“I sure hate bacon”… said no one ever.

    (April 3, 2013)

          We hosted our first major family holiday this weekend. The fiancé and I had opera rehearsal the day before and after Easter, so somehow I thought hosting 12 people for the day would be easier than driving back and forth to Connecticut. My parents, future in-laws and cousins all went for the idea and in fact, seemed excited. For one thing, my cousins are local and have a one year old who hates being in the car, so they thought forty minutes of screaming preferable to two and a half hours to Connecticut. There was a big part of me that felt the whole thing was sort of silly; like B and I were just playing house and that it was sort of laughable; the formality of such a holiday, not to mention the fact that we are actually adults.

          I had this desire to do something different for an entrée over our usual ham, so I took a note from the Jews and made brisket… only I wrapped it in bacon. I woke up at 8am on a Sunday. If you know me, you know that the only thing that usually wakes me before 11am on a weekend morning is the occasional church singing gig, so to have woken up to prep and slow cook a piece of meat was a feat unto itself. I was moving at a pretty good clip, inspired by the smells of the red wine and bay leaf marinade roasting in the oven. It was only at about 10am that the tearing of the ends of green beans became zombie-like. A friend texted to wish me a happy Easter and I told her: “Wish me luck that I don’t burn myself, burn dinner, or give everyone food poisoning.” Two out of three ain’t bad.

          I should preface this by saying that I had already burned myself the morning before. I have a new and magical curling iron that makes me feel super glamorous and I had been periodically just slightly burning the tip of my forehead which was mostly covered by my hair. Saturday morning, however, while absentmindedly reaching for something mid-curl, I burned my neck something awful. And it probably wouldn’t even be that bad if I didn’t have the kind of neck skin that turns bright red when touched. (I have a special kind of paleness ancient aristocrats would have coveted.) So I was not only in pain, but it was the first real day of a long-awaited spring and I was off to a rehearsal where my fiancé had already been for an hour, with a giant red mark strongly resembling a hickey. But don’t worry, I’m not the kind of classy person who can be discreet about such a thing. If anyone got close to my right side I had to loudly exclaim that that mark on my neck was a burn and NOT A HICKEY. My hair looked fabulous though.

          So Sunday progressed and I managed to not burn the brisket. Everyone contributed something from beautiful flowers to delicious food, (Pysansky eggs, pierogies, kielbasa, and sauerkraut included, what kind of Ukrainians do you think we are?) To the best of my knowledge, no one suffered any food poisoning. I managed to only burn myself once out of the many times I pulled the brisket from the oven, (which would have been fine if my dad hadn’t absentmindedly grabbed my arm for story-telling emphasis more than once.) All in all, it was a good day. The baby, (and her family) recovered from a harrowing scream-fest of a drive across town, we improvised with seating, took a walk, and as with most Easter holidays before it, my five year old cousin and I ate our weight in candy.

          With the exception of not having a meat platter yet, we found that we are more like real adults than we thought.

Dirty Thirty

(April 1st, 2013)

          So I turned the big dirty thirty in November. Was I ready for it? I can’t be sure. The damn thing crept up on me so gradually that I only seem to be able to reflect on it now. I have read that research shows that this birthday can be a much more traumatizing event for men than for women and the reasoning seems fairly logical to me.

          For men in our culture, not unlike for women, it can represent a proverbial notch in their timeline which is supposed to point to their accomplishments— like they should have a good job and should be thinking about settling down. But I think for men, in our increasingly youth-obsessed, commitment-phobic culture, (and if you haven’t noticed it, you haven’t seen a comedy with Vince Vaughn made in the past ten years) it can be seen as an expected end to all their wild times with the drudgery of suburbia soon to follow. And so, even though it is more acceptable to push the settling-down piece of life further back with the generations, the anxiety on the subject seems to increase in the wake of the transition.

