Poem of the Week 2024/40

Grand Slam

Dreams brimming over,

childhood stretched out in legs,

this is the moment replayed on winter days

when frost covers the field,

when age steals away wishes.

Glorious sleep that seeps back there

to the glory of our baseball days.

– Marjorie Maddox

Here is another baseball poem, as we head into the playoffs.

Other sports inspire poets (wrestling & boxing poems go back to the classical Greeks, & Pindar is best known for his odes to athletes in the original Olympics) but baseball is the pre-eminent sport of American poetry, partly because the professional leagues stretch back to the nineteenth century &, until recent decades when football & basketball matched if not surpassed it in popularity, it was, if not the only game in town, the only one that really mattered to the majority of Americans. The season's steady unfolding, from spring through summer to fall, mirrored the year's cycle of planting, growth, & harvest; the green field, the slow but steady pace, the way fanship for the local nine was often passed from parent to child, the ever-lengthening history & lore of the game, & maybe above all, the very high rate of defeat & loss among even the greatest players made the sport irresistible to a certain cast of poetic mind, whether the mind belonged to a practicing poet or not.

Nothing in my description above is wrong, but of course there was more, mostly a sad & even sordid story of underpaid & overworked players, economic chicanery, & embedded racism (when it was revealed that Barry Bonds broke the home run record while taking performance-enhancing drugs, there was much talk of putting an asterisk by his record; but every player who preceded Jackie Robinson's entry into the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 should also have an asterisk by his name, for playing in segregated leagues). For all the talk of fan love & loyalty, was that ever, in the eyes of the owners, more than a marketing strategy? Just last week, our East Bay team played its final game in its long-time home, before decamping to what its owner hopes will be the more lucrative location of Las Vegas.

But the dreams are as real as the more brutal facts of what is usually considered reality (usually, in fact, "harsh reality"); for some people, ascending into the dreams & ignoring the sordid aspects of reality is what poetry is.

It's only in the title of this poem that we find out what's happened: someone has hit a grand slam (for those who don't know, a grand slam is when the three bases are loaded & the hitter at bat hits a home run, meaning the team scores four runs – a sizeable leap forward in a baseball score). The very first word of the poem, other than the title, is dreams, which cues us into the tone here: a burst of action, possibly (probably?) meaning victory, with an immediate segue to dreams, dreams in the sense of imagination, fantasy, wishful thinking. These players are young, as we can infer from the reference in the next line to childhood – perhaps they think this moment of glory is what life, or at least their lives, will be like. It's a very active scene: the dreams brim over, the legs stretch out (I take this to refer to the players running as they round the bases). Childhood stretched out in legs is a peculiar way to phrase the action, though: it must be more than literally stretching the legs to run; their childhood itself is being stretched out, lengthened by this memorable moment in the sun, with the suggestion that childhood is an innocent & carefree time (of course, as with baseball, the reality of childhood is often much tougher & more troubled & more troubling).

But after this brief moment of success, presented not through the scoreboard or cheers but as perceived, in their fructifying imaginations, by the players – or by the viewers; the poem could be read either way – things immediately turns reflective; taking this moment & enshrining it as a moment, as a spot of time outside of the usual. It becomes a memory played over & over during winter, the only season when baseball isn't being played. Winter, of course, also connotes aging, shivering cold, & death (or at least the end of something significant).

After the turn of this line, we have two lines dwelling on winter: frost covers the field (most obviously, the baseball diamond, but the field could be any place where crops are raised, or children play). Cold takes over, the greenery dies. Age steals away wishes: just as a runner in baseball can steal a base that he hasn't "earned" through a teammate's hit, so age can take us unawares, advancing us towards the end. Age steals away wishes: not only do we suffer physical decline, but there is a narrowing of our vision & our hopes. After the two lines in the beginning that imply a wonderful athletic feat, the rest of the poem is a poignant description of how memory sustains us through life's diminishments.

What is left? Glorious sleep, the state in which we dream, though these are not the hopeful dreams of a youth who has hit a grand slam, or someone who's watching him round the bases; these are the dreams that come to us, their passive recipients, during the night. The sleep seeps back there – to the back of our mind? back to the time when we had our moment of glory? Seeps obviously echoes, with a labile diminution, sleep; it also is a slower, less active image than the brimming over of the first line, reflecting the loss that age & winter have brought on us. Glory in the final line echoes the glorious of the preceding line; the sleep is glorious, the glory belongs to our (past) baseball days: glorious & glory describe our memories, our past, our past hopes; glory & glorious do not describe us, though their memory may help sustain us until new players take the field.

When I was a boy, I was completely unathletic; it wasn't until I moved to Boston as a young man that I was caught up in the Red Sox fandom, which was not only intense, but year-round (this was long before Tom Brady made the Patriots much-watched football champions). Even in winter, the sports page (we all bought daily newspapers then) was centered on the Sox. When the ball went through Bill Buckner's legs in 1986, & yet another World Series slipped away, we heard about companies that hired grief counselors to help their employees cope with this latest devastation (& I thought to myself, after this I do not want to hear one more joke about touchy-feely Californians). I moved back west long before the Red Sox finally won a world series in 2004, but I still followed them from a distance & went to see them when they played in this area. But after 2004 & its moment of historic exhilaration, my interest declined. The romance (of striking loss, when victory seemed possible) had gone out of it. And more & more games went on expensive cable stations I didn't get, & I gradually stopped following teams in any coherent way. Harsher realities took over, as is their wont (there's the long-running story about the Curse of the Bambino, but it's more like the curse of Jackie Robinson; the Red Sox were the last major league team to integrate, & as a result they missed out on some game-changing players). But – well, how do I end this paragraph? Maybe I'll just leave it there, teetering uneasily between memory & reality, loss & nostalgia & longing.

I took this poem from Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems, edited by Gabriel Fried.

Friday photo 2017/19

AT&T Park, San Francisco, July 2016

Friday photo 2015/34

adjusted detail of The Tired Boxer, a bronze by Douglas Tilden, from the de Young Museum, San Francisco, August 2015

Friday photo 2015/28

statue of Willie Mays outside of AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, 1 July 2015

Poem of the Week 2013/26

Amateur Fighter

for my father

What's left is the tiny gold glove
hanging from his key chain. But,
before that, he had come to boxing,

as a boy, out of necessity – one more reason
to stay away from home, go late
to that cold house and dinner alone

in the dim kitchen. Perhaps he learned
just to box a stepfather, then turned
that anger into a prize at the Halifax gym.

