Andrews Sisters, “Tico Tico” (1944)
Esther had been singing since she was a little child. One photograph I love of her shows her as a girl of seven or eight, singing for a church group or wedding reception. She remembers singing “Tico Tico” one time. Leafing through old papers, I came across a program for a concert where she sang in it. Her sister Evelyn, ten years older, accompanied her. Their name was misspelled –“Bendick” instead of “Bendik.”
“You were always singing.” (Esther’s childhood friend, Sherryn Weiss Prescott.)
Esther sang her way through high school (Elyria High) and college (Bowling Green State University). She soloed with her high school choir at almost every concert, sang at recitals and weddings, sang in the church choir. Her high school chorus director was Mr. Beck: she speaks of him with affection and respect. She started taking voice lessons in high school: they were in Cleveland, a forty-five minute trip either way. When she started college at Bowling Green, she first thought of majoring in music but she changed to American Studies instead. In college, she was one of the principal soloists in the chorus: she remembers singing in a huge ballroom for a gathering of regional college and university choirs. She sang at a campus night club, sang at weddings and concerts.
After she graduated from Bowling Green, she taught English in Parma, a suburb of Cleveland. Somehow a connection was made and she was called upon to sing a song in a musical a psychology professor at Fenn College (now defunct) had written. The song was entitled “You’ll Always Need a Mother.”
“You may have a girlfriend, you may have a wife, but you’ll always need a mother…”
That led to an invitation to try out for Fenn’s production of Brigadoon. She was cast as Fiona, than whom there is no role more romantic. (When I was in high school, even college, Brigadoon was the musical I most dreamed of being cast in, and the role I wanted to play was Tommy, opposite Fiona.)
1962, the summer before we met, Esther landed a job in the chorus at Musicarnival, a giant tent theater east of Cleveland that put on a full slate of musicals every summer. On the bill that year were The Desert Song, The Music Man, Bye Bye Birdie, among others. The Dave Brubeck quartet performed there one night. I asked Esther if she’d met them. She said they were nice.
She got $180 a week at Musicarnival, this at a time when I was taking home $95 a week minus deductions teaching high school in Olmsted Falls and I’d been teaching for three years. Even better, Musicarnival was an Equity company so Esther left at the end of the summer with her Equity card. If you want to perform in, even audition for, professional productions in New York, you have to have that card. It’s the equivalent of a union card for a union-member-only jobs.
***
Making it in New York without connections is hard. Her first winter in New York (1963-64), she landed a job as singing waitress in a nightclub that was due to open soon in Jersey. But it turned out to be not so much an opportunity as a scam: the owner was hiring waitresses as a way to make conquests so Esther quit.
***
One time she was auditioning for a musical –this was after we were married– and I went with her to the audition site before heading on to the library to do my own work. The tryout was for a chorus slot: there were probably no more than eight to twelve slots in all. She got there early but there was already a line of candidates stretching around the block and down the opposite side of the street. The pressure for positions was intense, with up to 400 candidates for a slot, and you could be culled for any reason: too tall, too heavy or too thin, wrong color or hair cut, not pretty enough, too pretty, how you moved, sang….
Once your turn came at a tryout and you were on stage, you were assessed for height, weight, looks, and you got to sing four to eight bars of a song before you left, hoping against hope to be called back. Esther was called back for a revival of Richard Rodgers’s Pal Joey. She was one of twenty some women being looked at to fill at the most four to eight positions. The composer, Richard Rodgers, was in the auditorium, judging candidates as they came on stage. Esther did her bit –at callbacks, you sang a slightly longer stretch of song. They said “Thank you” and she was ushered off stage. Her audition was over. Afterwards, she found her way into the auditorium and approached Rodgers in person to ask how she’d done. “You have a lovely voice,” he told her, “but you need to work to make it bigger.” (He was right. She did have a lovely voice. But it was a big theater to sing in so volume was an issue.)
She subsidized her singing hopes by working day jobs. First, temp service for an agency. Then, a tour guide at the UN. Our last two years in New York, 1965-67, she taught pre-school. Most of this time, she studied scene study at the Herbert Berghoff Studio where her teacher was Charles Nelson Reilly, a lovely man and good teacher, who’d made his reputation with major supporting roles in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Hello, Dolly. From 1965 on, she took voice lessons from Rita Sofia, a singer she met in summer stock in the Hamptons.
“The Heather on the Hill,” Brigadoon (1954)
MUSIC & ME 