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Book: Call Me Debbie: True Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva by Deborah Voigt
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Authors: Deborah Voigt
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crumpled wrapping-paper evidence. My part-time job at Del Taco that year didn’t help, either. I probably consumed a burrito for every five I rang up at the cash register.
My bad habits kept escalating—like a speeding car, I was a wreck waiting to happen—until one early evening I crashed in one grand, dramatic, symbolic collision.
My parents had sent me to pick up Rob at the movie theater and on the way I stopped in at Burger King for my usual driving meal. I was driving and eating, heading westward, with the setting sun in my eyes. I remember looking in the rearview mirror and seeing a motorcyclist behind me as I leaned over to take a sip of my chocolate shake, and then . . .
The rest was in slow motion. The cyclist flipped over the roof of the car and was knocked out cold. Then, a flash of images: people saying, “We’ve called for help” and someone getting me out of the car and sitting me down on the curb . . . fire trucks, ambulances, and then . . . the sight of my father standing above me.
Dad whisked me out of there and got me home, then went to the hospital to check on the cyclist. He had regained consciousness, but when the doctors gave him a drug for shock he had a horrifying allergic reaction that left him paralyzed from the waist down for days. Needless to say, I was a basket case; we all were. My parents even let John come over to console me so I wouldn’t sink into depressed oblivion.
Thankfully, once the drug wore off, the man’s paralysis disappeared. Soon after he was released from the hospital, the man drove past our pretty, upper-middle-class home and decided to sue us for hundreds of thousands of dollars, even though he had completely recovered and was fine. The lawsuit hung over my father for two years, until it was dismissed.
I was too scared and ashamed to admit to anyone that I’d been paying attention to the food I was gobbling up instead of the road when I mowed that man down.
BUT I KEPT eating, and gaining weight. At least I had my singing and music to sustain me. It was the one thing God told me to do that I obeyed.
In my final year of high school, our drama teacher chose The Music Man as that year’s musical. I had begged and pleaded with her to choose My Fair Lady so that I could sing Eliza and realize my childhood fantasy onstage, but she stood firm with Music Man. I auditioned for the lead role of Marian the Librarian, played by Shirley Jones in the 1962 film. My only real competition for the part was a slim, pretty, and talented classmate named Yvonne, who was a year younger than me. We both auditioned and I got the part and was elated.
As I was leaving school that day, after auditions, I passed Yvonne’s boyfriend in the hall.
“Hey, Voigt,” he said, “congratulations on getting the part.”
“Oh, thank you!”
“You must have got it because of your figure ,” he said, with a sneer.
I was speechless. I kept walking and held in the tears, pushed them down. How could he say something so cruel? It was the first time someone outside my home had made me feel really bad about how I looked. It was the first time I really, truly understood I was fat. Not chubby, not big-boned, not voluptuous— fat . But music wasn’tabout how a person looked, it was about talent and ordained gifts and ability. It was the one place that wasn’t touched by my crazy life, my crazy eating. Or so I had hoped.
The following year, that same drama teacher put on My Fair Lady , with lithe and pretty Yvonne in the romantic lead. I had pleaded for that part, but I guess I was too big to play Eliza. I wasn’t a romantic lead, I didn’t fit the dress.
By graduation, I was tipping the scales at 190 pounds.
I stood on the bathroom scale, wondering how, at my size, I was ever going to sing and perform like my idol, Karen Carpenter, who was getting skinnier and skinnier as I got fatter and fatter. And how was I going to sing the Broadway show tunes and play the parts I loved if I was
My bad habits kept escalating—like a speeding car, I was a wreck waiting to happen—until one early evening I crashed in one grand, dramatic, symbolic collision.
My parents had sent me to pick up Rob at the movie theater and on the way I stopped in at Burger King for my usual driving meal. I was driving and eating, heading westward, with the setting sun in my eyes. I remember looking in the rearview mirror and seeing a motorcyclist behind me as I leaned over to take a sip of my chocolate shake, and then . . .
The rest was in slow motion. The cyclist flipped over the roof of the car and was knocked out cold. Then, a flash of images: people saying, “We’ve called for help” and someone getting me out of the car and sitting me down on the curb . . . fire trucks, ambulances, and then . . . the sight of my father standing above me.
Dad whisked me out of there and got me home, then went to the hospital to check on the cyclist. He had regained consciousness, but when the doctors gave him a drug for shock he had a horrifying allergic reaction that left him paralyzed from the waist down for days. Needless to say, I was a basket case; we all were. My parents even let John come over to console me so I wouldn’t sink into depressed oblivion.
Thankfully, once the drug wore off, the man’s paralysis disappeared. Soon after he was released from the hospital, the man drove past our pretty, upper-middle-class home and decided to sue us for hundreds of thousands of dollars, even though he had completely recovered and was fine. The lawsuit hung over my father for two years, until it was dismissed.
I was too scared and ashamed to admit to anyone that I’d been paying attention to the food I was gobbling up instead of the road when I mowed that man down.
BUT I KEPT eating, and gaining weight. At least I had my singing and music to sustain me. It was the one thing God told me to do that I obeyed.
In my final year of high school, our drama teacher chose The Music Man as that year’s musical. I had begged and pleaded with her to choose My Fair Lady so that I could sing Eliza and realize my childhood fantasy onstage, but she stood firm with Music Man. I auditioned for the lead role of Marian the Librarian, played by Shirley Jones in the 1962 film. My only real competition for the part was a slim, pretty, and talented classmate named Yvonne, who was a year younger than me. We both auditioned and I got the part and was elated.
As I was leaving school that day, after auditions, I passed Yvonne’s boyfriend in the hall.
“Hey, Voigt,” he said, “congratulations on getting the part.”
“Oh, thank you!”
“You must have got it because of your figure ,” he said, with a sneer.
I was speechless. I kept walking and held in the tears, pushed them down. How could he say something so cruel? It was the first time someone outside my home had made me feel really bad about how I looked. It was the first time I really, truly understood I was fat. Not chubby, not big-boned, not voluptuous— fat . But music wasn’tabout how a person looked, it was about talent and ordained gifts and ability. It was the one place that wasn’t touched by my crazy life, my crazy eating. Or so I had hoped.
The following year, that same drama teacher put on My Fair Lady , with lithe and pretty Yvonne in the romantic lead. I had pleaded for that part, but I guess I was too big to play Eliza. I wasn’t a romantic lead, I didn’t fit the dress.
By graduation, I was tipping the scales at 190 pounds.
I stood on the bathroom scale, wondering how, at my size, I was ever going to sing and perform like my idol, Karen Carpenter, who was getting skinnier and skinnier as I got fatter and fatter. And how was I going to sing the Broadway show tunes and play the parts I loved if I was
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