Later, in New Orleans, there were the books
he couldn't stop reading. A scholar, his eyes
weakening. Fighting, then, a way to live

dangerously. He'd leave his front tooth out
for pictures so that I might understand
living meant suffering, loss. Really living

meant taking risks, so he swallowed
a cockroach in a bar on a dare, dreamt
of being a bullfighter. And at the gym

on Tchoupitoulas Street, he trained
his fists to pound into a bag
the fury contained in his gentle hands.

The red headgear, hiding his face,
could make me think he was someone else,
that my father was somewhere else, not here

holding his body up to pain.

Natasha Trethewey

Here's another boxing poem. I actually come across very few works* that grapple in a meaningful way with what masculinity means in our society, which is something I think this poem does very thoughtfully and beautifully, even though it's not written by a man (proof once again that empathy and artistic detachment and understanding are much more important in writing about a group than is being a member of that group – insight is not determined by genetics). It's interesting how central fighting still is to works that examine masculinity – Fight Club is an obvious example, but also the play Blade to the Heat and W C Heinz's novel The Professional (Hemingway could only dream of writing a novel that good).

In this poem, boxing – the primal almost savage urge towards both attack and self-defense limited and guided by rules that turn it into both sport and art – is both forced upon and chosen by the young man. He needs to defend himself against the hardness of the world (first visited on him in the person of his family, specifically a stepfather). But he also feel an inner, visceral need to fight; he's a scholar and voracious reader, but physical risk and danger are part of living in the world, a part he feels the need to embrace. How much can even a scholar understand if he doesn't understand and prepare to fight back against the hardness of the world? It's the gentle and quiet parts of his nature that lead to anger against the thoughtless cruelty of the world: it may sound like a paradox for Trethewey to refer to "the fury contained in his gentle hands" but the fury and the gentleness both reside together and are aspects of each other. (I have read that there is a manifestation of the Buddha shown with fire swirling up as he stamps his feet in anger at humanity's refusal to move towards enlightenment.) He boxes, he swallows cockroaches on a dare, he dreams of bullfighting – and he also tries to help his daughter learn difficult lessons about how unforgiving life can be. Men are expected to live in the world in a certain way, which is why the narrator here has the not uncommon experience of seeing her father in a social role (in this case, in the ring, with his headgear on) and realizing that her father can be a man completely unfamiliar to her.

In the last line, I love the placement of "up," because I see a different shade of meaning there: if she had said "holding up his body to pain" I think that would have implied that he was mostly enduring – that the pain was actively attacking, and he was passively resisting. But "holding his body up to pain" implies that he is choosing to stand against pain – he is seeking it out, which is a way of beating it, even if ultimately the pain wins.

Trethewey is currently the Poet Laureate of the United States. I took this poem from The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, edited by Arnold Rampersad; you may find other works by Trethewey here.

* If you can think of others to recommend, please do so.

Poem of the Week 2013/25

Here's another boxing poem, and it's also another one by Ishmael Reed:

Petite Kid Everett

The bantamweight King of
Newark
He couldn't box
He couldn't dance
He just kept coming at
you, glass chin first
Taking five punches for
every one he connected with
you

Petite Kid Everett
He missed a lot
Slipped a lot and
By mid-life he'd
developed one heck
of a sorehead
Took to fighting in
the alley
Gave up wearing a mouthpiece
Beat up his trainers
Beat up the referee
Beat up his fans
Beat up everybody who was
in his corner

Even jumped on Houston Jr.
the lame pail boy
Who didn't have good sense
Petite Kid Everett
There's talk of a comeback
He's got new backers
He stands on one of the four
corners, near the Prudential Life
Building
Trading blows with ghosts
Don't it make you wanna cry?

Ishmael Reed

Here are some things I love about this poem:

I love that he's "Petite" Kid Everett; even more than little or tiny or Kid, petite gives you a sense of overwhelming odds against him – is it the fancy Frenchness of the word? its association with women's sizes? its general aura of daintiness? But it also sounds a bit grander than little or tiny: again, the fancy Frenchness, etc. In an almost Dickensian way, a lot of the character – his persistence, his loserdom – is rolled up in the name.

I love that he ends up standing on a corner, "near the Prudential Life / Building" – and there no doubt is an actual Prudential Life insurance company building on that corner in Newark, but a prudential approach to life is exactly what the struggling Petite Kid does not have – on one side, the vast imperturbable substantial walls of an impersonal calculating agency, on the other, a doomed man flailing away with increasingly random violence against first opponents, then friends, then bystanders, then ghosts – obsessions, visions, insubstantial but inescapable hallucinations.

And unlike last week's poem, the boxer's persistence isn't seen as necessarily an admirable, hopeful quality, and that's another thing I love about this poem: the way the last line jolts the whole thing into a certain framework. This isn't a sociological or protest poem about a man denied opportunities; it's much deeper than that, an encapsulation of rueful and even tragic wisdom about what life, at a basic level, is like, as the hapless Petite Kid spirals ineluctably down.

I took this from Reed's New and Collected Poems, 1964 - 2006.

Poem of the Week 2013/24

the loser

and the next I remembered I'm on a table,
everybody's gone; the head of bravery
under light, scowling, flailing me down . . .
and then some toad stood there, smoking a cigar:
"Kid you're no fighter," he told me,
and I got up and knocked him over a chair;
it was like a scene in a movie, and
he stayed there on his big rump and said
over and over: "Jesus, Jesus, whatsamatta wit
you?" and I got up and dressed,
the tape still on my hands, and when I got home
I tore the tape off my hands and
wrote my first poem,
and I've been fighting
ever since.

Charles Bukowski

I don't really have much to add to this. Poets, keep battling! I took this from Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali, edited by Robert Hedin and Michael Waters. More books by Bukowski are available here.

Chad Deity enters the Aurora, elaborately

A couple of Thursdays ago I was in Berkeley seeing a play with an all-female cast and then the Tuesday after I was back in Berkeley seeing a play with an all-male cast. It seems as if there should be some larger cultural meaning to this, but I don't think there is; I think it's merely one of those odd striking coincidences that look significant but are just haphazard. Both plays actually dealt more with class and cultural grouping than with gender.

