And all that carries over into other stuff, too. For example, this blog. Oh, sure, it's all well and fun when you start. Blah-blah this, blah-blah that. Then all of a sudden, you get busy with something else and then remember it's been ages since you wrote in your blog. Then it's like, "Oh crap! I need to be writing a blog entry, but I don't know what to say." So you start in on some gripe that's been bothering you, but you're now going, "Ehhhh, do I really want to be doing this?" And it's off to the next thing.
I guess it all comes down to discipline. Unfortunately, I hate to have to self discipline myself, too. Whadyagonnado?
So, last night during opera rehearsal, I remembered it had been ages since I'd written anything. I'd promised myself that I would blog productions, and here I was, a lousy two productions in and that had gone out the window.
So, here goes: I'll get everybody caught up and then I won't blog for another month, until after "Rigoletto."
First of all, a gripe. Not necessarily a key one. Just an, uh... inconsistency, let's call it. Isn't "Rigoletto" a bit of an odd opera to do for Valentine's Day? I mean, the only love in it, other than the Duke and his cronies' physical orgies, is the love between a father and a daughter. Well, I suppose one might argue that Gilda has the hots for the Duke (or who she thought that the Duke was when he was disguised as Gaultier Malde). And at the end, she dies for him, despite the fact that a mere 20 minutes earlier (performance time) she'd been raped and left by him. Perhaps we should be performing this during National Battered Women Awareness week or something. Gilda certainly ends up with a classic case of battered-wife syndrome when she throws herself into the malevolent clutches of Sparafucile in lieu of her beau. "Maybe if I die for him, he'll love me the way I want to be loved," might be her inner dialogue.
But, as we all know, Gilda's a pretty odd character anyway. I mean, she's been sequestered away by her father all these years. She's fallen for some guy she knows nothing about just because she saw him way up in the front row at church. I would say her fantasy life is pretty active since her real life pretty much sucks. Take vulnerable teenager, throw in a lifetime of overprotectiveness by her father, and voilà! Instant psycho!
I have to admit, though, Verdi has really turned traditional opera on its ear. What? The tenor's the bad guy in this one? What the...? And there's no really pure romance, you say? Instead, everybody's pretty much a baddie or whacked.
Oh, but there is a big curse. That's a big opera thing, right? Curses? And you just know that whoever ends up cursed is going to be dead or imprisoned or executed by the end of the opera just as surely as Bobby Brady ended up being cursed by the tiki god effigy.
And so we have Verdi's masterpiece where there are shades of gray all around. One could argue that Gilda is the only pure character, but even, in the end, she ends up tainted... in both senses of the word. Well, there's plenty of dirt to go 'round. Even Giovanna could be seen as a nasty character. I've seen some productions where she is in the pay of the conspirators, that she lets them in the gate, even. Nice. I guess Rigoletto failed to check her record with the National Association of Nursemaids and Nannies.
And so it goes. In turning back to the real world, I must admit that I've come home from opera pretty much every night exhausted. I don't know if it's because we didn't do a fall production to "get in shape" or whether I just was way too inert over the holidays or if Carroll's staging is a bit too frenetic for my tastes. But it's not like I didn't go into this not knowing that we were going to be running around the stage and dancing and partying, etc. It certainly wouldn't be a Carroll Freeman production if it wasn't busy.
Of course, now that Koehler's introduced me to Facebook, I'm obsessed with it, which isn't helping me get any additional rest I might need for opera. I've had a basic name-rank-serial-number MySpace page for a couple of years, but I never like MySpace. It was too hard to find people you knew unless you knew their online monikers. What's really cool about Facebook is that it does most of that legwork for you. It looks at a friend you've made and says, "Aha! Joe's from Knoxville. I'll bet Eric will know Joe." or "Eric and Sara both are in the opera fan group and live near each other, so they might know each other." MySpace didn't do any of that. Plus, with MySpace, you had all that junk that people put on their pages to have to wade through--you know, flying heart wallpaper or bizarre animated GIFs. Bleh.
But Facebook keeps everything relatively clean (though the interface, to me, seems a little confusing). Plus, it automatically notifies you about what all your friends are up to, who they've met (and if you might know who they've met). It's like being at a great big party of a well-connected friend and running into all your pals from various areas (and eras) of you life. I've "refriended" people I haven't seen in over twenty years on Facebook, all since last Friday! Pretty wild. What's even cooler is when you see that people have reconnected with others because of you. That's really neat to see.
BTW, thanks to Koehler for forming the Knoxville Opera "alumni" group on Facebook. If you're on Facebook, check it out. If you're not on Facebook, give it a look. And, btw, it's not just for high school and college kids any more. I've got friends on there that are in their 60s!
