Anne Alter sings a jazz standard in a small room of the Oxford Building in Oakland while Flavio Chamis, music director of the band, plays an upright piano. David Christian Baird strums lead guitar, a Kiesel without a head as a wisp of wavy brown hair dangles over his eye. And Barry Mills lays the bass line on his Ibanez guitar.
Stretching out her arms almost as if pleading, Alter croons, “I hope I see … someone to watch over me.” Her husband died of a heart attack 23 years ago, and she still mourns his loss. “It’s plaintive,” she said, “singing out my heart to find someone who can keep an eye on me.”
The band Infinity sings their signature song with vocalists Anne Alter and Susan Padilla, guitarist David Baird, and bassist Barry Mills. The song lyrics come from a poem Baird wrote, and band director and composer Flavio Chamis wrote and arranged the music. (Video courtesy of Flavio Chamis)
Chamis, an independent music pro, gently prods Alter, Baird and Mills — none professional musicians, and all diagnosed with schizophrenia — to reach the maximum of their abilities. Today he passes out to the band, dubbed Infinity, the lyrics of a new song, “Wholeheartedly.” He wrote it after waking up from a dream. He has not written a song about God in 20 years, he said, but this one deals with god in a generic sense.
Mills, usually Infinity’s class comedian, offers a serious explanation of the lyrics. “We all have something we want God to do,” he said. “But we want to know what we can do for Him.”
Alter holds an empty juice bottle to her mouth as if she is singing with a microphone.
By just saying these few words
I’ll acquire some of your divinity
And the best, best thing of all
that would help us to help me.
Alter stretches the last word in her soft soprano, and it lingers in the air.
“You really touched everybody,” Chamis said.
For about eight years, Infinity has used pop, soft rock and Broadway tunes to display its talent and help members deal with their schizophrenia. The trio has been rehearsing almost weekly for the annual Marianne Cornetti and Friends Benefit Concert, set for 3 p.m. June 14 at Carnegie Music Hall, to support people with mental challenges.
With an interest in mental health and a desire to, as he puts it, reconnect us with a more essential, childlike capacity for wonder, Chamis helped recruit the band members, all patients of UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital. A native of Brazil, he was a leading composer there and second conductor to his friend, the late Leonard Bernstein, beginning with the Israel Philharmonic in the 1980s. He moved to the Pittsburgh area in 1994.
“For some with serious mental illness, making music gives them an identity,” said Caroline Whiddon, executive director of Me2 Orchestra, Inc., the group in Boston that inspired the creation of Infinity. “When you’re living with a mental illness, the system we have almost strips you. Some people are told they can never work any more, and we’re saying you have an identity here. You’re a musician.“
Schizophrenia is a brain and mental health disorder that may result in disorganized thinking and delusions such as hallucinations and voices, said Dr. Roy Chengappa, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and a facilitator of the band. The illness is believed to be caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors and stressors.
Symptoms usually become obvious in the teens to early 30s. Although there is no known cure, antipsychotic medications may help control the disorder. “They don’t bring you fully back to reality, but they bring you pretty close to a functioning life,” Chengappa said.
As many as 3.4 million people in the United States lie within the range of schizophrenia, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group in Arlington, Virginia. At an estimated rate of 1% of the population, it’s likely about 24,000 people in the Pittsburgh region live with the disease.
According to the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, people with schizophrenia satisfy one demand for creativity – originality. But original thoughts are not always useful.
The ‘Booby Hatch Chronicles’
Anne Alter has lived her whole life on the edge of adventure and mental frailty.
She has ridden horses bareback into a lake and traveled on the hood or roof of speeding cars, once during a thunderstorm. With thick, dark hair and expressive eyes, she has modeled for a catalog of Deva Outerwear and posed nude for artists. She has even worked singing telegrams.
She grew up in Squirrel Hill. Her father, Paul, was a technical writer and her mother, Nancy, a homemaker and later secretary. Alter noticed her illness even as a young child. At age 10, she was hospitalized after not eating for five days. She studied theater at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, but experienced her illness more acutely in her 20s.
She had delusions of being God, inhabited by aliens and forced to share her brain with a twin brother who does not exist. “I’ve suffered terribly, but it’s worth it to me to have come through it,” she said.
Alter discussed her life in emails, a blog she calls Plague Diaries/Booby Hatch Chronicles and an interview at her house in Wilkinsburg where her green-eyed tabby, Mickey, prowls.
She said she has reached the “Age of Ma’am,” the term younger people use to greet her. Her antipsychotic meds have also caused her to gain weight. “It is heartbreaking, but I have to take the medicine to survive,” she wrote. “I have chosen sanity over vanity.”
On a wall near the front door rests a 1998 wedding photo of her husband, Herb Schacter, in a bowler and double-breasted, pin-striped jacket and Alter in a white lawn dress once owned by her great-grandmother. Alter was bold enough to ask Schacter out for a first date even though he was 30 years her senior.
Prior to their marriage, however, Schacter had her committed to the former Mayview State Hospital. She had been exercising excessively, her weight dropping below 100 pounds, and believing that she was leading armies of genetically engineered mutants.
She credits Schacter with saving her life because hospital staff had told her that her heart might have stopped.
Alter calls the mental hospital a place where a Jew like her can think she is Jesus Christ, then walk around the ward and bump into other messiahs of the same name. She kept sane at Mayview by planning her marriage to Schacter.
Alter takes pride in serving as secretary of Self-Advocacy Voices, a Highland Park-based group that helps people with disabilities speak up for themselves. But much of her life revolves around singing.