Anyway the play with the all-male cast was The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, a very recent (2010) work by Kristoffer Diaz, directed by Jon Tracy at the Aurora. It's set in the world of professional wrestling, so right there I'd like to commend the Aurora for taking it on, as I'm doubtful most of their regular audience has ever seen any wrestling matches outside of Orlando and Charles in As You Like It. Back when I lived in Boston the two main local companies were the Huntington, near Symphony Hall in Boston, and ART, the American Repertory Theater, in Harvard Square. The latter had the reputation as the more daring and experimental theater, but I used to disagree when people would say this, on the grounds that it was more daring for the Huntington to present Congreve to their more mainstream audience than it was for ART to present Beckett and Ionesco to their Harvard crowd. A play that takes professional wrestling as its prism on American life is as they say these days outside the wheelhouse of the typical Aurora audience. But most of them seemed not only open to it but to enjoy it thoroughly, though there were a couple of defections at intermission. One woman near me who was enjoying the show but hadn't been to the theater before asked me if this play was typical of what the Aurora did. I said, "Well, they're saying 'fuck' a lot more often than they do in most of the plays here," which amused her, as it was intended to.

If you haven't been to the Aurora before, it's a very small theater, with four rows of seats in a U-shape around a central stage. There were platforms in the back part of the stage but the central stage area was mostly taken up by a large ring. As we entered there were flashing red, white, and blue lights and flashy video projections on the back. Dave Maier, who was not only the Fight Director but also played several characters in the play, stood in the ring before the show and warmed up the crowd with a steady stream of comical patter, calling one large guy with big arms "Hercules" and pretending that a young woman was defeating him with her stare. He brought up a couple of volunteers from the audience and gave them quick, whispered instructions on a few pro-wrestling moves, which he then very convincingly pretended had knocked him flat. The first was a lanky teenage boy in a hoodie. The second was a tiny older woman who looked both fragile and enthusiastic. He gave each of them stage names. I forget what the teenager was called, but the woman had red hair - as someone shouted out, "She's a red-headed woman!", which made me think of Crown's song from Porgy and Bess - so I think he called her the Flamethrower. It was all very good-humored and cleverly brought the audience into the spirit of the world we were about to enter. (I did not have the usual dread and anxiety I have whenever I am threatened with any sort of audience participation.) The brief matches with the audience volunteers not only got the audience involved before the play even started, they actually helped illustrate a major theme of the play - how the "loser" of these scripted wrestling matches actually has to be a better wrestler and a better actor, using all his skill and knowledge to make it look as if the charismatic but less skilled hero is doing the work.

The scripted loser of these matches, and our Virgil through the world of pro wrestling, is Macedonio "The Mace" Guerra (Tony Sancho), a charming and talented athlete-actor who is serious about the heritage and artistic possibilities of his profession (and why not? it's completely theater). Guerra is Puerto Rican, and grew up poor in America. He ends up recruiting a smooth-talking Indian, Vigneshwar Paduar (Nasser Khan), whose patter on the basketball court had entranced Guerra's older (and less thoughtful) brothers. Their ethnic identities are crucial to the persona created for them in the arena, often as negative stereotypes (Paduar gets cast as an vaguely Middle Eastern terrorist and Guerra as a Mexican revolutionary and probably illegal immigrant, though both men want to use the story-telling possibilities of wrestling to tell different, positive stories about their people). They wrestle against various super-patriotic whites (Billy Heartland and ex-Marine Old Glory, played by Dave Maier), but the ultimate prize is the hero of the arena, Chad Deity himself. Interestingly, since this is a play very much about ethnicity/cultural stereotypes and power in America, Chad (Beethovan Oden) is a black man, whose glittering overblown boasting hides a canny, perceptive mind. But the real power behind the wrestling organization, though not exactly its brains, is a white man, Everett K. "EKO" Olson (Rod Gnapp), whose main skill (and it's not an insignificant one) is to know almost intuitively which emotional/political buttons to push to separate his audience from their money.

The whole cast is excellent, though I should single out Tony Sancho as Guerra, since he carries most of the burden of wrestling as well as narration. It's a very high-energy show, with, as you might imagine, lots of wrestling, some of it elaborately choreographed, and with lots of oversized personalities and big moments, but the actors keep their characters this side of caricature (so kudos to director Jon Tracy as well). Diaz constructs the story very skillfully, giving us enough background in wrestling so that we can read it as more than just a couple of guys in tights tossing each other around, showing us what drives these men to do what they do, and giving us enough insight into the psychology of the wrestling audience as well as the wrestling organization itself so that after Paduar goes off-script in the ring, when Guerra thinks EKO is going to be furious, we can guess that he's wrong, because of the audience's response to Paduar.

It's a very entertaining play. But there were a few moments when Guerra reminded me of the old Mad TV skit in which a proud Latino waiter would give detailed, historically informed recitations of his people's glorious culture to groups of clueless white Americans who only wanted to order cheap pseudo-Mexican food or get blasted on Cinco de Mayo or something like that. The thing is, though I recognize the importance and value of ethnic uplift, I just do not respond to it artistically; I find it limiting (anytime uplift is your main goal, you're going to have to omit a lot of reality). Guerra's impoverished but dignified Puerto Rican family is swiftly and expertly drawn in his story-telling, but doesn't he realize that his narrative of strong and proud families is ultimately just as contrived and regulated, and even stereotypical, as the wrestling narratives he objects to about patriotic "real" Americans fighting evil foreigners? What really struck me about Guerra's position in the wrestling world had nothing to do with ethnicity - he's someone we've all seen, or perhaps have been, in any corporation - he's the hard-working, hard-luck employee whose skill and dedication get things done, but whose type of intelligence and personality exclude him from stardom. In short, I think Guerra would have had a similar story no matter what his ethnic background, which is one of the reasons I find identity politics limiting and ultimately pointless. Still, there's enough other stuff going on here so that I'd recommend the show. It runs through 30 September; more information here.

National Poetry Month: 13

April is several things besides National Poetry Month, and one of them is the start of the baseball season. Baseball is probably the most favored modern sport among poets; perhaps it is the Arcadian aspects (or maybe I should say the pretense of Arcadia, the remembrance of lush green diamonds open to the sky, rather than today's over-monitored and over-musicked stadiums), or the dailiness of a season that starts in spring and ends in autumn, or the pleasing symmetries of the geometric rules, or the fact that the sport has its moments of triumph but is mostly about more or less graceful defeat; perhaps it is merely the example of other poets who are fans.

