When I was sixteen, I fell in love with Mario Lanza. It happened quickly and deeply, like a searing knife twisting into my pubescent flesh. One day I heatedly became more aware of his existence than I had the day before, and the next all I could think of was this man and the golden voice that poured from his strong and achingly beautiful being. Mario Lanza, unfortunately, is someone that has long been forgotten in the dusty corners of LIFE magazines and forlorn, broken records. He exists now only in small-press biographies, PBS specials, and occasional re-masterings of his recordings. He also exists in memory, perhaps the most delicate and ephemeral of all. The fleetingness of memory is sharp in my mind; the only reason I write these words is because I had almost forgotten all about Mario, and my sixteenth year when he was my everything. Maybe this is some kind of hubris, but nonetheless, I feel that perhaps I am one of the few that knows of him. The rest, well, who knows where they are and how long they will live.

I first became aware of this God of Song through my grandfather, a manic-depressive staunch Catholic who I knew yearned for better days, when he was young and vivacious and handsome; the days that he belonged to, and in some capacity, when he didn’t have to answer to anybody. But because these days were long gone, he infused in his only grandchildren (myself and my younger sister) his love for music and movies of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals were staples of our afternoons spent with our grandparents. I recall one year in which every single time I visited them, which was most likely every weekend, we watched the move musical Oklahoma!. I still wake up sometimes with “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” ringing like a throbbing bell in the back of my mind.

There was a method to this infusion of nostalgia for things I had not experienced in my soul. I would approach the movie shelf with my grandfather, I standing on a stool so that I could see the fifteen or so DVDs sitting in the deep recesses of the wooden square cabinet. He would ask me what I wanted to watch. If my sister was present, we had to compromise. But the selection never deviated. It was during these afternoons and evenings filled with State Fair, The Bishop’s Wife, The Eddie Duchin Story, An Affair to Remember that prepared me for Mario’s entrance, grand and loud and more deeply resonating than I could have ever expected to felt at that time in my life.

In my early teens, I had crushes a plenty, but they seemed to fall in a sort of assembly line, sprouted from the Caucasian suburbia in which I inhabited. None of them stand out to me now. Even my celebrity crushes fall under this category. The only reason I bring this up is to emphasize the strictly vanilla romantic dream-world I escaped to in moments of longing and infatuation when I was young. If this dream-world was a colour, it would be white. If it was a sandwich, it would be peanut butter. If it was a song, it would “Sugar Pie Honeybunch.” You get the picture.

Then, suddenly, the lights dim. I see the stage before me. I am in the plush, front row, the one person present as I sink deeper in the velvet, unsure what awaits me behind the ruby-red curtain. I can hear the orchestra tuning, plucking at their strings and running swiftly through their scales. It seems the performance, whatever it may be, will not begin for some time, when an earth shattering note suddenly descends upon my being. The curtain has not been drawn. The orchestra has not begun to play. But neither need to, and he doesn’t even need to physically enter the stage to fill it to the brim with his presence…his voice. It pierces the air, the space, my heart. I was in my grandparents’ house when I first heard The Voice.

To be continued.