She took a voice class in high school, studied with private teachers and sang in choirs. For her and the rest of Infinity, performing with mezzo-soprano Cornetti is the highlight of the year. Cornetti, artistic director of Pittsburgh Festival Opera, is one of the leading interpreters of Verdi roles around the world.
Said Alter, “I want to show the world that people can have schizophrenia, bipolar (disorder), OCD, panic, whatever it is that they have, that they can rise above that and do good work and experience meaningful lives.”
Feeling different
David Baird, of Wilkinsburg, has felt different for as long as he can remember.
He was born with his tongue attached to the bottom of his mouth all the way to the tip. He grew up in Mt. Lebanon the son of James, a clinical psychologist, and Harriet, a secretary.
“I didn’t think that would be very fun to be found out by the kids being a freak, so-called, so I tried to keep it a secret,” the 51-year-old recalled, measuring his words slowly.
He took guitar lessons in high school and later studied the instrument with private teachers. He majored in English at Virginia Tech, but drank beer, smoked marijuana and used LSD and mushrooms to still the hallucinations and voices in his head.
“Some of them were spirits,” Baird said. “Aliens. God. Neighbors. There was a running commentary on everything I did.”
As a joke, his roommate held a knife to his stomach and threatened to tear out his guts, Baird said. He reported it to the police, but they arrested him instead. He was committed to a mental hospital in Virginia.
Among the side effects of his medication is shaking, Baird said, displaying a tremor in his hand. He also has LSD flashbacks.
He has not had a girlfriend since high school. “When I was younger, it bugged me more,” he said. “But I’ve kind of adjusted to it.”
In 2010, he held a part-time job in IT. Since then, his work involves occasional music gigs. The philosopher of the band, he quotes Nietzsche and writes journals, fiction and poems. One of them was adapted by Chamis into the band’s theme song and usual closing number, “This, Infinity.”
Baird looks forward to the Cornetti concert, but it gives him performance anxiety. He worries that he will suffer a flashback on stage or lose the fine motor control needed to play the guitar. He tried to quit Infinity but credits Chamis with talking him out of it. He focuses now on the honor of being a guitarist with schizophrenia performing in a venue as grand as the Carnegie with world-class artists.
“You want to make the most of it because it’s like your whole history, life, preparation, journey, all that coming together at once for just two or three songs,” Baird said. “So it’s sort of the compression of all your music and truth.”
A pat on the back
Barry Mills was not born with mental illness. His health problems developed after a fistfight. “I lost my balance and then fell backwards and hit my head on cement real hard, and it started changing the delivery [of my] speaking.”
Mills became addicted to nicotine and alcohol and used crack cocaine, but later quit. According to the National Library of Medicine, 47% of patients with schizophrenia have serious problems with drug or alcohol use – nearly triple the rate of the general population.
Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in about 2000, he said the condition was like a pornographic voice in his head. Sometimes he spouted obscene thoughts. Other times he blacked out, then woke 10 or 15 minutes later, asking “everybody in that vicinity, in the area, what happened,” he said. “I mean there’s been times I had the seizure, uh, totally naked, and then end up in a UPMC hospital.”
The son of a steelworker and secretary, he grew up in Wilkinsburg and learned to play the drums on a set once owned by a brother. He later switched to bass guitar.
Frequently moving from residence to residence, he lives now at Heavenly Vision Missionary Church in Penn Hills and works as a maintenance man.
Mills began performing with Infinity in about 2018. He especially enjoys playing at the annual concert with Cornetti. After the show, he relishes the applause of the audience. “It’s like a pat on your back,” he said, tapping himself.
Mills brings an unmistakable joy to Infinity. At a rehearsal, the band finished playing its theme song, and Mills let loose a deep-hearted, tooth-gapped laugh that prompted chuckles from others.
“That is the essence of the group,” Chamis said. “His smile is contagious.”
Grateful for schizophrenia
On April 29, Alter called Public Source to announce that she was leaving in 10 minutes to go to Western Psych for a sort of brain tune-up. She expected it to take two days, but as of this week, she was still there.
With a month to go before the concert, Alter sat at a table in a cable knit, tan sweater over a teal hospital gown about to color with markers. The lyrics to “Wholeheartedly” decorated her window. In conversations in person and on the phone, it was obvious that Alter had lost her grip on reality.
Her hospitalization is an example of the many glitches that Infinity has faced and Chamis must juggle. Last year, for example, another singer dropped out of the band. Chamis, the self-proclaimed “jazz improviser” of Infinity setbacks, said he was concerned about Alter’s absence.
“We need everybody,” he said. “I talked to her therapist. It could be a while. If Anne doesn’t perform, I’m not sure we’re going to do it.”
If Alter does return, it would mark the fourth appearance of Infinity at the Cornetti concert. The group closed last year’s show with three songs. On that day, Cornetti joined in on the group’s theme song with a voice so powerful that the sheet music vibrated in Alter’s hand.
Mills and Baird heard the thunder of applause as the show ended, but Alter faltered. A lifetime of stage fright consumed her. Her voice tensed up.
Thinking she had missed some notes, she walked off the stage feeling a failure. But Chamis cheered her up. “Didn’t you hear the applause?” she remembered him asking.
Perhaps on June 14, if she sings and the band plays well, she will shed the self-doubt and the demons that have haunted her, and accept the admiration of the audience — not as pity for her condition but as genuine appreciation.
Alter, for one, said schizophrenia is not an illness she regrets. Rather, it is one she embraces.
“If it weren’t for schizophrenia,” she said, “I wouldn’t be with Infinity.”
Editor’s note: This story will be updated when Pittsburgh’s Public Source learns whether Infinity will play the June 14 show.
Bill Zlatos is a freelance writer in Ross and can be reached at billzlatos@gmail.com.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
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