Today is the home opener for the San Francisco Giants, so here is a baseball poem, though it's not about the Giants but the Red Sox. Boston was my first team (I was a late-bloomer as a fan, and wasn't interested until I moved to Boston in my 20s, where Red Sox fandom was inescapable), but I have to admit some of their romantic lustre was lost when they finally won the World Series, first in 2004 and then again in 2007. This poem by Donald Hall captures many of the qualities – the ever-fresh hopes of the green fields of spring, shadowed by a sense of a shared past and of time passing – that draw poets to the sport. ("Number nine" was the uniform number of the great hitter Ted Williams, the "Splendid Splinter.")

Old Timers' Day, Fenway Park, 1 May 1982

When the tall puffy
figure wearing number
nine starts
late for the fly ball,
laboring forward
like a lame truckhorse
startled by a garter snake,
– this old fellow
whose body we remember
as sleek and nervous
as a filly's –

and barely catches it
in his glove's
tip, we rise
and applaud weeping:
On a green field
we observe the ruin
of even the bravest
body, as Odysseus
wept to glimpse
among shades the shadow
of Achilles.

– Donald Hall

I took this poem from the collection Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves: Contemporary Baseball Poems, edited by Don Johnson.

classical music is dead, Super Bowl edition

Heard during various commercials during today's Super Bowl game:

snippets of music by:
Verdi, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Handel, Orff,* and Mozart

(perhaps we should exclude Orff because I believe it is federal law that every NFL broadcast must contain at least the opening of the O Fortuna chorus from Carmina Burana)

GIANTS WIN THE WORLD SERIES!!!

Better luck next year to everyone else. . .

I'm already receiving merchandising e-mails!

Above is the Ferry Building at dawn, lit orange for the team.

LET'S GO GIANTS!!!

two views of San Francisco City Hall, lit orange for the Giants' National League pennant race; the other team color is provided by the black night sky

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs / Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest – . . .

So here was how my Friday evening went:

Having hours and hours to kill after work and before curtain time, I walked from the Financial District down to the Westfield Mall for dinner. I went to the Thai place in the food court (they probably have some more upscale-sounding name for that area, since this is the mall with Bloomingdale’s, but a food court is what it is) – I think it’s called Coriander. They now offer brown rice, so I had brown rice. For my two items, still trying to be healthy, I picked the mixed vegetables and cashew chicken. The mixed vegetables (and I’ve had this before, so I don’t know if this was a server making a mistake or some new stingy policy) turned out to be three smallish stalks of broccoli – really, two and a half smallish stalks of broccoli. Speaking of really – you’re stiffing me on the broccoli and carrots? Really? It looked more like a garnish than a side order of vegetables. The cashew chicken was tasty but I think, if only for technical reasons, there should have been at least one actual cashew in it. So it was OK, but I’m not inclined to hurry back there.

Having hours still to kill, I walked over to Macy’s to check out Holiday Lane, which I have to admit I love in a childish happy way. So I find Holiday Lane for my first visit this year, walk around thoroughly inspecting all the decorated trees and Christmas paraphernalia, and . . . it’s OK. It’s all stuff I’ve seen before, and though I wasn’t disappointed, I wasn’t excited either.

So that brings me to Jerry Springer: The Opera.

The large cast is very enthusiastic and committed, and that’s not a euphemism for untalented, because there are a lot of terrific voices in the cast (all of them brutally and crudely amplified). I particularly liked Jonathan Reisfeld as the disturbed, reptilian set-up guy in the first half and Satan in the second half, though singling him out isn’t meant to take away from the others. The basic joke, which is summed up in the title, has lots of potential: what we think of as low and crass, poured into what we think of as high art (though of course opera is by its nature more mixed and sensationalistic than, say, chamber music).

But the music isn’t “operatic” enough for the contrast to work really well; it’s through-composed (though oddly Springer doesn’t sing – I could go either way on whether that's a reference to Pasha Selim in Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail as well as on whether "this is my Jerry Springer moment, and I don't want it to die" is a reference to Goethe's Faust, looking for the moment so beautiful he will beg that it never pass away) and the music is fun and effective, and there are some amusing take-offs on baroque passion music, but it pretty much has a Broadway/pop sound, and that’s just not far enough from the Springer world for the high/low joke to pack the punch it might.

There are plentiful warnings that the show is shocking and no refunds will be given to the offended, but . . . well, I’m wondering if anyone is actually offended, and if so, what they were expecting from something called Jerry Springer: The Opera.

It’s almost comical how easily shocked and offended I am in real life – for instance, I was shocked and a bit offended that Duane Kuiper’s offhand remark last spring that Giants’ baseball is “torture” has turned into a team motto; since a vast number of Americans have apparently decided, in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary, and in defiance of simple decency and the better traditions of America, that torture “works” and is OK for Americans (to give, though not to receive), it’s disturbing to see it become a marketing opportunity for a baseball team.

But as for what is shocking in the theater – well, I’ve been reading the Elizabethans/Jacobeans and the Greeks since I was ten, and there is, trust me, absolutely nothing you can put on stage that is going to shock me: incest, pedophilia, mutilation, cannibalism, rape, blasphemy, various fetishes . . . they're all really just a starting point. If you think you're delivering a shock by mentioning these things, and that they're sufficient on their own, then as I start waiting for variations on the theme that never arrive, I start feeling a bit bored.

And I’m not trying to hide shock under an attempted veneer of sophistication, in the manner of those people who say things like, “Well, honestly, profanity is such a bore, isn’t it?” What I mean is that if one character threatens to fuck another character up the ass with barbed wire, even after the first time, let alone the third or fourth, I’m thinking, Well, in the last two hours I thought something similar about four people on the train, six on the two-block walk to the theater, and at least ten right now, and I’m in a pretty good mood, for me. Is that all ya got?

Maybe I’m just a little too in touch with my simmering, festering inner rage.

But I chuckled pleasantly along, and laughed at the Ku Klux Kick-Line (executed, like all the dances, with more good spirits than precision), but then I also laughed when I saw one of those in O Brother Where Art Thou. And I used to subscribe to the Weekly World News, back when they had a print edition (how sweetly old-fashioned of me!) and though I haven’t seen that many episodes of South Park (since I don’t get the stations that show it) . . . you get the picture. Nothing here is anything new – it’s the circus sideshow. It’s the Elephant Man, though the musical doesn’t develop the characters enough to give you the strange poetic side you get in Lynch’s great film – in fact, watching this musical is pretty much like watching the actual Springer show: we’re there to laugh at the freaks, and then at the end there’s a little lesson about accepting people or being different or something. I never saw more than a few minutes of the Springer show, but it’s already feeling sort of quaint – oh, remember when that show was on? Hey, remember when people used to say “talk to the hand?”

