A Night at the Opera

Obligatory “I’m back” note: There are, by my estimation, 1.6 billion blog posts with writers explaining the angsty reasons they’ve been dormant so long. There’s no point adding to them. As to why I’m back, the best way to put it is I realized I either had to stop or start. So I’ve started; I have too much to say to stop. If you care to hear more, it’ll be in the PostScript. 

A Night at the Opera

Every year, my five brothers and I take our mother to dinner and a show for Christmas, though not always at Christmas. Especially as we’ve gotten older and our own families have grown and moved, coordinating our seven different calendars and travel schedules can be challenging. We almost always see a musical, but this year we shook things up a bit. 

I noticed Carmen was playing at the Met through May and wanted very much to go, so I pitched it to the boys. Everyone was on board (even if a couple were ambivalent). We found a date in May, Memorial Day Weekend, just before it closed. The performance didn’t disappoint and turned out to be something my mother also wanted to see, which was a huge bonus. Still, I told her I hijacked her Christmas present. 

They set the updated Carmen at a Texas? Arizona? Southwestern manufacturing plant. The bullfight was replaced by a rodeo and the second act included an onstage car chase. There was controversy. You can check out a clip below, but that’s not what this story is about. This story is about the first intermission. 

If there is a more mixed crowd than a Saturday matinee at the Metropolitan Opera, I’d love to be in it. After 30 years in the South, I’ve developed keen hayseed eyes. It’s easy to forget that faces, bearings, and accents come in all different variations. Fortunately, I haven’t devolved to being surprised by multi-racial crowds or shocked by hearing a language other than English spoken right out loud, but the fashion spectrum as we lingered in the lobby threw me a little off-kilter. 

A rouged, botoxed 50-70-something gentleman, whose spray tan seemed just a little less natural than his onyx hair, wearing a lightly sparkled black tuxedo, loitered by a post waiting to be joined. He looked around a little, not nervous, we were all early. I think he was checking to ensure he wasn’t the only one so well-dressed. He wasn’t but he was up there. His foil, and the hero of our story, a skinny old man wearing a giveaway tee (The Something 5K, I think), shorts, and fanny pack under too-thick white hair sauntered there, too. “Ed” as I will call him, was an old New Yorker pulled directly from, Oh, Hello.

SPOILER ALERT

If you haven’t heard the plot of Carmen I’m going to have to tell you to give Ed’s running commentary context. I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t paid close attention to his odd critiques or noted all of them, but this one should give you a sense.

Carmen dies in the end, killed by a jealous lover, who collapses over her body as the lights go down. The first words I heard after all the ovations stopped were Ed’s.

“You couldn’t kill a woman with just one swing of a baseball bat,” he said, vaguely incredulous. She gets stabbed (just once, I imagine) in the original. 

I have come to understand this reimagining of Carmen didn’t go over with all the critics. The updated production that I found stunning put me in a slight minority. Ed seemed to be struggling with which side he would come down on, so he probably said things like that to prove he knew there were serious differences to be parsed. A woman, maybe his daughter or a niece, accompanied him, nodding him into whispers and then silence as each act started, her head bobbing in a cyclical, “let’s finish up” attitude.

Ed started holding forth under the fading applause at the first act break, as if he were fading in. He tried to engage his niece, but wouldn’t let her get a word in, appending his questions into wonderings. Finally, she interrupted. 

“I’m going to go pee now,” she said in a polite, exasperated tone shorthand for, “keep talking if you must, but I’m walking away.”

I’ll admit it’s a tone with which I’m personally acquainted. 

“Yes, yes, let’s go to the bathroom,” Ed said, and almost followed her, but he stopped near the woman seated to his niece’s left.

“Do you want a pretzel?” he asked her. 

“Excuse me?” the woman had a whisper of an accent.

“Would you like a pretzel?” he repeated. 

“Um, no. Thank you.”

“What do you think of the French?”

It took her a second. I like to believe she wondered whether, in the middle of this surreal pretzel exchange, he wanted her opinion of American-Franco relations. She shook that idea off as she realized he was asking her about the quality of the performance. He wanted her opinion on whether these professional opera singers staring in one of the world’s most famous operas in one of the world’s most famous opera houses had nailed accents sufficiently. 

“Oh,” she said. “I don’t speak French.”

Ed plowed on ahead, determined to undermine the rumor that New Yorkers are rude to foreigners.