          For women of our generation I think it’s a little different. From a completely shallow point of view, I think thirty is a good milestone for a woman’s confidence. I think my mother was at her most beautiful around her third decade, and that thirty looks good on most women. Certainly, I feel more comfortable and confident with my appearance than I ever did in high school. I’m not saying I was some deformed freak then (although close). It’s just that we all seem to have just met our adult selves in our late teens and early twenties and I, like many, am much more accustomed with my looks at this age, accepting of my flaws, and comfortable with my style. So in this way, I feel being a late bloomer has served me well. I’m also very lucky to have descended from a long line of late bloomers. I suspect and hope that this correlates in some way to this longevity gene I seem to have coming at me from both sides. My grandmother’s grandfather in the Ukraine lived to 101, and I had grandparents, and great aunts and uncles on both sides who lived to their late 90’s. Having grown up surrounded by many who considered eighty to be young, thirty is like an embryo still.

          I’d say the big change for me is professional I suppose. I can completely relate to one sentiment of a teacher of mine in junior high. She said she couldn’t wait to turn thirty— that she felt she would finally get the respect she deserved and she would stop being treated like a child and referred to as a “girl”. I can completely relate to this sentiment. Professionally, I feel like I can sing more of the repertoire I want to because I’m not a baby in the singing world any longer. I have felt some of the expected changes to the timbre of my voice in the past few years and more importantly, have the confidence finally to try some different repertoire choices. Having a slightly more varied aria package, for auditions, for example, shows some confidence at age thirty. If I had presented the same set of arias for an audition at twenty-two, it was more likely to show willful ignorance. Ironically, at this age my zest for having an international travelling opera career has greatly diminished— actually it’s pretty much disintegrated.

          There are several reasons behind this. For one, I’m pretty happy with my current life. I live in a great city, surrounded by great friends, have a wonderful fiancé, and I’m not too far from home and family. I work during the day and have a good salary without always having to constantly hustle for the rest of my life to make ends meet. I have gained a lot of entrepreneurial skills as a freelance singer, but at my core, I am not a hustler. I think very few people actually are. So even if all the hard work and sacrifice paid off, which is statistically no guarantee at all, I still don’t want to give up so much of what I already have. I don’t have a desire to sacrifice an active social life to sit in hotel rooms ten months out of the year in various cities performing opera. This is this side of opera they tell you about, but I, like many I suspect, was too blinded by the stars in my eyes to realize the reality of it. It’s not uncommon for me to run into classical singers who re-evaluate career paths as we start to fall out of the “young artist” category. I asked a friend recently if she thought I had become complacent about my singing career because I am getting married. She said: “Nah, you’ve been talking like this for a long time.”

          To a certain extent, I wonder why I didn’t accept that I wouldn’t have a different kind of career earlier— one that didn’t involve a lot of travel for auditions and gigs and where I sang a lot more in local opera and in more oratorio and concert work. Truth be told, if I could make a living singing recitals, I would. Not every Classical singer feels that way. I just love art song that much. But a travelling art song career is even harder to obtain than an opera career, and the latter is usually a prerequisite for the former. In some ways, I just did the thing that everyone who loves opera and singing around me was doing. It isn’t that I couldn’t accept that I didn’t want/couldn’t have a successful travelling career. I realized years ago that in many ways, I am not built for a traveling opera career and it alone is not enough for me, but I was having fun doing it. I still am having fun singing opera. I get to sing some of the world's most beautiful music with wonderful colleagues. I think and hope that for me, age thirty is going to mark a time in my life when I become more creative with my passions. I have dreams of traveling more, (for pleasure, not work), and of being a champion of the arts in my city in ways I didn’t think of before. Perhaps that means finding more writing venues. Maybe it means starting an art song salon. Right now, I’m working fulltime, performing in an opera, and finishing wedding planning. If I can find time to do my taxes in the next 2 weeks, I will be convinced of my ability to do anything.

Fooooood

          Tonight, there is a baby shower after work, and I’m looking forward to it because, aside from it being one of those lovely, happy, social occasions, it also means that I don’t have to make dinner. This is not to say that in my house, I am always the one to do so— far from it. We both take turns. This is just one of those nights when Brendan is teaching later in the evening and the task would be left to me. So I brought some cheese and a baguette as contribution to this potluck shower, and in exchange I will be fed for the evening with not so much as one greasy frying pan to contend with.