In one of the few sermons I remember at all from childhood, the priest made the too often neglected point that sin wasn’t just about sex – that just because society has decided that divorce or living together without marriage is not a sin (yeah, I’m old enough so those were both subjects discussed in hushed tones, and old enough to remember when social justice was still something mainstream society pretended to care about), therefore there is no such thing as sin. Because there are plenty of things that still should be seen as sins, and as more serious ones – the way we turn our back on the poor and the sick, for instance. And while JS the O brings in the religious element (the whole second half is in Purgatory and Hell, where Jerry has to hold one of his shows for Satan, because Satan wants an apology from Jesus), it's all on such a basic level, as if the mere idea of Jesus on a talk show is enough (again, haven't these people ever seen South Park? and even if this musical possibly originated the idea, it's now a pop culture pervasive). The whole second half felt really padded to me, with too much time spent on setting up things that didn’t really need to be set up (like getting Springer to agree to hold the show in hell).

There’s such an embarrassment of riches right now when it comes to things Americans should be angry about and ashamed of, and there’s nothing in this show that’s going to make the audience aware of any of those things, or that will make the audience question itself. I’m fine with a fun evening of naughtiness, but if you’re going to make a big deal, as this show does, about how it’s going to “shock and challenge your perceptions” (I’m quoting the playbill), then I’m going to expect something that is, you know, if not shocking, at least challenging. Sparklers are fun, but don't tell me there's going to be a huge fireball and then just light a sparkler. And though a chorus singing “dip me in chocolate and feed me to the lesbians” might be kind of funny the first time, it doesn’t really get funnier when it’s repeated. And repeated. And repeated.

Certainly the audience didn’t seem challenged, though it certainly was entertained. There’s a raffishly fun midnight-showing-of-Rocky-Horror atmosphere about the whole thing, though at the point when the midnight audiences started being full of people who had heard about this thing and figured since they were cool, despite living in the suburbs, they should be there. Of course jerks ended up sitting right behind me, a pack of pasty-faced aging bitches of all genders (note to V: they were teachers, so you know the type I’m talking about). There’s a very long intermission (guys, about that half hour intermission which you claim is necessary because the theater has such tiny bathrooms: you’re already opening the door into the alley during intermission – put two port-a-potties in there and get things moving!) and I was more or less forced to listen to their blather (“oooh, you’ll simply love Tuscany!”) but then they started talking throughout the performance.

I wasn’t expecting hushed silence, but I also didn’t need a constant, loud commentary on the stage action, especially when it’s as stupid, obvious, and frankly inaccurate as this one was. This was not the occasional whisper, but continued talking. There was no place to move to, and besides I didn't feel that I should have to move because of their obnoxious and inconsiderate behavior. I told the worst offender to shut up. After the show, she attempted to reprimand me. I love it when rude people get indignant when they’re called on their rudeness. She actually poked me. I was furious. So I repeated my request to her to shut up, adding a number of the words we’d just been hearing a lot of, and a few we hadn’t heard enough of. And there it was – my Jerry Springer moment! I truly regret not hitting her in the face with a chair.

And I’m sure she walked away thinking there was something wrong with me, and without questioning her own rude, stupid behavior or unjustified sense of entitlement. So what was she getting out of this show, besides a little laugh at the freak show and a smug feeling that she was so adventurous for being there? I don’t want to inflate what I was expecting from this show, or to leave the impression that I’m blaming the show for not turning our eyes into our very soul, there to see such black and grained spots as will not leave their tinct, even though the people presenting it seem to think that's a possibility. It’s a perfectly pleasant evening (run-ins with stupid entitled bitches aside, though those are too common to be of much significance, and were only a fraction of the evening anyway), though it drags a bit.

If you’re in the mood to go, go. It's there for another week, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were extended. I’m giving it a hearty “meh” . . . . I’m just not inclined to be either shocked or titillated by things like bisexuality or diaper fetishes. Sorry to sound humorless, but what shocks and offends me are things like our on-going cruel and illegal wars of aggression, our heedless destruction of the environment, our lack not only of economic justice but of concern about economic justice, and . . . you can supply your own favorite American corruption. Dip that in chocolate and feed it to the lesbians!

Sorry, JM. I wanted to love it, but it was only like. I just found it less than the sum of its parts. Though I do agree with you that it’s more exciting and challenging than most of what San Francisco Opera is currently doing. But then shouldn’t we set the bar a bit higher than that?

So that was my evening. I thought it was . . . OK. The second Giants game in this round of the playoffs had let out around the same time. When the muted crowd filled the train in the last two San Francisco stops, I didn’t even need to ask if the team had won. Clearly this was not the follow-up they had hoped for to Lincecum’s brilliant first-game win. It was eleven innings of back and forth, only to end in a last-minute loss for the home team. Torture!

black, gray, silver, white

for John Singer Sargent

St Sebastian and the torso of a Roman athlete

from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

things that go bump in the night

I’ve never been to the actual Halloween in the Castro, but last Saturday I went to Jack Curtis Dubowsky’s new opera by that name (at Jack’s invitation, and check here for an interesting interview about this work posted in his blog), so now I feel free to sit at home on Halloween, since even if I had some slight thought that maybe I should experience it once, I no longer need to, because the opera provokes thoughts about the event much more entertainingly than the real event would, proving once again that art is life distilled and improved, and with much better music.

The opera was presented by the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco at the Metropolitan Community Church, which of course being a church is not necessarily designed with theatrical sightlines in mind, but the staging by Stephanie Lynne Smith and Shane Kroll makes clever use of the whole space. Presenting a new opera was amazingly ambitious for the chorus, which is basically a small affinity-based amateur ensemble, and I really congratulate them for taking on something that, as far as I know, lies way outside their usual fare. Though the individual voices varied in quality, and some were miked while others were not, everyone was really committed to the performance, and really put across the words (also by Dubowsky) – the lack of surtitles was no problem; there were only a couple of lines I couldn’t quite catch.

Given my lack of personal associations with the Castro Halloween and my feelings about identity politics (which range from indifference to loathing), I wasn’t quite sure how I would react, but as soon as the opera opened with a lovely melancholy piano and violin tune for Arnold (described in the dramatis personae as a Bitter Queen with the drag name Miss Ann Thrippy), who laments the passing of the old Castro and the death of his lover Alan, I realized right away that the opera was going to go beyond affinity groups and tourism; its real subjects are the bind between a romanticized past and the need to live in the present, getting older, and the search for community. These are resonant themes, and by the time the third act opens, it’s easy to see the metaphorical force of a chorus for those stuck on Muni, wondering if they’re ever going to move forward.