“I’m sorry, are you a … I mean, do you …” Ed struggled to find a non-offensive way of asking the woman’s race, finally stumbling into a hedging question that improved his chances of getting to the root of the matter.

“Do you speak Spanish?”

I don’t know what it’s like to be an immigrant, but I suspect your experience has a lot to do with how thick your accent is. Here’s what I can tell you about the woman. She spoke fluently with a slight accent. Any confusion she showed had to do with her surprise at playing “guess my race” at the Metropolitan Opera that afternoon more than any language barrier. 

Realization dawned on the woman’s face, lighting up with understanding and darkening with offense in small increments that doubled back on themselves. She seemed equally baffled and relieved as she got his point. Her exasperation only showed a little when she answered, but she couldn’t stifle the incredulous hitch in her voice.

“I’m Japanese,” she said, probably irritated for the first time in her life at not being stereotyped. This woman didn’t look just “a little” Japanese. She looked so Japanese that she couldn’t imagine anyone thinking she wasn’t Japanese. 

“Oh,” Ed said, thrilled to have found common ground. “Are you familiar with the films of Kurosawa?”

I remember seeing the English office for the first time at my future wife’s apartment, nearly 20 years ago. She presented the show with a certain satisfaction that sadly is alien to the post-streaming generation. A friend of hers living in England had sent her these bootlegged, re-coded DVDs. I’d heard of but not seen the American version, and her satisfaction turned to glee as she introduced me to Ricky Gervais, who hurt me to watch like no one since Archie Bunker. 

Call it forthright ignorance. I knew too many of these people, terrified to be seen as bigots but just a little more terrified to see whether they actually are. It’s the lack of malice that always gets me, the unreflective belief that feeling as if you’re a good person makes you a good person. That not having malice is the same as not being rude.

That’s what was going on with Ed, and I couldn’t stop him any more easily than I could have stopped Ricky Gervais. This was a moment in amber. It’s weird because I would have stopped him from, say, hitting her with a stick (or hitting me with a stick for that matter), but it wasn’t that kind of assault. In the end (as with Ricky Gervais) I had to just stop watching because it was too real. This man wasn’t a cartoon, he was the truth behind the stereotype.

In retrospect, there’s a sitcom moment where I say, “Can’t you see the lady doesn’t want to talk to you?” Or “Is he bothering you, miss?” Realistically, I’m sure the last thing she wanted was more helpful male attention. I only could make things worse. The best thing I could do was not get caught noticing, so I distracted myself. At some point, Ed’s daughter/niece/handler returned to field his obscure questions and nod distractedly at his unsolicited inter-act commentary.

As we left the theater following the performance, my brother Michael asked me, “What was that old guy saying to that Asian lady?”

She’s Japanese, Michael. Japanese.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

PostScript

I know there’s an object lesson I’m toying with inexplicitly here. I try very hard not to be obnoxious. Sometimes I succeed. When I do it’s because of guys like Ed, examples of people I don’t want to be but easily could become. They haunt me, especially as I get older. I’m not afraid of saying the wrong thing, I’m afraid of doubling down on my ignorance, of being a man on a “look how accepting I am” mission.

I can’t tell you how often I don’t tell strange women how nice they look because I think it will brighten their day, but it’s a lot. The problem isn’t about whether or not to say anything, but in the urge, there’s an arrogant, aggressive friendliness I know I have to keep in check so I don’t start talking Kurawasowa to every Japanese person I meet.

Still, Rashomon? Killer, killer flick.

Kickstart

I promised myself (and I think you) that I’d shake things up with my writing and sometimes do podcasts, sometimes do video, sometimes all three. Instead, I have a long list of stories that I haven’t “discovered a medium for.”

How artsy-fartsy is that? Like, rather than do any work I “agonize” as my notebooks fill up and any timely stories fade into obscurity. It’s embarrassing to admit and humiliating to realize. Still, thanks for your indulgence and patience. I’ll try not to abuse it again.

Expect more stories on all fronts soon.

Death Stuff

I’ve mentioned that I do a funeral podcast, right? Funeral Service Insider: The Podcast still is going pretty well. I added a weekly element called, In Case You Missed It, which you might get a kick out of.

It’s a news roundup of interest to funeral directors with occasional contextualizing and commentary. I do it on YouTube as well as on the podcast feed. It’s part of me trying to get better at video, both more comfortable and more adept. 

Anyway, here’s the most recent one. My goofy face smiling out from under the word, ‘Decomp.’

I’ll reach out again very soon.

TR