Forget about the Fat Lady. The opera...

Forget about the Fat Lady. The opera isn’t over until Willie the Whale spouts.

A standard of even greater than Pavarottian proportions will hover over bass-baritone Mic Bell when, accompanied by his wife, pianist Cathy Matejka Bell, he sings operatic selections, Broadway tunes and spirituals at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Verdi’s, 1519 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, in a benefit for The Wellness Community-Westside. Tickets are $20. Information: (310) 277-6943.

OK, Bell used to be a member of the Fifth Dimension. But for the little boy who grew up to write this column, Willie was no less than the landmark religious experience of our times.

The year was 1950. The little boy was 6. “Willie the Whale” was a 78-rpm record intended to sugar-coat classical music for kids. The album showed Willie standing on his flukes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a pleated ruff around his neck.

Today, when whales are au courant , not to mention PC, the record would sell in the millions. Greenpeace might adopt it as an anthem. Not so then. It’s possible that very few discs of “Willie” were pressed. The former little boy has yet to find another person who heard it.

Willie could sing grand opera. More, he could sing it in three separate voices: tenor, baritone and bass. Nelson Eddy, then a musical leviathan of sorts, sang all three parts. But Willie only dreamed of singing at the Met. How do you get an audition splashing around in the middle of the ocean?

Well, a ship happened by, and on it was an impresario, Signor Pizzicato. He heard Willie sing and jumped to conclusions: He’s a-swallowed a h’opera singer . . . two . . . three h’opera singers!

A rescue attempt was planned. And just when Willie was Figaro-ing into a splendid high note, the ship’s crew harpooned him. Dead.

The little boy was stricken.

He had learned about life after death in Sunday school, but never before had he wanted so much to believe it. People were supposed to be sinful, after all. They deserved a bit of dying. But not Willie. Not this cetacean Caruso, this big, lovable lug blowing bubbles.

In his calmest, most magisterial voice, Nelson Eddy urged the little boy to do the impossible--to forgive Signor Pizzicato. Willie’s singing was a miracle , he said, and people just aren’t used to miracles. (No doubt the Greenpeace version would be more militant.) And he affirmed: In whatever portion of Heaven is reserved for creatures of the deep, Willie goes on singing . . . in a hundred voices . . . each more glorious than before.

Then came a chorus from Flotow’s “Martha,” a chorus so transcendent that it gave the little boy goose bumps. He played it over and over until the record warped, as 78s tended to do, and the sound sickened and his mother, in self-defense, finally threw it out.

Sunday school lessons don’t always stay with you. But with Willie--well, you just gotta believe.