As a Creator, Artist, Performer and Artist, my Inspiration came through life and early Professional Experience.
Creator Life Journey – Life is about a series of rhymes for Stephanie Vlahos
Margaret Mead’s daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, wrote a wonderful book entitled, Composing a Life, where she explored the ways in which people today navigate their careers. It’s a story about reinvention and arguably, the journey.
My creative work focuses on people’s journeys – whether embodying characters in the opera, interpreting the songs of Poulenc or Weill in my solo performances, mentoring, stage directing, creating unique works for stage artists, or focusing on the lives of characters in my books.
Our lives chart remarkable paths that weave in rhyme scheme.
As a child, I woke up every morning to the inspiration of incessant tapping on an Underwood typewriter.
My parents were writers and teachers. My mother, Olivia Vlahos, wrote extensively on anthropology. She was also a protégé of anthropologist Joseph Campbell and a fabulous professor in her own right, drawing from her earlier years as a child actor. After all, every great teacher has the It factor.
My father, John, wrote for radio and the silver screen in Hollywood. Later, he wrote for early television in New York City, often referred to as The Golden Age of Television. He never liked living in Los Angeles, and when he discovered the lush green summers of Connecticut, he moved the family to a house on a hill surrounded by trees
The Redcoats and Minute Men fought in Westport. Compo Beach still has the cannons on it. We lived in the presence of history without realizing it. My house was a converted artist’s loft, and I often fondly recreate it in the stories I tell, for example, a short story entitled, The Sad Story of Imani Cosmos.
Creator Playing in the woods
I was a Creator from a young age. Playing in the woods, I re-envisioned the landscape of large, stacked stones as bunkbeds or secret spaces. I’d play explorer, wielding a large stick to beat the tall grass, always followed by my trusty companion, a golden mutt by the name of Snoopers.
A childhood filled with the freedom to imagine is nothing short of magnificent wealth. And because of that blessing, I spend a good portion of my creative life invested in telling stories that remind people that childhood is sacred.
My Father
My father, a Writer and Creator worked in a detached office on the top of our hill that was loft-like and filled with hundreds of books and piles of newspaper clippings. He received an Emmy Award in 1962 for a Defenders episode entitled “Killer Instinct” and a Sylvania Award for his comedy “Beaver Patrol.” He also wrote special services for our church (the Unitarian Church in Westport), in which the family performed every year. His services are archived in the Unitarian Universalist library.
Despite all of his accomplishments, my father quietly considered himself to be a poet. He wrote sonnets. He also went through a deep depression when I was quite young.
I never said anything nor asked. My father was such a kind, mild-mannered human that he wouldn’t dare share his feelings. It was his secret to keep, and in those years of melancholy, he never lashed out, never yelled, never manifested the prison of his depression.
Dinner Ritual
My father cooked our dinner every night. It would always include hors d’oeuvres, a treat before a treat. When the dinner ritual was complete, he’d retreat to the couch in the living room for a snooze. Still, he’d always wake up in time to put us to bed, and after, he’d retreat to his office, writing till the wee hours.
His late-night stints never kept him from waking up before all of us, so that we’d be met with the sound of classical music, a warming house, the smell of breakfast replete with hand-brewed coffee, fresh squeezed orange juice, and melon. Such stuff was magic, and I am aware that I was once rich.
I walked a different creative path from my parents. From a tiny age, I sang loudly and everywhere. Paul Newman once commented on it. I dimly recall my father saying Paul liked it, but I didn’t really care. Singing was mine and besides, I had no idea who Paul Newman was.
I’d later run into Paul Newman at my church. We nearly collided in a doorway (for me, many resonant moments in my life have occurred in doorways). I might have mowed him down were it not for those blue eyes.
But, of course, that memory is a fond digression. It had nothing to do with my future as a singer.
Performer
In my early teens, I was asked to sing in two madrigalensembles, one professional, the other semi-professional. I loved to harmonize and blend, even with old people, but everything dynamically changed when I first set foot onstage in a school play.
