Ballam never had to wait on tables; he found work. He remembers one big audition in Chicago early in his career: "It was a new opera that was difficult," he says. "You had to have relative pitch — you had to pick the note out of the music. Not everyone was willing to invest the time to learn it. Then when I got to the audition, the accompaniest couldn't play it. I said, 'I can play it.' They said, 'And sing it at the same time?' I said, 'Yes.' "

He got the job and stayed in Chicago eight months, and, just like that, his professional career was born.

Later, almost exactly 10 years after the little old lady had patted his knee in the War Memorial Opera House and said "That's nice," he appeared as the same tenor voice on the same stage and in the same production he had watched from the balcony as a teenager, just as he had vowed.

As a teenager, Ballam yearned to have someone who felt what he felt about music, but how many teenagers can connect with "Madame Butterfly"? Once, he brought a steady girlfriend to the house and played the last 30 minutes of "Madame Butterfly" for her, watching her face carefully for a reaction.

"She was completely unmoved by it," he says. "She kind of made a joke about it at the end. I thought she can't be my girlfriend anymore. If she doesn't catch the magic of this, I'm doomed. I was very frustrated. I couldn't find anyone who would understand why it was important. It was like that quote from the "Music Man." I wanted to find someone you don't have to explain why Beethoven is great. There wasn't anyone like that. I knew if I was going to marry someone, they had to understand."

"Madame Butterfly" became a test for girlfriends. Eventually, he gave the test to Laurie Israelsen, another piano student. He gave her the recording and the score — wrapped as a gift. "I want to share something with you that means a great deal to me," he told her, and as they listened to part of it together she was moved to tears and a romance was born.

"I thought it was the most romantic gift anyone had given to me," she recalls. "I memorized the whole opera. I listened to it night and day."

They were married five years later while attending Utah State. They have six children — Christopher, 25; Vanessa (the 1999 Miss Utah who performs with her father), 22; Nick, 20; Ester, 13; Olivia, 11; and Ben, 9.

Family life and marriage were strained by a career that took Ballam on the road about half of each year. It was compounded by the needs of a large family, not to mention the special needs of Ben, who was born with spina bifida.

"There were years when I saw Michael a month out of the year," says Laurie.