The Wagner Society of Washington DC had another open meeting at Funger Hall on the George Washington University campus last evening (1/13/00) which I (a non-member, as I always feel compelled to explain) attended. J.K. Holman, the society's chairman opened the meeting with a few special announcements, one of which might be of special interest to readers here. The society has obtained an undisclosed number of tickets for this summer's Bayreuth festival available only to paying members of record as of February 15, 2000. They are available as a set of three (for Parsifal, Lohengrin, and Meistersinger) and/or four (The Ring). It is expected that the number of requests will exceed the number of available tickets and the society is "working hard to develop the fairest possible way to allocate" this limited number of tickets among its members. He then introduced the evening's speaker, Jeannie Williams, a columnist for *USA Today*, who has written for *Opera News*, *Opera Monthly*, *Opera Quarterly*, *BBC Music Magazine*, the magazine of Lyric Opera of Chicago, and *New York Magazine*. She has also written an (as she pointed out) unauthorized biography of Jon Vickers entitled *Jon Vickers: A Hero's Life* about which she spoke with illustrations from some taped recordings. In the past, I have attempted to give a somewhat detailed account of these get togethers because I believed that it might interest some readers (even if all of it might not interest all readers) and while I found this evening as interesting and instructive as earlier ones I had attended, I don't think I can write about it in the same way. Vickers apparently is a private person and did not want the biography written (and had bragged about never having had to pay a publicist), declined to help Ms. Wilson, and referred to it as that "bloody book". She was so fascinated, however, by this man that she set out to write this biography anyway, based on her own research elsewhere, a job that took her many years, partly because she was still working at her day job at *USA Today*. Her presentation seemed to be biographical highlights taken from her book. He was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, the son of a minister, and was taught that his singing was a gift from God for which he should not be taking money (a doctrine he later forced himself to abandon). His ambition to study medicine was thwarted by the heavy competition for school vacancies from returning WWII veterans and he went into business instead. Somewhere along the line he won himself a scholarship to the Toronto Conservatory in 1950 and Ms. Williams played for us a tape of him singing Walther's "Prize Song" from *Meistersinger*. (She clearly lived and loved this and other taped excerpts of his singing and would sway to the music and lip synch the texts.) We were given more biographical details, times and places of performances of roles by no means confined to Wagner, with representative tapes, many of which I suspect are not available commercially. One non-Wagner excerpt was from Berlioz' *Troyens*, which may be from the Sir Colin Davis recording, but I don't recall. I'll content myself with just a few examples of biographical information that I found interesting. Her book would contain them and more, and the cold dates can of course be found in entries for him in the musical dictionaries. He had a feud with Georg Solti and refused to sing with him. It was never resolved. He would not sing *Tannhaeuser*, at least after a while, because he found Elizabeth's intercession to secure Tannhaeuser's absolution blasphemous. Apparently, he couldn't explain why his religious qualms didn't prevent him from singing Sigmund who sires a son with his sister. Similarly, an apparent anti-gay bias gave rise to problems w/ Britten. Although Vickers' *Peter Grimes* is famous, he maintained that Grimes was an outcast character pure and simple and insisted on singing the part free of homoerotic implications. [Naive me, I never heard the opera any other way.] Similarly, he would not sing the part of Captain Vere in *Billy Budd*. In response to a questioner after her presentation she pointed out that what may have made her fix on Vickers as a subject of biography was that he, probably unlike any other singer, was able to sing a definitive Tristan, Sigmund, Aeneas, Otello, and Peter Grimes. Walter Meyer