High school was almost a complete bust for me. If it weren't for choir, I think I would have gone mad. Fortunately our high school choir was one of the best in the state, certainly the best in the city, and our sense of competitive pride was extremely high and nurtured an already robust (perhaps too robust) musical competitiveness in me. I made it to All-State Choir three years in a row (I missed my freshman year, as I spent that year in a Catholic girls school), winning first in my voice division every year at every level (region, area, and state) except once, when I foolishly had pizza right before my audition and had to fight through major cheese phlegm while singing.
Between choir and the increasing demands my piano study made on me, I grew lazier than ever scholastically, neglecting homework and skipping class to practice in the choir room. I even managed to skip nearly an entire semester of Latin. Every summer, I'd have to make up at least one class that I flunked due to my laziness and lack of interest. I believe it was my junior English teacher who told me I had tunnel vision -- that I could only see one thing, music, and that one thing would never carry me through life and would prevent me from ever being a well-rounded person.. Then it was that my counselor, frustrated at having to summon me to her office at least twice a month for one thing or another, told me point blank that I'd never amount to anything. When it came time for graduation and I wound up being one of only a handful of kids in my class that didn't receive a diploma, it looked as if my counselor was right. I never did graduate high school.
My mother came to my rescue -- the first of two crucial rescues she made in my life, the second being her praying me back to the Church. The summer after my non-graduation, I won a Ewing-Halsell Foundation scholarship to the International Round Top Festival, a summer program for young pianists and string players. There I studied for six weeks with the renowned pianist James Dick and performed in several concerts. While I was there, my mother, without telling me, went to Trinity University to speak with one of the piano faculty, Andrew Mihalso; he had known me since judging me in a competition when I was small, and had wanted me to study with him ever since. He and my mother appealed to the dean, who examined my SAT scores (before I found out I would not be graduating, I had taken my SAT and applied to three colleges, including Trinity). He found my scores to be very high, high enough to justify admitting me -- provided I didn't actually matriculate for a degree.
So the flunkie lucked out. With the help of my mother and a teacher who believed in my talent, I spent five years studying piano and voice at Trinity, earning no degree, but coming away with several competition prizes and many performances under my belt. It was also during college that I began coaching singers, mostly my fellow students; but then one weekend a Wagnerian bass named Simon Estes came to sing with the San Antonio Symphony and wanted to coach his next role while he was in town. Someone gave him my name, and I spent two hours one afternoon working with him on Handel's Saul. That was my first real professional coaching, and the start of a 25-year career.
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