These themes are I think particularly resonant in the Bay Area, which can seem trapped in the 1950s and 1960s (that is, the beatniks and the hippies). I attended Berkeley about ten years after the riots that its name still conjures up, and was amused even as a freshman by the number of my fellow students who didn’t quite realize that HippieWorld had passed. Maybe they didn’t need to realize it, since they weren’t really interested in being hippies (all that patchouli, ugh) but in the glow surrounding celebrated rebellious spirits. Same thing with the Beat era – you can’t go half a block in North Beach without running across a dozen poseurs who think they’re free-spirited poets because they’re smoking and drinking overpriced cappuccinos while leafing through the copy of Howl they just bought at City Lights Bookstore. And then they go back to their corporate/social climbing and think about how they’re really rebel spirits.

After Arnold's opening aria, an Unseen Spirit warns him that a violent act will again disrupt the Castro this Halloween, and then the rest of the cast marches down the aisles in Halloween costumes singing a chorus that captures the fizzy excitement of the festivities with a sort of Kurt Weill-meets-the-baroque sound. Two bar owners then debate over how exactly they are going to make money off of Halloween: one wants to stay open, and the other wants the Castro Halloween turned into an upscale destination event. (You can make a lot of money off of the aura of danger and seediness, as long as actual danger and seediness are kept far, far away.)

They express their wishes to the Politician, who of course will do what they want, since they are big donors. He holds a Community Meeting where, in an amusing echo of Gilbert and Sullivan (particularly Captain Corcoran and crew in HMS Pinafore), he listens to the concerns of the Castro Community, assures them he is one of them (even opening his shirt collar to show his studded leather collar), and then proceeds to do exactly what he had intended to do all along: “shut down” Halloween by not providing city services, though the bar owners announce they will still be open for business.

That’s the first act, and already the libretto has deftly introduced the personal and the public, the romanticized, and the lost, as well as the carnival spirit that ultimately underlies all Halloween celebrations, and shown them running up against the economic and political realities of the world. The second act expands the cast of characters. First there’s a group of vacuous gym bunnies who dress in drag as cheerleaders, and I liked the way that throwing this group in the mix broadens the themes, since they reflect (as another character points out) that apparently universal highlight of the high school rally, when the cheerleaders dress in football uniforms and the jocks dress up as cheerleaders.

In response to the Bitter Queen’s charge that the cheerleaders are just perpetuating heterosexist stereotypical paradigms, the guys sing a hilariously extended baroque-style “you go, girl!” number – I love baroque music, but if you’ve ever wondered just exactly how many times some random phrase about the purling stream or the bleeding heart is going to be beaten into the ground, then this is the chorus you've been waiting to hear.

We see a straight couple from Walnut Creek (“it’s hard to be chic / when you live in Walnut Creek”) who decide to drive in (because they're sure there will be lots of parking) to check out the craziness. They have no costumes so they put tape on their glasses and pens in their pockets and go as “nerds” (which is pretty much what they are, and which plays in to the same high school-type social structure as the cheerleaders). The woman is wearing an AIG golf visor, which sums them up perfectly and hilariously. Their excited duet about wanting to see some gays in their native habitat is given a sinister twist in the variation sung by The Miscreants, who are concealing weapons and planning to go in to the Castro to cause trouble. Back in San Francisco we get a tender, touching duet between a lesbian couple, dressing up as a plumber and a housewife, and then Sister Chiquita Piccata Mundi of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence gives us a brief history of the Castro Halloween party.

During the street party in the third act, there is indeed an act of violence as foretold by the Unseen Spirit, but with an unexpected twist I won’t give away. This was the one part where I thought the staging fell down a bit; I couldn’t see what exactly had happened until the aftermath allowed me to figure it out (and the synopsis, which I read afterward, proved me correct). I had moved to a different seat during intermission, to get away from the whisperers next to me, and the only available seat was even farther in the back, which may be why I had trouble seeing. The opera ends as Arnold makes some tentative steps towards regaining a sense of community with those around him by joining the lesbian couple in what the synopsis calls “a plaintive and hopeful song” about restoring the joyous spirit (and with it the economic and social viability) of the festival.

I had walked in thinking this might be like one of those “occasion operas” that Renaissance and baroque composers used to write for important state affairs like marriages or treaties; it turned out to be a really satisfying evening of theater and music, with much broader scope than its immediate subject. Kudos to the outstanding instrumental performers: Paul Yeager on violin, Charith Premawardhana on viola, Anthony Fanning on cello, and Ryan Connolly on piano, and to all the singers. I really hope the chorus can manage to revive the work annually; it deserves to have legs.

Philadelphia 4: Italian Stallions

The story is that we're more and more a visual culture, but I think we're really a movie culture. Back when I still saw movies in movie theaters, I went to the first Austin Powers film, and realized that it was yet another movie comedy that had its funny moments but wasn't nearly as sophisticated or consistently funny as the best TV comedies of the time (in particular, the Seinfeld show). I have the DVD of the Simpsons movie waiting, but I find it odd that after almost two decades of surprising and subversive hilarity anyone still felt there had to be a movie to prove the show's legitimacy.

I had seen and liked the first Rocky movie when it came out, but I haven't seen any of the sequels, mostly because Stallone in the person of Rocky and Rambo came to represent the country's turn to mindless reactionary patriotism and I just didn't feel like it. I'll probably watch them eventually, because I like boxing movies.

Everyone remembers Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and posing at the top with his fists in the air. A statue of this pose was placed there for one of the sequels, and became an awkward leftover once the filming stopped.

You see actual athletes running up those steps, but you mostly see tourists climbing up to pose like Rocky. You'd think if we actually had a "visual culture" these people would then walk into the museum and look at pictures. Some do, lots don't. I think the museum was horrified at this fairly bad statue cluttering up their main entrance (too bad Rodin wasn't around to do it justice), and when I was in Philly about five years ago I heard that there was one of those controversies about where the statue should go. Back then, I was told it was out by the stadiums, but when I went to a Phillies game I didn't see it. The museum had compromised by placing a tastefully understated, conceptual-artish pair of bronze Converse prints and the carved name of our hero at the top of the steps.

