If You Must Be Mediocre,
Do It With Passion
By Cliff Ennico
Back in the 1970s, that silly decade, there was a syrupy pop song on the radio that had a title something like #147;You Don#146;t Have to Be a Star . . . To Be In My Show#148;. As a disk jockey for my college radio station, I remember introducing this song by saying something witty like #147;You Don#146;t Have to Be a Star . . . I Love You Because You#146;re Mediocre.#148; It got laughs, at least back then.
Another musical recording, one I just bought a month or two ago, has started me thinking about mediocrity in a new way.
Let me say by way of introduction that I am a lover of classical music, and opera in particular. But I#146;m not a stuffed shirt. I also love musical parodies that make fun of classical music#146;s pompous pretensions. I think that great musical humorists like Spike Jones, Victor Borge, Peter #147;P.D.Q. Bach#148; Schickele, and Anna Russell (a world-class opera soprano whose screeching takeoffs on Richard Wagner#146;s horns-and-helmets melodramas became cult classics back in the 1960s), have done more to introduce young people to great music than Bach, Beethoven and Brahms together ever did.
It was therefore with great expectations that I recently bought a Compact Disk (CD) entitled
Murder on the High C#146;s: Florence Foster Jenkins Friends, Original Recordings 1937-1951#148;
(Naxos 8.120711, available from Naxos Nostalgia at
www.naxos.com
). The liner notes to the Naxos recording promised #147;the COMPLETE recordings of the #145;Dire Diva#146; . . . not to mention several offerings by people who should have known better.#148; I couldn#146;t wait.
You#146;ve never heard of Florence Foster Jenkins? I#146;m not surprised #150; many classical music aficionados have never heard of her, and many of those who have wish they didn#146;t. The truth is that nobody knows much about Florence Foster Jenkins, except that:
she was a wealthy New York City socialite during the 1920s and 1930s, who died in 1944 at the age of approximately 75 (her exact date of birth is not known);
she founded and guided the Verdi Club for thirty years; and
she loved to sing.
We know she loved singing because at her death she left behind about ten 78 r.p.m. records, made sometime during the early 1940s, on which she sings some of the most famous soprano arias from the great operas, accompanied by an excellent pianist named Cosme McMoon, about whom even less is known (frankly, it sounds like a phony name to me, meant to hide the identity of a well-known performer helping out an old friend). We also know that once a year she rented the ballroom of New York#146;s Ritz-Carlton Hotel to give a private concert for her friends and fellow Verdi Club members.
These recordings were not made by RCA Victor or any of the great studios that preserved the sound of Arturo Toscanini and Enrico Caruso for posterity. Rather, they were private pressings (#147;self-published#148;, we would say today) made at the Melotone Recording Studio in New York City at Ms. Jenkins#146; own expense, and distributed to her friends and family members as holiday gifts (if you were a stranger, you paid $2.50 each, a pretty hefty sum at a time when the country was just recovering from the Great Depression and catching its breath before entering World War II). It is these ten recordings that have been collected on the Naxos CD.
Having listened to the Naxos recording several times now, I can tell you one thing about Florence Foster Jenkins . . . the lady couldn#146;t sing to save her soul. These recordings are not the work of a great musician who is consciously having some fun with the classics to show how good she really is. On each song, Florence Foster Jenkins is truly, majestically awful. She sings at least two keys flat, misses almost all of the high notes by a country mile, is either way behind or far ahead of her piano accompanist, tires audibly about halfway through each song and finishes up by yapping like a Park Avenue poodle chasing a squirrel in Central Park.
These recordings are guaranteed to make your dog howl; your cat will disappear under the sofa for weeks. If you have a teenager in the house who plays Eminem at top volume all day, I can think of little better revenge than to give him or her a dose of Florence Foster Jenkins.
And yet . . .
Listening to the first Jenkins song on the recording, I laughed, when I wasn#146;t wincing in pain. By the second song, I felt pity for the old gal, trying so hard to hit the notes with lots of heart but zero talent #150; even a novice singer gets half the notes right. I was also a little angry at her friends and Verdi Club pals who egged her on and led her to believe, despite the evidence, that she was on a par with the great opera sopranos of her time. By the third, fourth and fifth song, I realized something amazing #150; as horrible a singer as Florence Foster Jenkins was, I couldn#146;t stop listening to this recording. Something about it was keeping me glued to my CD player.
