A Night at the Opera

After all the planning meetings and weeks of work it's time for the performance! My painting contract included two free tickets. Doug, who saw the entire Ring cycle in Seattle last summer, thought somebody else should have a turn, so I took Mary McGiffin for a girls' night out. (She was my on-the-spot babysitter a few times when schedules conflicted.) It was a freezing cold night and windy, but it was great fun and we were both super excited ("Oooh, we're going to the opera!")



Photo by Peter Serko.

They put us right behind the orchestra at first, but Noel came by and said he would find us different seats, so then we got to move to the back where we could see better.   The performance was great.  Neither of us really knew anything about the story and we enjoyed watching it unfold.  It's a lot like a Shakespeare play--love, disguises (no cross-dressing, in this one), humor, misunderstanding, drama--except that everything is sung, and it's all in Italian.  (They did have English titles projected above the stage.)   The performers were all fantastic, and wonderfully expressive.  The guy who played Figaro was especially fun to watch.




I sent in a short bio, but it was slightly altered between my email and the playbill. What I said was "A mother of two and an aspiring muralist, she and her family recently moved into a home in University Place with many invitingly blank walls." The way it came out makes me sound like a graffiti artist.

Late night!  I was feeling it the next day.  (The Rialto is a gorgeous old theater, but those seats are not comfortable.)  The performance ran almost three hours (including the intermission) and then we spent a while out in the lobby talking to JoLee and Patrick Watson of the multi-stake committee about the production of The Sound of Music that they're doing this summer.  (Patrick says he has six different sets planned, so there will be tons of painting to do!)

I went back Sunday evening to get all the paint cleaned up and put away (I didn't want to leave my six reds in disposable Ziploc containers sitting around for somebody else to deal with). Everything came down a lot faster than it went up.  I gave my storage closet key to Tony. He asked me "Aren't you coming back?" and I assured him that I would be happy to.  This whole experience has been very cool.  I love being able to create something and then see it used and appreciated.