Searching for Cassiopeia

By Fabio Osaben

This is a funny and poignant account of the life of a rogue of sorts. The crazy escapades and sad moments of a life lived on the brink and a character that never held back. It is ultimately the search for a love lost many years before and a search for the essence of unspoiled youth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Aug 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466952065

Fabio Osaben

1. In recounting these escapades, both as a young boy in my native Trieste and later in the United States and while traveling over half this world, I became aware of the place love has in the ever present cycle of life and death, that one never looks at, and, how religion, control, fear, pleasure and joy contribute to this understanding. 2. Do you remember being here before? Have you been here all along but you don't remember. How to remember, or better, what is the quality of the mind that asks this question? 3. I live in New York, studied aerospace technology and voice, was a member of the Met Studio, sang opera and concerts, off-Broadway and later concentrated on night clubs. I traveled extensively throughout the world, was a director on the largest cruise companies in the world, hotels and various resorts. I enjoy life, value my relationships and my three sons all involved in the arts.

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Contents

Capitolo Primo

Capitolo Due

Chapter 4 (?)

Chapter 2 (I Was a Whiz in Math!)

Chapter 2 1/2 (An Interlude)

Chapter 8

Chapter Interlude

Chapter 6 (?)

Chapter after 6 (Now it’s up to you to figure it out, or as Billy Bigelow or Jigger would say, Figger it out!)

Chapter 1 (What? Hey, Butch, it’s the beginning of a new life; and anyway, it’s my book!)

Chapter 10 (A Thought in the Middle of an Irony)

Chapter I (Roman Numerals? Well, I Am Italian!)

Chapter 2 (Who cares? Who’s counting? It’s just a story.

Page 1 (A new approach!)

Page 2 (Hey, looks like we are finally establishing a pattern!)

Page 3 (Yes! Yes!)

Chapter I (Wrapping Up the Sixties)

Chapter 2 (The Next Phase, in a Different Direction)

Chapter 3 (The Sun Rises, the Sun Sets… This Is the Sunset of a Beautiful Time)

Chapter 4 (All Long Journeys Begin with the First Step… in This Case, the Next Step)

Chapter 5 (The Road Is Long, with Many a Winding Turn)

Interlude

Chapter 6 (Chapter Alice)

Chapter 7 (Little Did I Know What Was about to Happen!)

Chapter 8 (Picking Up the Pieces)

Chapter ? (Just the next step, small steps, one at a time. It’s a long journey.)

Chapter 9 (Yeah! The Next Chapter!)

Chapter 10 (To Build Character by Negative Means)

Chapter 11 (Hey! Sounds like Bankruptcy!)

Chapter 12 (What shall we talk about? Life, death, love, or a good dirty joke?)

Chapter 13 (On Stupidity and Ignorance)

Chapter 14 (A Brush with Opera, Again)

Chapter 15 (My Kids)

Another Chapter (Long-haired stuff, good time for going to the used beer depository.)

Chapter 16 (Movies That Left Their Mark)

Chapter 17 (Required Reading)

Chapter 18 (Death and Its Benefits)

Chapter 19 (Food!)

Chapter 20 (Somebody Said It Better!)

Chapter 21 (To Recapitulate and Give Credit Where Credit Is Due. My Heroes!)

Chapter 23 (I Love Yodels)

Chapter 24 (Mr. Z and the Ringneck Dove)

Chapter 25 (Pesto, Pesto, Pesto!)

Chapter 26 (Ring Toss!)

Chapter 27 (Trieste, the Return)

Chapter 28 (On Compliments)

Chapter 29 (Spinning Records)

Chapter 30 (And Now for a Romantic Interlude?)

Chapter 31 (My Favorites)

Chapter 32 (Things I Hate, Things That Piss Me Off)

Chapter 33 (Have You Noticed How People Seem to Have a Double? Make Mine Scotch!)

Chapter 34 (Let’s Hear One for Old Glory!)

Chapter 35 (It’s Always Now!)