The symbiosis of acting and singing was perfection.
I didn’t become legit until a tiny voice in my chest said yes when a conductor friend suggested I move to Los Angeles from New York and audition for a new international opera company, spear-headed by Peter Hemmings.
After my onstage audition at the Dorothy Chandler, Peter walked down the aisle from his seat in the house to shake my hand.
I chucked everything – my relationship with a guy, my proximity to my family, my friends and teachers. I put my bull terrier in my car and moved West, all on the whim of the word yes.
LA Opera quickly rose in international status and to my astonishment, I stood on a stage in a 2500-seat house, singing lead or supporting roles opposite some of the greats like Maria Ewing, Thomas Allen, Leonie Rysanek (oddly, Dudley Moore). I worked with directors such as Peter Hall, Jonathan Miller, and Gordon Davidson. Singing under the batons of conductors such as Neville Marriner, Andre Previn, John Adams, and Pierre Boulez.
Working
I later appeared in films directed by Walter Hill and Nicholas Triandafyllidis, working alongside actors like Jeff Bridges and Keith Carradine, and another rhyme, I shared a connection with those two actors – our dads. John Carradine and Lloyd Bridges had worked with my father.
And then, somewhere in that glorious upswing, I fell. It takes great resolve to stand proud in the opera world. But you can’t even begin to stand proud if you have forgotten your relationship to singing. And I had. More importantly, I had forgotten why I sang.
Artist
My solution was to let go of the comet’s tail and dig deep through solo performance, unhindered by grand opera’s bluster and demands. Platforming my work as performance art, I explored the art of cabaret, vaudeville, and music hall, creating solo shows, for which I received the dubious distinction from the Associated Press as The Moonlighting Diva. I was fascinated by 20th century traditions in theatre and movie music. I loved a chunky ballad. In the late eighties I sang at Jean-Pierre Boccara’s critically acclaimed club Cafe Largo in Los Angeles in double-bills with people like Sandra Bernhard or the fabulous John Fleck.
That flex of solo work was the beginning of my exploration into being a Creator. I was inspired by lyrics. I loved learning the poems of Goethe, Verlaine, Blake, Dickinson, or Baudelaire through composers’ voices such as Chausson or Weill, or the surrealism of Apollinaire in Poulenc’s L’Hotel. “…I light my cigarette on the sun’s flame… … I want to to smoke.” I’d intermix classical form with popular form. Early days stuff that is possibly commonplace now.
My solo work centered on the reflections of women in crisis while the theatre of opera centered on a single moment, resulting in unavoidable and tragic decisions, i..e…, Cio Cio San (Madame Butterfly) keeping vigil on a cliff overlooking the sea, waiting for Pinkerton while not realizing that he, along with his American wife, would take her son.
Cio Cio San’s story was not dissimilar to the plights of Brechtian females in Threepenny Opera, “Und ein Schiff mit Acht segeln…” or Weill’s French songs such as, J’attends un navire– “I wait for a ship…” And, of course, the ship would never come.
These were women invested in the fairy tale notion that a love would save the day. Butterfly was a Geisha, Jenny, a prostitute. Arguably, geishas were not prostitutes, but companions, and yet Butterfly was used by Pinkerton to satisfy his needs while on tour of duty. Their marriage had no value to him.
Both Jenny and Butterfly made necessary choices out of societal pressure or background. These were free choices, for sure, but were they freeing? One woman victimized by racism, the other by abuse. Their tragic parallel was in the innocent hope and belief in love. How tragic to yearn for the beauty of love only to be tarnished by the object of your love?
I have always been moved by the human condition. When I took on the voices of characters such as Jenny in Threepenny Opera or Suzuki in Madame Butterfly, I walked in their shoes, my outer mind speaking for inner truths while sharing in our commonality as women.
As I got older, moving deeper into my inner creative voice, these precious explorations into people and their stories soon matured through different mediums of expression. I became an Equity stage director, a Mentor, a Creator for stage, and an Author, and those stories are the gist of this site and the sequel to my journey.
Thank you for having a look.