Irene Dalis gets back in the action

Originally published in the San Jose Mercury News May 14, 2011

By Richard Scheinin

On Oct. 22, Irene Dalis was on her way to work at Opera San Jose, driving north on Interstate 880 in San Jose after a standing appointment with her hairdresser. She remembers that a white SUV sped onto the freeway from The Alameda and spun out of control on the rain-slick surface, barreling across three lanes, smashing into Dalis’ car and changing her life.

A Good Samaritan pulled her from the wreck. Dalis, 85, looked up at him, she recalls, and asked, “Do you go to the opera?”

She laughs, nearly seven months later, recounting that moment. Not that there’s anything remotely amusing about what Dalis — Opera San Jose’s founder and general director — has endured: snapped and shattered bones above the right ankle, 15 broken ribs, multiple surgeries and skin and muscle grafts over the course of five-plus months in three different hospitals. “There was much talk that I might have to have the right leg amputated,” she says.

Yet those words spoken at that moment — “Do you go to the opera?” — are so Irene Dalis.

Even now, speaking on the phone as she heals at her home in Willow Glen — on her feet, her body intact, working daily with a therapist to build her physical strength and muscle tone — she has to be pushed to discuss her ordeal.

She would much rather talk about the company, how it worked “like a clock” this past season: “As I’ve told my board, I could get hit by a bus, and the company would continue. And it did.” And she plans to be back in her office within two weeks. Even after “feeling like I’ve been to hell and back twice,” this whirlwind says she has no plans to retire: “There was a while there when I thought I’d have to give it up, but I’m back.

“I’m only moving forward,” she says, for instance toward the Fifth Annual Irene Dalis Vocal Competition, a showcase for 10 emerging singers, Saturday at the California Theatre. She will attend? “Of course! It’s an opportunity to show young talent that we do believe in them and we want to help them. That’s what my whole life is about right now, to help someone get going, to launch careers.”

It’s a terrific occasion, with the finalists culled in the preceding days from 100 or so competitors. Several of the judges are from nationally ranked companies; there’s $50,000 in prize money; and the audience votes gets to vote on its own winner in this “Opera Idol” kind of event.

But let’s get back to Irene Dalis, because the driver of that SUV — who vanished from the accident scene and hasn’t been found — came that close to removing the South Bay’s most widely respected arts personage from the planet.

And if you don’t know her story, here it is in a nutshell: The daughter of a downtown San Jose hat maker, she grew up on Delmas Avenue, watched Clark Gable in “Gone with the Wind” at least seven times at the California Theatre after the film’s opening in 1939, graduated from San Jose State in 1946 with a minor in math and a major in music education, then went off to New York for more music studies.

As a mezzo-soprano, she cultivated her career at regional opera houses in Europe. In 1957, she debuted at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where she starred in dozens of productions over two decades, before retiring in 1976 and returning to San Jose — to her true destiny and most important career, she has said, as the founder of Opera San Jose, now in its 27th season.

And so, while in the hospital — first at Valley Medical Center and Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose, and finally at California Pacific Medical Center’s Davies Campus in San Francisco — she studied the company’s balance sheets. “You better believe it, every month, absolutely.”

She also watched videotapes of the performances she was missing at the California Theatre: “Oh, I tell you that was the biggest punishment. That was the hardest, knowing that my people were on stage, and where was I? I was in bed. Fifty miles away.”

Yes, there was additional punishment: grueling surgeries and relentlessly enforced rehabilitation.

“Honey, it was the real thing. You know I don’t do anything halfway.

“At the beginning,” she says, “I really thought I should depart: ‘Let’s find out what’s on the other side of this world. Let’s just do it.’

“That was my first wish, and I wasn’t frightened or anything. But when I realized that I was not going to die, then I knew I had to do everything in my power to help this heal, and I tried to cooperate with all the doctors, and I really did have a dream team. And yes, there were moments of great difficulty, but somehow or other good sense came into my brain: ‘Well, it’s not going to help to be depressed.’ And I just found a good thing to think about every day, something in my life, and I’ve had a wonderful life.”

She pauses to come up with the words to characterize her recent experiences: “My whole life has been go-go-go, do-do-do. But this was six months doing nothing, and all I did was think and think and think. I’m not a religious person, but I spent a lot of time thinking about the Big One. And I think I relived my entire life, as well. I really do.”

Which memories rose up?

“Oh, I thought about my late husband, and about my childhood, and how I spent most of it at the piano. And I thought about college in the war years, and how, during World War II, people would hang stars in their living room windows. And the day my mother took down those three stars, and I knew my three brothers were well and coming home — they were all overseas in the military. I think that was the happiest day in my life.”

Is she a nostalgic person?

“I didn’t used to be,” she says, then tallies her family members, who rallied around her in the hospital: her daughter Alida and grandsons Gregory and Scott, as well as her two nephews and six nieces and her three great-nephews and three great-nieces. And her friends, too, and the hundreds of people who sent her get-well cards: “The kind of support I have in this city is amazing.

“I think basically I’ve come to appreciate my life,” she says. Just over a month ago, she returned home and walked through the door. “Oh,” she says, “I just thought my little house was a palace.”

Every day she works with the therapist, who has “had me out on the walker,” she says. “I just went down to the curb and walked around. Pretty soon it’s going to be graduation time” — back to work, she means — “and meanwhile, if I can walk 20 steps, I’m grateful.”

In recent years, Dalis was a power walker, striding through several miles every day. Are the power walking days over?

“Oh, I think that’s a thing of the past. But we’ll see. One step at a time, my dear. Anything is possible.”

Just a few days ago, doctors gave her permission to put her full weight on her injured right leg: “I’m liberated!” she says.

“I saw two performances over the weekend,” she adds. Attending those final performances of “La Bohème,” she was “on cloud nine,” she says. Last Sunday, when she took her seat, a stir went through the audience: “It was like mother’s come home.”