only my parents, but my aunties as well.  So I had dolls.  What did the budding costume and make up and hair designer in me do to my dolls?  Draw with permanant  pen around thier eyes to represtent make up after my mother got very angry with me for stealing and using her …yuck…green eyeshadow, lipstick and perfume and slathering that both on them and myself.  I cut their hair…with paper sissors.  Yep…short and horrible.  These were fancy dress up dolls that you kept on a shelf.  They came with costumes and had thier heads wrapped in plastic wrap to keep them nice.  Sorry dolls.  I always kept them. I still have them.  My husband says one looks like a demon, one like Jack Nicholson and one frightens him so much he makes me hide it.  I keep them as trophys though.  I was not going to be a prissy little girl no matter how much crinoline they layered on me nor how many times they brushed my hair.  My mother, in order to stop me from slicing my own hair bought me three little plasitc wigs that went on your head like hats.  One brown, one red, one silver or platinum.  YUM.  I wore them all the time, with my very long hair pushed up under them. I will write more about these when I talk about Cindy Bear later.

So I sang.  My father decided he was going to  train my voice.  He was a terrible singer.  Couldn’t really stay on pitch and blamed his lack of range on the 3 packs of Winstons he smoked every day.  Nah.  He was just a terrible singer and he never, ever, ever could remember lyrics.  He used to kinda make them up.

But he loved music.  He loved to sing and he taught me how to love singing too.  He did it unabashedly.  Albeit horribly, but unabashedly.  I have a sister who has this same talent.  An awful singer but that never stopped her!  It is a delight to listen to her! So Free in her fun.

One day he sat me down and had me memorize a song.  He had an idea that I could be a child star or something, this made my mother very unhappy.  Even with her protestations he chose a song for me and  we began.  It was called “You Can Sing a Rainbow” by Andy Williams.  He loved it because there were children singing along on the song and he thought I would pick up from them.  I did.  I liked it too.

So I was singing a rainbow…red and yellow and pink and green…purple and orange and blue…now you can sing a rainbow…sing a ranbow…sing a rainbow too. I haven’t heard that song since I was that age but I still have it memorized.  He mad me sing it…like…three million times!

…listen with your heart, listen with your heart and sing everything you see.  You can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow too…

There is much more to this story and the end of my siging for my father but I will save that for later too.

Back to the maiden.   I was truly marinated in a vocal world.  The opera on the first floor would eventually surface from within me later in life and would show me what my calling really was and how important my voice was to me…but that is for later…for the Amazon phase!

For now the maiden is still singing along with Andy Williams and Frank Sinatra and Rocco who never sang as good as me…on top of his lungs….every day.

Earliest memory of this path done. I will try to keep these below 2000 words so your eyes stay in your head.

Blessings and Break a Leg

That is me sitting on the table playing with some cousins…bet my mouth is open a little cause I am singing.