Chapter 36 (The Ever-Elusive Whatnot)

Chapter 37 (The Ghost)

Chapter 38 (Tying Up Loose Ends)

Epilogue (No More Parentheses: The Journey Is Journey, My Favorite Group!)

Celia… . . somehow, somewhere

I’ll find you

Eating fresh clams in Trieste. Do you remember the lemons? The clams moving as you guzzled them down the hatch? How many years was that before Carousel? Did the memory prepare me for Billy and Jigger and real fine clambake? Is that where the journey began? Years later, when I sang those roles, the lemon was there, the clams were there, and so were Ms. Pipperidge and Julie and my mom, who gave me those early memories. As Jigger, I remember hoisting Ms. Pipperidge over my shoulder and patting her behind… . The story begins!

Early gospel (By whom? I dunno! as Jigger would say.)

Never run out of basil or toilet paper!

Capitolo Primo

(Chapter Uno)

I remember the first time I felt a little twinge, something stirring in my pants. My earliest girlfriend was Giuliana—pretty girl—in Trieste, Italy. She lived on the first floor in Piazza Perugino 3. I, on the other hand, lived on the third floor. Sometimes she would come up to play. Sometimes I would go down. Don’t go there! On one occasion in around 1952, I must have been six or thereabouts, we were playing in her apartment. She had a nanny, a young girl of no more than sixteen years… . Pretty enough! Well, to me. Man of the world! I was only six years old! Giuliana was to take her bath… in the tub! All was ready. The girl, the nanny, was washing her. I was behind, playing on the floor, when I suddenly looked up under her skirt. No bloomers! There was the most beautiful sight I had never seen before! An older woman’s butt… beautiful and round. I, six; she sixteen. I have relived that moment countless times. To this day, butt rules!

And so I had my introduction to the ways of the flesh.

Capitolo Due

(Page 2)

As a boy, I always used to reach up and grab things off the table, things that my mother was preparing. All sorts of goodies, vegetables, cauliflower, carrots, peppers, and fruit—prickly pears (cactus fruit), persimmons, peaches. My mom always used to say, Watch out, little guy. One of these days, you’ll grab something you won’t like! Watch out! One day, my mom was preparing fish—cleaning, boning, blah, blah, blah. Up came that little hand, reaching over the table and grabbing what I thought was a juicy peach. My mom looked and watched as I spit my guts out, and she laughed and laughed. She shook her finger at me. I told you! How can you not love a mom like that? To this day, I love all vegetables, all fish, everything—raw, cooked, you name it, nuked! I will never understand why American kids don’t like vegetables. Green things, peas, broccoli, spinach. To eat spinach crêpes, with a butter bread crumb sauce sprinkled with Parmigiano. Maybe I’ll give you my take on it later.

In Trieste, we didn’t drink soda or milk. We drank wine, spiked with a little sparkling water, or rather sparkling water spiked with a little wine. Hey! Bring it on! And much healthier. My mom used to send me down with the wine decanter to the trattoria, there in Piazza Perugino, and get an eighth of wine for lunch. I was eight years old. When we came to America a few years later, we were doing the tourist thing, and we stopped to eat at a deli. My father ordered four beers. The waitress looked at me and asked, How old is he? I obviously didn’t get the beer. America will never learn. But you know, it’s wine, women, and song—not wine, women, and food! So? When I was four, in 1949, I first heard Mario del Monaco on that purple-and-white radio we had in the kitchen. He was singing Nessun Dorma. I was done for. I had no idea what this voice would ultimately do for me. So there you have it—how I became a connoisseur of wine, women, and song by the age of six!

PS. (an addendum)

Mario del Monaco, the cornerstone of my vocal training, to be embellished later on by Merrill and Corelli.

(Chapter 3?)

I wanted to write a little more or much more about my life in Trieste, Italy, about growing up with my first hero—my brother—but I didn’t necessarily want this to be a chronological detail. So a moment of pause. Yesterday saw the passing of a true legend of music, soul, and disco—Donna Summer. Live long and prosper! Take a moment, take out that record, and dance your buns off!

