How to Survive as the Only Opera Fan in Elementary School
My brother Dana shares a story about his unusual childhood
My best writing teacher was also my first—my older brother Dana.
Perhaps younger siblings always imitate the firstborn, going back to those burnt offerings outside of Eden. But in the Gioia household, this didn’t happen on a baseball diamond or football field. In our unusual family, the process played out slowly on blank sheets of paper.
We wasted a lot of ink along the way. Black for me; red for him.
So many years later, Dana is still a popular teacher at colleges and writing workshops, and I make no claim for preeminence among his pupils. But if he was my first teacher, I was also his first student.
I certainly gave him useful experience in correcting almost every mistake a writer can make. Give me credit at least for that.
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I always envied Dana’s stylish and seemingly artless manner of expression. How does he achieve that relaxed, confident balance of humor and observation, erudition and reminiscence, storytelling and instruction?
I’m still trying to figure it out.
That’s a long way of introducing Dana’s latest piece, a boyhood memoir about music in the latest issue of The Hudson Review.
The memoir describes how Dana became the only youngster in our home town to prefer opera over Elvis.
You should read the whole thing. (And I also recommend The Hudson Review—I’ve been a happy subscriber for decades.)
Below I share a few paragraphs.
I assumed all Italians liked opera. My grandfather lived in the apartment next door. He was a tough immigrant who had survived many hardships, including hassles with the local police and the mob, neither of whom he would pay off. I admired him enormously. One day when he came over, I put on an opera recording. I thought he would be proud of me for liking Italian culture. He walked in, listened for a moment, and then bleated like an animal in time with the music. As I turned off the record, he howled with laughter at his ridiculous grandson. I never repeated the mistake with any other relative.
My father had no musical training, but he had a good ear. He had been a championship dancer before he joined the Navy in World War II. He had won the “Mr. Jitterbug” contest in Los Angeles. With it came a chance to dance in the movies. He quit Hollywood after two days. It took too much effort to be a star. After the war, he courted my mother by taking her to jazz clubs. As newlyweds, they went to dance halls and after-hours clubs. They bet on the horses at Hollywood Park. All the fun ended, my mother often remarked, when I arrived.
Here’s another passage.
When I was eleven, my school was given four free tickets for a Los Angeles Symphony youth concert featuring selections from the Ring. I had already gone the year before—the first time I ever heard a symphony orchestra—to hear Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. There were 800 students at St. Joseph’s, but I asked the sister who taught me piano if I could go again. She was appalled. She told me I was impossibly greedy and advised me to confess the sin. I knew she was right. My desire was selfish and disgraceful. I left her office embarrassed. On Saturday morning two hours before the concert, she called me. One of the chosen kids had decided not to go. While the other kids and parents sat bored beside me, I had the most thrilling musical experience of my young life. Being the only Wagnerite at St. Joseph’s Parish School had its moral danger, but also its occasional bliss.
In the car home, I wanted to talk about the concert, but I knew it would be a mistake. Everyone else had already forgotten it. It was best to hide my enthusiasm. I had already been exposed as greedy. Why add weak and weird to the list? Many children lead secret lives. Mine was simply more elaborate than most.
And one more sentence:
Beauty had an effect on me I didn’t understand, but I recognized it made me cultivate a vulnerability that everyone else suppressed.
You can read the entire piece at this link.
Beautiful story. I already loved music as a 5-year-old. But what really got the ball rolling was when I saw a concert in 1968 with the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta, with Itzhak Perlman performing Prokofiev's Violin Concerto. As a 12-year-old, I loved the music, but when we were going down the stairs on the way out, we were walking behind two men who were discussing the performance in detail and how Perlman did this and that with this theme and that theme etc. I was totally amazed that you could think and talk about complicated music (for me) that way and decided that was what I wanted to do.
I was infatuated with horses from the first time I saw the Junkman’s horse stop before my grandmother’s house when I was 4. When I was 8 I had a friend who was seriously training to be a Ballet dancer, and developed an appreciation of that art. In 5th grade I received a copy of Marguerite Henry’s “Album of Horses” which had a beautiful painting of a circus horse with a dancer on its back and wondered how I could do THAT? So began a life in an assortment of arts, drawing and painting horses, choreographer for a figureskating club. A songwriter who listens to Bach and “Va Pensaro” before sliding off to sleep. To dream about dancing, flying horses and beautiful music.