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Since you so obviously haven't the merest inkling of a whisper of a hint about what is going on around you - despite copious program notes, supertitles, and many explanatory lectures and essays - maybe you should do the do the honorable thing, the decent and mature and civil thing, and shut up. I can see we're in way over your head. Granted, the concept of opera is a vast and complicated one: people singing songs about stuff, I mean, wow, you'd need like a degree in culture or geography or something just to get in the door, I mean omigod, like, that is way hard. Like, what is that all about, anyway? I just don't get it and anyway Fox is showing that Brittney Does Hawaii special again so I gotta go. E-mail me, kay? Luv ya lots!!! ;) No, really, lots. And since you love me an equally lots, I know you'll be pleased as Palm Sunday to hear of my latest foray into Gainful Employment: I am in an opera. A Dutch opera. A Dutch opera full of passion and love and cows and women dancing in small pools of water and getting milk dumped all over them by union stagehands who seem to legally require a committee of eight in order to get out of your way backstage and then stare at your butt as you walk by. To those of us who know that culture doesn't just refer to yogurt and pap smears, this is an incredibly intense, life-affirming, making-out-with-Andrew-McCarthey-in-the-stables-at-the-country-club experience - the pinnacle of which comes moments after the first strains of music thrill through the theatre. It builds to a crescendo; dancers scatter wildly as the cue is given; the lights blaze and, with the infinite self-possession born of years of intense study and training, I step out and- I walk across the stage. Yes, my musically defunct readers, I walk across the stage. I start on the right, and damn it all if I don't walk straight across to the left, down the stairs and back into the green room for forty-five minutes until I am called upon to - do it again. This time, though, it's not so simple. This time I need to call on all my training, all the long hours in the dance studio. This is when all those years working days as a welder and stripping at night, all the sweat and sacrifice and sexual harassment, it all pays off: this time- I run across the stage. Then I run back. Then I run across again. Wearing a fifty-three-pound, floor-length woolen skirt and three-inch-high clogs, across a floor that's tilted at a thirty-degree angle and covered with milk, paint and water - the last of which is still falling in a relative downpour from the ceiling (courtesy of the union guys, six of whom stand just offstage, watching my butt as I run). Oh, and I'm carrying a butane torch. Lit. So obviously, my third big scene - the one in which I walk slowly across the stage while staring murderously at two guys - is a real rice cake in comparison. (Although that was the hard one to rehearse. It's just impossible to stare murderously like that time after time and maintain any real emotion. It drains you. After a while you just have nothing left to give, and you're tempted to just act the murderous stare instead of really staring murderously, and then there's no honesty whatsoever to your performance and you can't respect yourself later. You just can't.) In these three trips back and forth across the stage lies the essence of the art form, distilled to perfection in my single, frail frame … and those of the thirty-four other people and three small children also being paid twelve dollars a night to walk back and forth dressed like a seventeenth-century Hollandaise peasant. Onstage, collectively, we shimmer. We shine. We are Holland. In the women's dressing room, we are a bunch of self-obsessed, barely-literate New York actrons with an inflated sense of our own importance in this production. I mean, let's face it - if one of us were in some way incapacitated or otherwise occupied [perhaps with a really exciting audition for a really interesting and very daring production of Brighton Beach Memoirs, a really important production, and I've worked with the director before, at Williamstown, I was the one who went out and bought his cigarettes and his soy milk during rehearsals, so I think I've got a good "in," you know] they could haul in pretty much any drunk, pervert or teenage runaway from Port Authority to walk back and forth in her stead. Also I'm not sure, but I think that the fact that we're seen in profile by an audience that is roughly four hundred feet away, coupled with the fact that our combined total stage time is something like a paramecium's lifespan, means that the total Ben Nye diva-in-a-box makeup job probably isn't necessary. Unless you happen to be trying to pick up union guys, I suppose. I think the best part of my foray into opera, though (besides having an excuse to leave the house, anyway) is all the Dutch I've picked up hanging out with the Hollandish dancers backstage. Frankly, sitting in a room full of foot odor and leotard funk, surrounded by people speaking an incomprehensible language and stretching continually is infinitely preferable to sitting in a green room full of extras, forbidden to drink the coffee - which is only for the orchestra - and listening to a hundred insipid conversations about how much better everyone is than everyone else and how they're all doing these great and important shows and really making it, despite being an unlisted extra in an experimental Dutch opera where even the cow wrangler gets higher billing in the program. The end. [Insert fat-lady-singing joke, consider yourself immeasurably clever, send in application for internet humor column, get rejected, fail miserably, welcome to my world.]
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