I don't know when the change happened, but the statue is back by the museum, only at the foot of the stairs, off to the right but clearly visible, at the base of the sloping garden leading up to the building. There are always visitors there getting their pictures taken. Sometimes these are kind of fun -- little kids wearing their boxing gloves, a group of Japanese tourists smiling and posing in unison -- and sometimes you get the type of parent who shows up on the 10:00 news for assaulting his ten-year-old's soccer coach. One father was yelling at his little son to smile since he looked constipated.

The Museum of Art has apparently made its peace with the statue, or at least with its appeal, since they sell replicas in their giftshop.

And at the Bourse (see Philadelphia 3), one store offers all the Rocky/Yo Adrian!/Italian Stallion wares you could wish.

This isn't really anything new. If you get past the Rocky stuff and go into the museum, you can see Bronzino's wedding portrait of Cosimo I de' Medici, pretending to be Orpheus, in a pose inspired by the Greek fragment known as the Belvedere Torso. Different heros for different ages, but the same impulse to copy a hero, and a hope that copying the physique means copying the spirit.

Haiku 32

Super-sized remnants
Picked over and abandoned
on plates and in Bowls

OK, kind of a stretch. Go Steelers, though I'm OK either way, unlike last year.

Here's an addendum, written on the train coming home from this evening's concert (Kronos Quartet). I still don't know which team won the game.

Windows flash past lights
Remembered melodies sink
Into transit noise.

act like a man

I was interested in a couple of plays that Thick House Theater was doing this season, but I ended up subscribing to the whole series, mostly because their managing director, Hilary Cohen, was so incredibly prompt and detailed (note to arts groups everywhere – efficiency is appreciated!) in answering my e-mail asking where exactly the theater is located and how a non-driver would get there. It turns out to be quite easy – you just get out at the 16th Street BART station and take the 22 Fillmore to the corner of 18th and Connecticut, and then you walk down a hill. Frankly I was expecting a black-painted basement in a dicey neighborhood, but it’s a pleasant, fairly recently gentrified area of Portrero Hill, and the small theater is comfortable and even elegant in an understated way. I enjoyed walking around the area before the rain showers drove me into the theater lobby.

There were two bonus plays added to the four-play season (six plays for $40 – that’s a bargain!). I subscribed just in time to miss the first one (five plays for $40 – still a bargain!), but I did get to David Greenspan’s Dead Mother, or, Shirley Not All in Vain at the Traveling Jewish Theater, which is actually trickier to find than Thick House, until I realized it’s just a ten-minute walk down from the 16th Street Station. I’m not quite sure why anyone would suggest the bus rather than walking; the sidewalks didn’t seem any more filled with annoyances than the 22 Fillmore, and you have to wait around until the bus shows up. I was glad to have the preliminary expedition, since Cutting Ball’s production of Endgame was also at the Traveling Jewish Theater before they make the Exit Theater their new home.

Dead Mother is the story of Harold and his family; Harold’s brother Daniel persuades him to impersonate their dead mother Shirley so that s/he can reassure Maxine, Daniel’s fiancée, that she approves the marriage. Harold’s wife Sylvia, Maxine’s Uncle Saul, and the widower Melvin are also involved; this is more Theater of the Absurd than Charley’s Aunt, though that reference may be part of the whirlwind of literary and dramatic references flying by in an ultimately distracting way: every minute your mind is annotating each scene and speech – there goes Twelfth Night, there’s Godot, Aristophanes, Dante, Don Juan in Hell from Man and Superman, Gertrude Stein, back to Dante, back to dozens that I noticed at the time but have now forgotten. . . .

I felt the constant annotation ended up emotionally distancing me from the action, which frankly is a little thin to start with; the assumption of Shirley’s persona frees Harold to speak the sort of forbidden truths that date quickly; shock has a very short shelf-life. Most of these terrible truths have to do with Harold’s troubled marriage and his attraction to other men, and to the racial prejudices of his middle-class Jewish father. After realizing what the painful family secrets amounted to, I suspected that this was not a new play; sure enough, it’s from 1991. It’s to Greenspan’s credit that the play avoids the cheap logic of therapy-think, where the family would be healed merely because someone dared to speak The Truth, or whatever cliché passes for it, but despite the excellent acting all around (particularly from Liam Vincent as Harold/Shirley) it was a somewhat unsatisfying evening.

A fluid presentation of truth is the strong point of Blade to the Heat, which is set in “the world of boxing” in 1959, shortly before boxing started to recede as a major sport and therefore metaphor in American life. Before that, boxing shows up in all kinds of surprising places, like silent comedies; there’s an extended sequence in City Lights, and it’s the focus of the entire plot in Buster Keaton’s Battling Butler, another of his brilliant, emotionally tortured comedies about a slight and effete man who goes up against a massive, physically confident and somewhat brutish opponent; the film ends with a surprisingly fierce and realistic boxing match. Ironically, the wiry and gracefully athletic Keaton is closer to our masculine physical ideal than his large but doughy opponents. Before I go back to Blade to the Heat, I’ll also recommend WC Heinz’s superb novel The Professional, which is like the novel Hemingway would have written if he’d been able to overcome his horrible boys’ school snobbishness enough to write a good novel.

Blade to the Heat gets described as “the gay boxing play” but it really is more about masculinity in general, a subject it examines with greater depth than just the usual panicked jokes (much like Fight Club, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both involve one-on-one fights). Anyone listening to the posturing tough talk that passes for our political discourse, or the swaggering attempts to justify our criminally insane and disastrous adventures in Iraq, must have noted our society’s need for such a discussion. It’s a psychological cliché to talk about “compensation”, but sometimes things become clichés because there’s a basic truth there: it’s difficult not to see America as the classic bully who swaggers and punches carefully selected weaker victims to cover his own weakness and fear. The iconic image of masculine panic from the last few years is of course our War-Criminal-in-Chief, who carefully avoided even his National Guard service during the Vietnam War, wearing a flight suit on the deck of a destroyer to declare our mission in Iraq accomplished. A (female) journalist at the Wall Street Journal, in one of the most truly embarrassing articles I have ever read, went on and on about how Our Leader “looked, well, hot” and how her tired middle-aged husband lying in his Barcalounger just couldn’t compete. My skin was crawling, but I read on in horrified fascination. It reminded me of a movie I saw years ago, called I think Paris Is Burning, about drag queens in Harlem. I only really remember one segment of the film, because it was so unbearably poignant: part of their traditional drag shows involved the guys dressing up and parading in the suits and ties that were standard business wear back then; here were men so alienated from any sense of normative masculinity that for them the standard male uniform was as exotic as their girly sequins and feather boas. And that’s why when I think of George W Bush, who loves to play dress up (I'm a cowboy! I'm a fighter pilot!), in the back of my mind I see black drag queens. The crisis in confidence is the same. (I should probably make it clear that I don’t have any sympathy with those who “blame” the feminist movement for the confused state of masculinity – obviously if you change the roles for one gender you affect the other, but it’s ridiculous to think that women should be held down because the manly men are threatened by them. Both genders have more than enough need to control and regulate others and more than enough delusion and self-destruction to go around. It probably all comes down to economics as much as anything else.)

