three cents: Donald Duck, Ibsen, and the Lone Ranger

If one wants to see opera in Italy, one should go to La Scala in Milan, apparently, I mean that's how it's done, but you just try being a lower-middle-class-ish American getting tickets to La Scala less than a year in advance. Instead Max and I walked by La Scala. We peeped the fancy calligraphied showbill on the theater's outside wall and ate asparagus and eggs at a small cafe in the alley by the musicians' entrance. Just prior, somewhere in the fashion streets, I had fallen down, tripped badly on the cobblestones, and I needed to nurse my rattled body. The musicians' union was tabling nearby, and the union reps caught a trio of violinists on their way out of the building and petitioned them urgently about something I couldn't understand in my base Italian. At our cafe, just meters away from the union outpost, the mundanity of these world-class musicians' day jobs went unnoticed. Women in black smoked and crossed their legs, men in linen suits debated the menu in staccato undertones, and I felt clumsy and obtuse and 19. It was a great day. 

One could get tickets to the opera in Venice, however, which one did, and after a high speed train (trains! my god, why don't we have trains here?!) and a long "It's a Small World"-esque boat ride down the Grand Canale and a quick change at the apartment, I was at the opera. In Venice. About to see one of the only operas I know well, La Traviata, in the very theater that had first commissioned it. 

The opera house in Venice is round and hence an island. Approaching on foot from the rear, we stopped to take photos on a bridge/street called Calle Maria Callas. There, in the interlocking intersections of several small canals, a parade of gondoliers, each propelling a separate tour party, created a slow-motion bottleneck. Their performance was so unironic—sunburnt people, crammed into uncomfortable boats, being tousled as the gondoliers crept through the canal, one by excruciating one. We laughed but the people in the boats were not laughing. The gondoliers maybe, later, counting their cash. 

2. a thing about love 
La Traviata is basically an opera about a dude who is a terrible, terrible father. There is a couple, they are in love, and then the guy's dad decides that his family can't be associated with a sex worker (oh, the girl's a sex worker, btw) and forces her to leave the guy, who is first heartbroken, then angry, then in a fit of Gender Double Standards he publicly shames her, and thus the young lovers are torn further asunder. Act three. Her lover, now remorseful, finds her again, then she promptly dies of consumption (or TB? or Mysterious Feminine Old Timiness?). The guy's dad still feels very guilty, both before and after the girl dies, but during the course of two acts the dad never actually does anything to make up for his terrible, terrible fathering and ruining of his own son's life, not to mention basically hastening this woman's painful demise. There are all kinds of love, and love makes a great excuse for all kinds of horrible behavior. 

Toward the end there, the woman is dying alone without friends. Like, whatever about the boyfriend, but no friends. Lying on an overcoat on a bare floor and still managing to forgive a man. I don't know. She was all about the love. La Traviata is not a romantic story, per se. The initial scene of love-epiphany happens with the lover, Alfredo, mostly offstage. There is one note in there, though—he reprises it from the wings too—one moment in "Un Di Felice" that I can't ever stop thinking about or wanting to arrive again. It's one of those sounds, like whatever is the precursor to that Adele song they figured out is scientifically engineered to make you cry. And it still works.

My grandmother, my mom's mom, loved opera. Before she lost her memory and then her language, and before her skin became so paper-thin that it rips when you help her to roll over, she sometimes had insomnia. Instead of counting sheep she'd recite the names and composers and librettists of operas—Italians, chronologically, then the Germans, and so on. When I was a child she took me to see Cosi Fan Tutte, which is an opera by Mozart about two dudes trying to entrap their girlfriends into cheating on them. I didn't hate it, but I didn't get it. Around that time, however, my mother took up the habit of listening to La Traviata every day while she worked on her dissertation, and the music must have worked somewhere inside eight-year-old me as I sat on the couch across the living room from where my mom typed on the Commodore 64. More recently, when I bought a recording of o.g. diva Maria Callas in La Traviata, it was in a fit of pre-grief. I was trying perhaps to find a way inside my grandmother's mind, to see whether or not she was still in there—and only then did opera start to move me. Now I listen to opera every day on my commute to work. The music renders New San Francisco manageable for me; it makes the parade of wealth and inequity and entitlement and nostalgia bearable, at a time when very little else does so. With Verdi in my head it's all theater, a musical, an aimless mass of heightened emotion that is still somehow listenable. Opera makes me love my town again. Obtuse passion, contained. 

3. a thing about money 
The numbers: Nosebleed tickets to the opera cost 75 euro each and the vaporetto there and back was 6.50 euro per person, per ride (!), and the intermission prosecco, times two people and three intermissions, was two bucks a glass. Max's linen suit was E350 on the "cheap" fashion street in Milan a few days prior, and my dress was $5 at Old Navy, five years ago.

This particular production of La Traviata was set very modern-Italian—men in sharp suits, party girls sporting next-level silk negligees, paparazzi. During the prelude, there was a pantomine onstage: the Traviata (her name is Violetta, and traviata means 'fallen woman') reclines on a luxurious bed and receives a line of suitors, each man giving her increasingly large handfuls of money. In the second act, the boudoir canopies are gone and the backdrop becomes a mass of silhouetted trees, a forest: The Country. In front of this scrim the stage is blank, except for a carpet of money—dollar bills—which in this place fall from the trees instead of thick green leaves. Love = money and sex = nature's currency and nature = capital and yeah, we get it. And it still works.

later, skaters.
xo
m. 

PS - tinyletter italics and formatting are being super inconsistent today, so please don't copyedit me yo