Obama and Opera

So, on the dawn of the day that the great diaspora known as the Bush Administration ("Administration," Ha! At least Nero fiddled while Rome burned!) is seeing its final days, I got to thinking:

Obama... opera.

Could there be a connection there, somewhere? Does our new prez-elect like opera? What does he think about it? What's his policy going to be on the Fine Arts?

So, like most i-idiots today, I googled "Obama opera."

What did I find? Well, what I found made me hope that Obama makes education a priority in our country.

The top link said "MySpace Videos: Obama and Opera by AAM." I should've red-flagged anything prefixed with "MySpace" as being spurious, but since this was an entirely unscientific experiment, merely relying on serendipity to yield its results, I went ahead and clicked.

Obviously, the video was of a rally, apparently in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. There were several people standing on a dais surrounded by a rowdy crowd of Obamanites. "Okay," I was thinking to myself, "some opera singer sang the National Anthem or something." Then Obama himself came up to the dais and began speaking. After a minute or two, I skimmed further through the video to find the part where the opera singer came in.

No such luck. No singing on that video. It was then that I noticed a rather portly African American woman on the dais with Obama. "Leontyne Price?" I thought. No. Though the video was a bit grainy, I could still see it wasn't Ms. Price. Kiri, maybe? No.

Finally I did recognize the person: It was Oprah!

Alright, so MySpace people aren't the brightest bulbs on the tree. Apparently, some folks were equally confused over on Yahoo, too. I suppose that I should forgive these (I'm assuming) kids or, perhaps, non-native speakers. After all, Oprah wasn't even supposed to be named Oprah. Oprah's given name was supposed to be the Biblical name "Orpah" (Ruth 1:4), but everybody apparently had a hard time pronouncing and spelling that in her native Mississippi.

So, no direct links between Obama/Biden and opera. But, I'm sure there's some greedy little composer in his parents' basement right now writing "Obama: The Opera." Don't be surprised when it comes out. Look for it at the Met in 2012.

FYI, a pdf of Obama/Biden's platform on the arts can be found here.