Composing a Further Life

children, a daughter and a son. The pattern of the time had him making the decisions about where the family would live to fit the availability of jobs, and about returning to school, but at the same time, Dan said, “It was a very strange thing because our agreement was we won’t have any kids until we get out of school, but she had suddenly gone and stopped using her birth control pill.… I like women, but I find that there is a major nesting instinct that hits hard and wide.” Medical bills were high, the marriage was running downhill, and Dan and his wife, who had both read
The Open Marriage
, a best seller at the time, were questioning their mutual commitment. 5
    A job in Milwaukee looked like the solution, but “once again, she had no choice in where we were going.” It was a two-year job with a possibility of renewal, but a politically astute soprano had been hired at the same time to teach on a temporary basis, and she got the continuing appointment. “I did some really good things there,” Dan said. “I had some really good students, and I saved their voices.… It’s one thing to get a job and another thing to hold it. You need someone who tells you, ‘Dan, make sure that if you perform somewhere you put your programs in everybody’s mailbox.’ They don’t tell you. I didn’t do that, and later I realized they didn’t know what I was doing.” Dan told these stories with wry humor.
    “One of the things I think happened at the university is one of my former students accused me of making a pass at him. I hadn’t, but he wanted desperately to be a star. I tried very hard, but he just couldn’t sing. He wouldn’t listen to what I was telling him, but he had the idea of being up there in spangles and stars, and wouldn’t that be wonderful? I think he complained, and what happened is the word got out that I was a—and oddly enough, to be hung for something you didn’t do—I could have done it, you know, but I wasn’t particularly attracted. I think that killed my academic career. But you could never prove it. And when there are too many people for too few jobs, any kind of taint on your record, you’re dead.” It was a very bad time to be on the academic job market. The expansion of higher education to accommodate the Baby Boom had overshot the need, so universities were in retrenchment mode, cutting back on hiring, and the turmoil on campuses during the sixties made hiring committees ultracautious.
    “I’m sitting here in beautiful downtown Milwaukee,” Dan went on, “and I have no job. You know, you have these great friends at the university, but if you’re not there and you’ve been canned, it’s like you have the mark of Cain. You have become invisible.” While Dan was searching for a job, he was volunteering for a nonprofit, putting together a list of resources for survival for people in the same position.
    When Dan got a job as a music teacher in the Milwaukee public school system, “It was a black high school, and the kids had been told they’d have a black teacher. I got there, and here’s my honky ass; it was 1971, and I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And they fought me the whole year. Okay, I failed at the university in a sense, because I wasn’t retained, and then I went right out and I failed at this high school. They wouldn’t let me teach them. I know they did this on purpose, because one time we were trying to do a few really simple things and I’m sitting there so frustrated, the basses just started singing their line and the tenors came in and the altos came in … they could do it without me, and they showed me, but they wouldn’t do it for me. It was a real slap to my ego.
    “That fall, I also decided to be a vegetarian. That was kind of dumb, because you don’t just decide to be a vegetarian. I just started eating vegetables. I almost died. My body didn’t make the shifts, and by Thanksgiving I was not well. I was supposed to be doing the Don Basilio part in a production of
The Marriage of Figaro
, and I couldn’t—I lost my voice, got a cold, and couldn’t sing. So somebody else came and did it. I didn’t do many more shows.
    “Then about that time, the marriage collapsed. One, two, three, the marriage collapsed over Christmas, the school transferred me, and the court said, ‘Move out of the house, and you have to pay
x
amount.’ It was all happening at the same time. What I should have done in retrospect, if I had been healthier,