Love to love you, baby!

my-disco-ball.jpg

(Chapter… 1… ?)

We all go through life with hopes and dreams and aspirations of family and personal achievement. Life doesn’t always turn out the way you hope. You will see when I tell you. But all these things—hope, dreams, faith, God—these are all conditions of the mind in its search for security. None of that exists. Instead, what does exist is a magnificent world that we never look at, we never appreciate, we take for granted. The reality is so much more beautiful; and here I am using words that are in the field of measurement, which is all the mind has, it seems, achieved. I asked someone last night, Look, what is that? He said, It’s a plane. It was the planet Venus in its journey, its journey across the firmament around something. We think we move in a linear way. From here to there, here to there. But do we move at all? People think they go through time. Time, which man invented.

Are we going that way or that way? We are all going around on a carousel called the universe. We never stop to look at it, to try to understand it. And because our minds are so shallow, we make things up. We make things up in our own minds; we start believing in those things and work toward them. Effectively, what we have done is dangle a banana, a carrot in front of our face, just out of reach; and we run for it. And we never quite seem to reach it. This is called a goal, something we created in our own minds that we try to reach, effectively blinding us to what is beyond the goal. I’m in my midsixties, although I know I’m really thirty-eight. And a young lady the other day asked me, in an interview, what my goals are for the next ten years. Not only is she dangling a banana in front of my face, but she is limiting me to ten years. Why not twelve years?

(Chapter 9)

(This is not a chapter. Celia will never be; Celia is now.)

Celia touched time. All my wives were and still are beautiful women. But Celia touched time. When that happened, I wasn’t looking. I wasn’t asking. I had no questions. I had no answers. They say when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. So came this understanding. Celia touched time!

I’m going to make coffee.

Chapter 4

 (?)

Before I tell you a little bit about my prodigious beginnings as the local two-year-old heartthrob, I should mention a word about swagger. Swagger. What is swagger? Swagger is a matter of comportment, how you carry yourself when you enter a room. It’s a matter both physical and mental, romantic with a sense of joie de vivre. Or you can just say Errol Flynn? Whether playing a cowboy, Robin Hood, Lord Essex, or dressed in white tie and tails, he could enter a room like no other. It’s as if he were saying, Move over, here I am! but not in a conceited way. It was in a playful, jovial way. My favorite actor! My second son, Giancarlo, has a bit of it. I noticed it one day while walking in the street. He was up ahead a bit, and I noticed it in his walk. He will be a good actor. As for me, I missed the boat! So much for swagger!

Chapter 2

 (I Was a Whiz in Math!)

The entry into Trieste, Italy, where I grew up, is spectacular. Trieste is in the uppermost northeast corner of the Adriatic Sea, just across from Venice. Most tourists don’t go there because Venice is so close. As you enter along a scenic piece of roadway tucked into the cliffs that fall down to that blue sea, there in front stretches out this magnificent panorama with a waterfront made out of piazzas, hotels, the Verdi Opera House, and countless places to eat al fresco. Dominating the city is an ancient hill where the city’s main cathedral, San Giusto, sits, among some Roman ruins and the castle of San Giusto that dominates the entire area. The castle comprises a museum, an art gallery, a restaurant with outdoor dancing, and a central courtyard where operas are performed in summer outdoors, with up to fifteen thousand people happily eating gelato and watching their favorite singers. Many years later, while at a concert in Stamford, Connecticut, we happily recalled those moments with the great tenor Giuseppe di Stefano, wwho thought that we had said we heard him singing at the famous bordello in Trieste. Naturally, he almost wet his pants, laughing at the slip of the tongue. I have a beautiful autographed picture that he gave me. You know, I am making too many grammatical mistakes tonight. So I’m going to put this baby to bed, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

Well, I’m back, I’m refreshed, and I just made another mistake! (Life is funny. You buy a suit with two pairs of pants, and you burn a hole in the coat!)

My mom was a beautiful, kind woman who let me eat raw fish from on top of