Pretty Woman? Moonstruck? Aria!

I was not an opera fan in my younger days. My perception was that it attracted snobs who pretended to like it while knowing nothing about it, and I wanted nothing to do with that. I also thought you had to be pretty well off to attend, which I assuredly was not.

Then my not-yet-husband took me to New York for my birthday one year. He proposed to me on top of the Empire State Building, he booked us a room at the Algonquin, and he took me to Madame Butterfly. It was probably the best birthday of my life, and that’s including the year my parents gave me a Mazda RX-7 in place of the ’66 Cadillac that had been “my” car. (Then I went to college and poor little Mazzy got run over by a monster truck whe my mom was taking it to get the brakes fixed.)

I knew in advance I was being taken to the opera, so I asked an opera-loving friend what I was in for. “I love it,” she said. “You’ll love it. It’s like the pro wrestling of live theater. Over-the-top performances and costumes, and lots of drama.” This was an odd way to sell me since I wasn’t a big wrestling fan (and I’m still not—some things DON’T change), but I was intrigued.

And then I went and was hooked. Opera is awesome. Opera at the Met is doubly so, because they have little screens in front of your chair that translate the lyrics so you can follow the plot. We made it a tradition and went to the opera on my birthday for a few years after that. A lot of Puccini. A little Verdi. Some Mozart. No Wagner, because the hubs won’t toss his money to antisemites even if they’ve been dead for more than a century.

The only down side was that even in March, New York can still be pretty nippy, and running around and failing to hail a cab in those pre-Uber days was no fun. Then we had a kid and went to one opera closer to home in DC, and then we pretty much traded in opera for trips south to spring training games.

But hey. The kid is gone. We live where it’s cold. Maybe it’s time for us to pick it back up!