‘Gee, What Would Happen If I Were Just Me?’ Published: May 8. 1966 By JOAN BARTHEL EVERAL years ago, when Judith Raskin was. just beginning to get somewhere professionally, a publicist asked her what kind of image she wanted to present. “I thought about it,” she recalls, “and then I said, ‘Gee, what would happen if I were tust me?" Clearcut. Uncomplicated. And on the surface, it has worked out. just that easily, Sunny and beautiful, with a voice to match, she was hound to entrance N.B.C. Opera viewers as Susanna and Zerlina and other lov. ables, to charm them with her Des- pina at City Center, to be called “As appealing a Susanna as the Metro- politan could wish for’ after her debut there in 1962. The sweetness- and-light image will get another pol- ishing this week, when she. sings in Haydn's “The Creation” with Leon- ard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. “Goddess and angel” burbled a review of her lieder recita! last December, and everybody knows that such beings live on nectar and roses, high up in the serene some- where, As it happens, Judith Raskin shops for groceries at Waldbaum's and lives in a screamingly ordinary’ 5-room apartment in Queens, on a block of look-alike buildings” with ~ plastic greenery in the lobbies and. names like “Revere Hall” and “The Joyce.” A different picture this: the artist as housewife, blithely humming arias as she whips up casseroles’ for a busy husband (a physician) and two chil- dren, Jonathan and Lisa, at the in- tolerant ages. of 15 and 12, But it remains uncomplicated, rigtt up to the moment. she glances around the casually modern living room, . says she hates it there, can’t walt to move into Manhattan, and describes how sometimes, after a performance, she comes home and compulsively scrubs the kitchen floor, ("I know that’s unnecessarily punishing myself, but I find myself doing it.) * Thus, in a sentence or two, “just me” becomes a complex woman of warmth, spontaneity and a some- times shattering candor, who grim- aces at the tendency of her publicity to lean toward such devastating rev- elations as the recipe for “Miss Raskin's Orange Chicken,” but who is the first to suggest the Sunnybrook Farm image is partly her own fault. “Maybe I've protected -myself toolong,” she said slowly. “I have not spilled all over the place, and I've tried not to let my problems show on the stage, but to work them ott in a way that doesn't affect my audience. And so a beautiful illusion has grown up that I have no problems, But anybody who knows me knows that still water runs very deep. “Sometimes at a lesson or at prac- tice I come across something — an emotion — which brings to mind a sorrow or a problem of mine, and I weep, then I don't have to weep when I'm onstage." There have been major illnesses, family problems; her father died suddenly two weeks be- fore she sang a first performance of “The Rake's Progress” at Carnegie Hall. Some time ago she decided the best way to handle “underlying psy- chological problems” was to confront them. “It's a myth that you have to be crazy, or at least neurotic, to be productive," she said with emphasis. “Tf I hadn't had professional help, I would be one of the vocal dropouts. I feel that through this help I have found, rather than lost, the artist in me.” She has also come upon the ability —fairly recently, she hints—to take @ pride in her work that is as honest as it is healthy, based on a saving humor. “In this house everybody is Nervous, even the cat," reads a plaque, in Italian, on the kitchen bulletin board. It seemed far more applicable to the Raskin cat, a fat black specimen named Oedipuss who prowled about the coffee table, mew- ing irritably, than to his owner, who flecked away a few cat hairs and settled back on the sofa, talking with increasing ease. "I ke to eat good food, and I'm 15 pounds overweight—why do you think I'm wearing this black dress? —and I'm always going to start a diet tomorrow. I have a wonderful house- Keeper during the day, but I don't have a little lady with a white apron taking care of me constantly. I love to cook, and I think I throw a pretty good dinner party, but I'm not a balabusteh, That means” — she widened her eyes—“oy, such a house- keeper! “So they really don't read me in this neighborhood. The day after we moved in six years ago, with every- thing in an uproar, I had to rush out to an appointment, and when I dashed into the elevator, carrying my black music case, a lady in the elevator looked me over and said approvingly, ‘You've lived in Queens only one day and already you're play- ing mah-jongg:' * "T don't conform te the Good House- keeping kind of housewife and I'm not the lady next door, What I am" —a sudden grin—"is much more in- teresting and more charming. I think I'm glamorous, I think it's very glamorous to do the things I've been doing., Although, the other night myout to an appointment, and when T dashed into the elevator, carrying my black music case, a lady in the elevator looked me over and said approvingly, “You've lived in Queens only one day and already you're play- ing mah-jongg!' . “I don't conform to the Good House- keeping kind of housewife and I'm not the lady next door, What I am" —a sudden grin—"is much more in- teresting and more charming. 1 think I'm glamorous. I think it's very glamorous to do the things I've been doing,,Although, the other night my daughter was sick with an intestinal virus, and while I wag sitting there at 3 in the morning, holding her head, T thought to myself, ‘This is glamor?" “But who knows, maybe it is. I know I want both these things—my home and family, and my career. Even though I never really tried to ‘have a career,’ meaning personal ap- pearances and all that jazz. I haven't tried for it, but in the last 7 or 8 years I've been having it anyway, I never wanted to burst upon the scene and flame for a few years, then burn out. I just wanted to sing, and I wanted to sing well. “My teachers told me, ‘the secret for you is slow progress,’ and I was so lucky that they knew the right thing to do with me, Of all my troubles, none have had anything to do with my teachers. George Schick is my kind of musician; there is a gentleness, a poetry, in him. I haven't had any trouble with my development as a musician; I guess I was born with musical taste, Nobody ever told me Bach. and Mezart were good; I just knew, The first time I heard ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ I almost got physically ill, it was so beautiful. “T've tried to make up in depth what I don't have in quantity. There is a kind of singer who has a poetic approach to music rather than a purely vocal approach, It's a special kind of voice, which cannot be de- scribed simply as lyric or lyric colora- tura. It's a special kind of sound. with a certain purity, and I like to think that's what I have.” Others have thought so, especially since her spectacularly received re- citals in the past year and a half. The beginnings were less promising; as a child she studied violin and piano, not yoice. “My parents just didn’t think I had it,” she said briefly, closing—or not opening—the subject.