What it was, I realized after a while, was Jenkins#146; sheer presence. She was not doing this for laughs. She clearly loved what she was doing (an #147;amateur#148; #150; one who loves #150; in the truest sense of that word), and couldn#146;t have cared less about what I, or anyone else, thought. By the fifth song I was rooting for her, hoping and praying for her to succeed this time, and when she did hit one of the high notes dead on target (which she does about 5% of the time), I almost wanted to pump my fist in the air and scream #147;#146;atta girl#148; like I was at a rock concert. Her mediocrity is majestic, almost noble. You gotta love her.
Lest you think I#146;m the only one who#146;s had this reaction to Florence Foster Jenkins, the liner notes to the Naxos recording tell us that #147;after years of giving her own unique small-scale entertainments, she took the bold step of appearing in Carnegie Hall on 25 October 1944.
Two thousand people were turned away from the sold-out auditorium and scalpers were getting $20 for their two-dollar tickets
[the emphasis is mine]. Columnist Earl Wilson, Jr. suggested that she should try Madison Square Garden or the Polo Grounds next, but Florence Foster Jenkins died a month after her triumph.#148; Way to go, Flo.
So what does all of this have to do with running your own home-based business?
Those of us in the Baby Boomer generation have entered our 50#146;s. We have started getting junk mail from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and assisted-living facilities, and it has become painfully apparent to most of us that our youthful ambitions of changing the world will never be achieved. We have to face the fact that we are now #147;over the hill#148; and, for most of us, greatness is just as far away as it was when we were in our 20#146;s, back in the 1970s, that silly decade.
I remember one of my professors in law school, then in his own 50s, telling us in 1977 about how we would feel when we reached this point: #147;You are all very bright young men and women, the cream of America#146;s top colleges. But let me tell you something. No matter how good you are, no matter how hard you work, the simple fact is that the Bell Curve applies to all aspects of life, and vast majority of you #150; 90% or more -- are destined to be stuck in the middle. You will not fail, but you will not achieve truly great things either. You will never argue a case before the Supreme Court, become a top judge, or occupy a high elective office. You will find yourself in a small to medium sized town, writing wills, buying and selling houses, representing small clients in court on small cases, and helping people start and shut down small businesses. Maybe you will sit on the local Board of Education, or run unsuccessfully for mayor. You will do a lot of good for your clients, but no one will ever erect a statue of you in the town square, or name a building after you. I don#146;t mean to burst your bubble, but that#146;s just how it is, statistically speaking.#148;
Somehow I don#146;t think my old law professor and Florence Foster Jenkins would have gotten along at all. I don#146;t think he would have understood a 70 year old woman, with her life pretty much behind her and not much in the way of achievement to show for it, plunking down serious money to make some records and realize a childhood dream of becoming a great opera singer, with no hope of success, but like Don Quixote in the Broadway musical
Man of La Mancha
, just in order to #147;follow that star . . . no matter how hopeless, no matter how far.#148; Making some truly horrible recordings, to be sure, but having the time of her life doing it, and capping her efforts with a triumphant, sold-out Carnegie Hall performance before thousands of people who had come to cheer her on. A woman whose records are still selling more than 50 years after her death, probably more than any of the #147;real#148; opera stars of her time, and inspiring that 90% of us who will never cut a deal with RCA Victor, play a role at the Metropolitan Opera, or solo on
American Idol
.
There are a few Enrico Carusos in the world of small business, but there are a lot more Florence Foster Jenkins#146;. If you are destined to be mediocre, do so with style, flamboyance, dignity and pride, and let the critics be damned. Flaunt your mediocrity, and let people see the passion that keeps you going at it every day, even though you know you will never be one of the greats. Keep straining to hit those high C#146;s, because every once in a blue moon you will indeed hit one, and posterity will take notice.
CLIFF ENNICO, best known as the host of the PBS television series #147;MoneyHunt#148;, is the author of the nationally syndicated newspaper column #147;Succeeding in Your Business#148; and the legal correspondent for the Small Business Television Network at www.sbtv.com. You can find out more about him at
www.cliffennico.com
. Permission granted for use on DrLaura.com
