March 2006
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Beyond the walls
Opera lover William Shumate is "Willie the Door"
William Shumate, PhD It was a job no other volunteer wanted, helping young opera singers on and off the stage and guarding the door during each performance to insure quiet, interruption-free auditions. But Children's Hospital Boston psychologist William Shumate, PhD, loves it. For 20 years, he has been the doorkeeper at the Metropolitan Opera's annual audition—the first of three rounds to find the most talented singers in the United States under age 30—held at The Boston Conservatory.
Shumate has loved opera since childhood and saw his first when he was just 9 years old. "Music and opera have always been a part of my life," he says. When he heard about the audition group through friends, he immediately began volunteering. He also gives tours of Symphony Hall each month.
Unlike Shumate, most volunteers preferred jobs that allowed them into the hall, where they could listen to the powerful voices of opera's most ambitious singers. So they rotated through the post of doorkeeper solely out of duty. But for Shumate, the silence among the select few allowed into the hall was stressful. "Because we were a small group listening to the singers, in the attempt to be so quiet, I suddenly found that I wanted to cough, sneeze, scratch, anything," he says. He was so comfortable during his first rotation as doorkeeper that he's never taken another post and even earned the nickname of "Willie the Door."
Shumate says doorkeeper duty still appeals to him because it brings out all of his paternal instincts. Beyond instructing the singers on how to announce themselves onstage, he tries to create a calm atmosphere while they're waiting. "I really want them to be relaxed enough to put their best foot forward," he says. "That means that once I have prepped them and told them what to do, I then leave them alone, so they can concentrate."
For some he's a last-minute coat rack. "Some of [the singers] will decide at the last minute they don't want to wear their watch, their wallets, their cell phone, and all sorts of stuff that I end up being the custodian of until they've come off the stage," says Shumate. With a number of prestigious performing arts schools in the area, Boston has the largest pool of entrants, second only to New York. This year "Willie" helped more than 68 singers through the door.
As for his own opera ambitions, Shumate says he's a frustrated opera singer. "I have never had a voice of any consequence," he says, "so I have resorted to whistling, which drives everybody but me crazy."
At Children's, Shumate supervises psychology trainees in the Psychiatry Department, the site of his own internship 42 years ago. After earning his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis, he returned to Children's and the Judge Baker Children's Center and has never left. "I think the main reason I have been here as long as I have is that I received such wonderful training, and I have always wanted to give that back," he says. "It's the kind of nice one-on-one teaching that I like to do."
Of his interns, Shumate says, "I want them to have the same good experience that I want the opera singers to have, because there is enough stress inherent in the situation that we don't need to add more if we can avoid it."
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