Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva by Deborah Voigt

Author:Deborah Voigt [Voigt, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-01-26T23:00:00+00:00

ACT III

CRESCENDO

( 12 )

Dangerous Liaisons and Plácido’s Kiss

THE SNOW FELL softly on Johann Strauss’s statue. A few months after I told John it was over, I was walking alone through the Stadtpark in Vienna in the wee hours and came upon a beautiful gilded likeness of the famous Waltz King. I had come to the city in early 1996 to record Elektra, composed by that other Strauss, Richard, and after a long day at work I needed some air. In the early-morning quiet, surrounded by old-fashioned gas lamps casting light onto the park’s white canvas, I felt like I was in a painting. I brushed away the snow from the stone and looked at Strauss’s name, in awe of his brilliance and grateful that I was part of the classical world of artists and music.

It was a magical moment—and a rare one of stillness and contemplation amid my new, frenzied life since leaving John.

I was recording Elektra with fellow soprano Alessandra Marc, who was considered one of the biggest opera singers, weight-wise, until I hit the scene. The joke going around opera circles was that she and I and another larger-than-life soprano, Sharon Sweet, were going to go on tour together as “The Three Ton-ers.” Very clever, but a little hurtful, too.

Alessandra was a colorful, boisterous character famous for throwing wild pool parties where opera singers—especially Alessandra herself—got tipsy and flung off their bathing suits. She was also one of my first cautionary tales when it came to weight and work. At that time she was still Queen Bee of the stage, but a few years later she would become so big in size, people simply stopped hiring her. That made her furious. She was an in-your-face kind of woman and if you ticked her off, you knew about it. I remember hearing she had a concert in Berlin that didn’t go so well and the audience booed, after which Alessandra defiantly gave them the finger.

But, oh, we did have fun together. On our last night in Vienna, we sat in a smoky little bar at the fancy Hotel Johann Strauss all night and drank dirty martinis (an homage to my olive-juice bender at age five) and smoked Cuban cigars (Montecristos). But although I was her drinking and cigar buddy, I wasn’t her eating buddy. In Vienna, I ate like a bird—a cliché I never thought I’d use to describe myself. It was around the time when I told John it was over that I discovered the dynamite weight-loss cocktail fenfluramine-phentermine (street name: fen-phen). It was all the craze in the diet world and I was in love with it.

It zapped away my hunger, jacked up my metabolism, and in four months I had lost sixty pounds. Sure, I didn’t sleep much and was up at three in the morning doing calligraphy. But I got down to 240 pounds—which was still well above “normal,” but it felt more normal to me. For the first time in a long time, I

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