March 1997

Paper Trails Date: 03/21/97 Category: STYLE Page: 8E Tonsillitis debuts a week before Carnegie Hall The last time Melody Johnson saw a doctor was three years ago. The Pine Bluff native, who now lives in New York, normally is a healthy person. This week she isn't. And this is no normal week. Sunday is Johnson's Carnegie Hall debut. "I can't even believe it," Johnson says, not of her debut but of her tonsillitis. Her doctor says she'll be doing so much better by Sunday that only she will know she's sick. That's still disappointing, though. "It's so exciting for me, and I want to be able to enjoy it," says Johnson, a soprano. "I don't want to feel like I'm singing through oatmeal." Johnson is used to problematic debuts. For 31U2 years, she's been the understudy for the comedic Carlotta in Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. That includes more than 100 performances, the first of which found her face down on the floor when she exited the stage in the wrong spot. Since the stage went black, this wasn't a problem. But since Johnson was in a huge hoop skirt, she couldn't get up before the lights started coming back on. "You're like a whale, you're beached," she says. So she yelled for another cast member to just drag her right off. Except perhaps for her first night, Johnson says the Phantom experience has been "the single most incredible experience in my life." Johnson got the part about the time she was ready to bid good riddance to New York and her opera career. She'd been to Houston, Cincinnati and Austria for various scholarships and performances with opera companies. And she froze, starved and took odd jobs. "I'm not worth squat as a secretary," Johnson says. "I got by on my personality." She charmed her employers by speaking in several languages. But eventually Johnson was no longer charmed with the starving-artist routine. Ready to quit her dream of singing at the Metropolitan Opera, Johnson took a friend's advice and auditioned for the Phantom role, which initially she didn't want. "Melody, you're a fool if you don't do it," her friend said. "Now go do it." Johnson says she's heard that God won't test a person beyond what that person's able to handle, and "I believe he just looked down and knew I was at the end." With her Carnegie Hall debut, Johnson might be at something of a beginning. "I look at this as hopefully my first performance at Carnegie Hall," she says. Johnson is singing the lead for Mozart's Solemn Vespers, which includes her own "gorgeous aria." 'Totally not true' There's been talk that Tom Dalton won't be director of the state Department of Human Services much longer. That's because there supposedly is an ad in a national hospital association magazine advertising his position. "We heard that rumor about the ad a month ago," says Joe Quinn, the department's spokesman. "It's kind of old to us." Not to mention, Quinn says, "It's totally not true." He says Dalton and Gov. Mike Huckabee "have gotten quite close through the legislative session. They are both very happy with each other. I think Tom is very much enjoying the work right now." Osborne's wake-up call A brush with death has given philanthropist and Christmas-light king Jennings Osborne a new lease on life. After sextuple-bypass surgery -- "I don't do anything in moderation," he says -- in November, Osborne was scared into losing weight. The 370-pounder dropped 50 pounds before his surgery and has lost another 20 since. Osborne's wife, Mitzi, was in a hospital waiting room with a woman whose husband underwent heart surgery the same day as Osborne. "He never got to leave the hospital," Osborne says. "You talk about a wake-up call." At one point Osborne couldn't even weigh himself on a normal scale, which only goes up to 299 pounds. "I had to go to the feed mill to get weighed," he says. And he avoided going places because he couldn't handle walking distances or climbing stairs. Now, he says, "I can walk 2 miles a day and not even be short-winded." That doesn't mean he likes exercise. "I would rather take a beating," Osborne says. He easily bores of walking on a treadmill, but he says, "When you get tired you have to keep going or you'll break a leg, and there's another variable in (my) world that I don't need." Osborne is having so much fun watching his waistline shrink and his belt tighten, he says, "I went and bought me a little hole puncher instead of taking (the belt) to the cobbler letting him do it all the time." Osborne is working toward a goal of 220 pounds, but he knows he has a way to go. For instance, last weekend he visited a couple of casinos -- not for games of chance but for the buffets. "I gambled on the buffet that I could eat everything, and I did," Osborne says. A trainer keeps Osborne in line, but he allows him to fall off the wagon once a week. "I fell offof it, and it drug me for a block." HOT TIP? QUIRKY STORY? LIVELY TALE? Call Carrie Rengers at 378-3892 or e-mail her at: Carrie -- Rengers@adg.ardemgaz.com

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