When I was eight years old, I cuddled up next to the radiator after choir practice and shrieked with mirth at Betsy and Tacy’s unsuccessful coronation of the upside-down Queen Dolly in the drawing-room-turned-Mirror-Palace. A few years later my eyes sparkled with Betsy’s as I made my First Trip Alone to my Carnegie Library and headed straight for Floor Four: Music and Art. Betsy and Tacy were my companions through all the “firsts” in high school and through any number of crushes and heartaches. But I’m thirty-two now, and only recently have I realized how much I owe to Julia Ray.

Julia was the only kid I had ever encountered in literature who, like me, knew that she wanted to be an opera singer from a young age and, unlike me, possessed the happy art of turning to gold everything she touched. She was a unique combination of the girl next door and, like the art form of opera, a bit larger, a bit better, than life. The insecurities of adolescence affected her not at all. How I admired her brilliance, charm and glamour, as well as the more prosaic underlying qualities of focus, drive and stamina which, I find, are just as important after all. She always knew exactly what she wanted to be when she grew up, and took every step to achieve that end. She learned repertoire. She practiced. She sang. She worked. She worked hard. “When Julia had a solo to sing,” her younger sister Betsy reflected, “she practiced it, although she neglected everything else.” I love Betsy, but it was Julia who inspired me, and I am grateful to Maud Hart Lovelace for giving me such a sparkling friend.

I think the reason that the Betsy-Tacy series is incredibly engaging children’s literature is that it presents culture and family life as they should be. Julia is an artist as artists should be; committed to the core to her unique calling but, at the same time, ever bringing out others’ talent and helping the musical culture around her to flourish. She encourages her sister to join the choir; she introduces her family to the beauties of sung liturgy; she plays around the piano for the Crowd to sing, and she happily sings popular songs at school assemblies, “dropping all her grand opera airs.” (Oh, for a few musical colleagues like Julia Ray!) In short, she makes people happy, and that is what music is about.

Brava, Maud Hart Lovelace!
 

Classical singer Imelda Franklin Bogue arrived on the East Coast -- aka "the Great World" -- in February of 2006 from her hometown of Seattle, made her Carnegie Hall debut four months later with the Manhattan-based Pacific Opera Company, and makes her professional oratorio debut in March of 2007 with the Fairfield County Chorale. A Metropolitan Opera Regional Finalist, Ms. Bogue is the creator of two traveling shows: The Secret Life of Opera Singers, An Operatic Comedy, an eclectic fusion of opera, audience participation and improvisational comedy, and Opera From A to Z, the classroom show which introduces children to the art form. For booking inquiries or to subscribe to Secret Life Adventures, the virtual newsletter that helps you keep your operatic groove on, email Imelda at imeldafranklinbogue@comcast.net or check out her website at http://www.imeldafranklinbogue.com.