Opera cat
My first opera was a spaghetti western written by Puccini: La Fanciulla Del West. I saw it at the Vienna State Opera on a Monday in January. The opera house was like a convention center. We sat in the rafters against seats at 90-degree angles. Our posture was absolutely upright. I wore a red and blue silk DVF dress. This was Austria. The masses represented a sartorial grab bag of Jack Wolfskin and Chanel.
Luonnotar ja Jolanta was my second opera. David and I changed quickly after work on Friday and ran into the spring night. We sat under the fairy lights at Elite. I got white wine and he got a negroni.
We walked to the opera house and decided to take a picture with my film camera. Actually, I thought he was going to take a picture of me. Instead, he asked a Finnish woman to take a photo of both of us. Romantic. She said no, her hands shake too much. He went to another Finnish woman, off to the side. She was smoking. She had seen the interaction with the first lady. I imagine the dialogue in her head: If that woman said no, there must be something really wrong with those people. I hope they don't ask me. So of course we asked her, and then she said "What, no phone? How do I see what picture I'm taking?". I showed her the view finder. She didn't look through it. She held up the camera and took the photo but I think she closed her eyes and held her breath while she did it.
We walked inside and the lobby was filled with nice-looking older people wearing rumpled suits and stocky leather kitten heels and brand-new Gucci bags, drinking little coupes of sparkling.
The opera itself was perfectly short at 1.5 hours and made me laugh. The plot focused on a blind princess whose blindness was hidden from her until a knight came upon her home and revealed the secret. Then, to save him from being killed for revealing her secret, she wished really hard to regain her sight. And that worked.
We left the opera on a twinkly little high that wine, music and Friday night conjure. We followed some other audience members to the neighborhood bar around the corner from our apartment and had two tiny glasses of beer. The sun went to sleep after we did.
Ciao x