Back to Blade to the Heat, which seems to be loosely based on the fight in which Emile Griffith accidentally killed an opponent who allegedly was taunting him for being homosexual, but so thoroughly is the incident thought through that it wasn’t until the end of the play that the connection occurred to me (unlike my experience with Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out, about a gay baseball player and filled with incidents obviously based on baseball’s recent past, such as John Rocker’s racist outburst; I kept thinking, No, that’s not quite how people really did react to that action. . . .). It’s a beautifully constructed play, conveying with complete naturalness a wide range of complicated emotional interactions and personified masculinities that come across not as markers across a theoretical range but as actual human beings, with a fluidity of identity that Virginia Woolf would have recognized and appreciated (a fluidity captured so much more effectively in this play than in Berkeley Rep’s ridiculous recent adaption of To the Lighthouse). Every time you think you have a character pegged, sexually, ethnically, or emotionally, he or she shifts a bit and shows you a different side, and it’s all handled in an amazingly rich and economical 90 minutes.

I know it’s obligatory to praise boxing dramas as “a knockout punch!” and suchlike, and I’d like to resist, but this really was a pretty outstanding evening of theater: sets, music, costumes, acting, and script all came together in a way that’s supposed to be standard but really isn’t. The boxing matches were not only convincing and exciting, which is pretty tough to do in a very small theater where you’re only about three feet away from the action, but they flowed seamlessly into the rest of the action instead of being obviously choreographed and practiced much more than the rest of the show, so here’s a big salute to Johnny Moreno as Pedro Quinn (the “gay boxer”) and L. Peter Callender as his rival, Mantequilla Decima, both of whom managed to maintain character even while throwing realistic punches.

I trekked out to Traveling Jewish Theater one more time that week for Cutting Ball’s Endgame, and director Rob Melrose really outdid himself with this one. I’ve been going to Cutting Ball for years now, and this was one of their best productions and a welcome return to form after the somewhat disappointing Taming of the Shrew last summer. And lots of credit should also go to Avery Monsen and David Sinaiko as Clov and Hamm, reunited after their summer foray as respectively Grumio and Petruchio. I didn’t much like Sinaiko’s Petruchio or his Doctor in Wozzeck; I felt he relied too much on a manic energy that seemed more like shtick than anything the characters would actually do, and he seemed to be giving the identical performance with each character. But as Hamm he gave the best performance I’ve seen from him in many years of attending Cutting Ball shows – a modulated, subtle portrait, with his be-ringed fingers and insinuating air of authority, of the dandy at the end of days. Avery Monsen is a really exciting actor: I thought he stole Shrew with his high-energy commedia; here, it was his quiet and inward air of exhaustion and suppressed exasperation that made him compelling. At one point, Hamm starts off on an anecdote, and Monsen just silently closed his eyes for half a second at the beginning of the recital, and you knew immediately how many, many times he’s heard this same story, told this same way, and how patiently and inexplicably he puts up with Hamm.

I meant to write about Blade to the Heat and Endgame weeks ago, but events intervened and I couldn’t until now; the productions are over and their moments of insight and beauty gone; I can’t go back and re-view (or review) them the way I would a movie; they take place purely and poignantly in my memory now, along with a lot of my life; for me going to the theater is like the ancient Japanese samurai going to view the fleeting cherry blossoms, an aesthetic lesson in appreciating the essential quality of life.

the best in this kind are but shadows

No, I did not enjoy the Super Bowl. Thanks for asking. But now that the game's final five minutes, which I couldn't even stand to watch, snatched the perfect season from the Pats, they are once again underdogs, so in a couple of days I fully expect to hear the haters saying, "You know, it sure is a shame they didn't get a perfect season," and maybe they'll even start to talk about how sick they are of the Manning family and its tendency to hog all the titles.

Anyway. Since I've been lecturing opera houses on marketing, I thought I'd share my latest notion, which came to me while reading the Wellsung entry about what the Met was doing the day they were born. So there you have it, the perfect stocking stuffer for the opera lover in your life: a CD copy of whatever the Met was doing the day of his or her birth, in simple but elegant packaging. Or the deluxe set: the entire season for your birth year. You see where this is going.

So I looked myself up. It turns out the Met was dark that night. Um, OK. I didn't say my idea was fully thought-through. For instance, I guess summer births are out of luck.

I did check San Francisco Opera, and they made up for the Met by presenting two operas that day! The first was a student matinee of Pagliacci -- yes, a student matinee, in Italian, back before surtitles, and starring Jon Vickers as Canio, Dolores Mari as Nedda, Lawrence Winters as Tonio, Cesare Curzi as Beppe, and Theodor Uppman (Billy Budd!) as Silvio. No "family versions" translated into English of The Magic Flute or L'Elisir d'Amore for that crowd, and I kind of feel the student audiences have just kicked sand in my face.

The evening performance really interested me, though. It was the second performance of the American premiere run of Die Frau ohne Schatten. My mother, who can still recall decades later the excruciating boredom of having to sit through Norma at the Old Met as a little girl and who has mostly avoided full-length operas ever since, has always told me that she and my father went to the American premiere of Die Frau at the invitation of some friends. After about two acts they had had enough and left. Since she clearly was not at the second performance, being otherwise occupied contracting and dilating and suchlike, she must have attended the actual first performance, when she was eight months pregnant. I'm amazed she made it as far as the intermission under the circumstances, and Mom, I'm sorry if I kicked you in the stomach for leaving early. Maybe that's where I got my whole "I do not leave before the end" thing. Who knows what reaches you under those circumstances? I don't even want to think about what intrauterine influence the plot and music of Die Frau ohne Schatten had on my fragile little psyche. But at least I can now tell everyone I was at the US premiere, though the people I was with refused to stay to the end.