         One of my friends said to me recently, “You always have the best cheese at your house.” I told her that this may have been one of the greatest compliments of my life. I love to go to a local place, try cheese samples, and arrange a variety of sharp, blue, nutty, and soft cheeses. I guess it makes me feel very Parisian or something. Life without cheese and chocolate in particular would not be okay. Often people say to me, "Oh, I don't have a sweet tooth. I like salty things". I never understand this because I crave salty things too. I like salty things, sweet things, sour things and hot things. I just like all the things. I certainly feel a strong passion for eating food, but less so about cooking. I love to talk about flavors and try new dishes in restaurants. I also like occasionally cooking for friends, but the idea of feeling obligated to cook every night simply to feed myself is exhausting. And I live with Captain Hypoglycemic, so we like to keep him fed before he gets "hangry". When we improvise cooking something for myself or just the two of us, we always seem to be missing one ingredient and accumulate a small mountain of dirty pots and pans. And with our schedules we’re often not eating until 8:30 or 9:00, when I am hungry around 5:30 (Yes, I am an old person). We are lucky that we both like dinner salads quite a lot. One of my friends recently reminded me that I really used to enjoy cooking in college. Maybe it was the novelty of being able to serve it to several others every night. As the daughter of two caterers, however, my relationship with the culinary arts seems a complicated one. I learned basic cooking skills at an early age but in our fast-paced contemporary lifestyle, who can even keep up with all the ambitious expectations of the new age foodie?

          One big factor for me and I suspect, for much of my generation these days is societal pressure and expectations concerning health. With nutritional research ever-changing, and confusing statistics abounding, extra control issues are popping up all over the country. Food suddenly needs to simultaneously be non-fattening, all natural, organic, local, grass fed, gluten-free, hormone-free, cage-free, dairy-free, paleo friendly, environmentally friendly—you name it and the list of fears goes on and on. If you can just make it at home, that would solve a multitude of problems with food, right? As a result of what should be a simplifying approach, there is a new cropping up of serious, let’s call them, upper middle class domestics.

          I know that we are living in a nation with an obesity problem and we eat too many processed and high fructose corn syrup laden foods. I am all about eating whole foods, like those of our grandparents, but it can all go too far. In our efforts to get back to basics in food, there is this new homespun, homemade, grassroots trend that I find full of unrealistic expectations, at least for my lifestyle. I suspect that this, like most pretentious, guilt-inducing crazes these days, finds its’ epicenter in Brooklyn. There was a hysterical blog I read recently parodying current foodie fears and obsessions. The fictional protagonist in this particular whole food struggle narrative, distrusting a number of food groups, ended up eating nothing but rabbit, (raised in the home of course), kale, and vitamin D supplements, only to end up with massive kidney stones. The irony here is that the comments section was filled with questions, (mostly from Brooklyn residents), about how to successfully raise rabbits. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for people who work fulltime and have families to take all these extra steps toward putting a meal on the table.

         This is not to say that if you enjoy and have time for activities like raising your own animals and making your own detergent, sunscreen, mustard etc., that you shouldn’t feel free to go do so with reckless abandon. I personally, feel no such inclinations. My old roommate declared excitedly one day that “we” should make our own butter! She is a very good baker, and enjoys the process and the results very much, but I had to inform her that I had no interest. The butter they sell in the store suits me just fine.

          Baking is another realm in which I have very little interest in venturing into deeply. There are several reasons for this. The first is that I do not need to develop a habit that is calorically extravagant when usually a small piece of chocolate will do the trick for me. I like cookies as much as the next gal, but cookie batter is an evil I am not able to resist and I end up eating my way through the entire process. As far as cake is concerned, for most of my childhood, there was a perpetual stream of leftover wedding cake sitting in both the fridge and the freezer at home. I am talking classic 80’s and 90’s Italian bakery cake, slathered in bulky layers of congealed sugary frosting. As a result, I have such disgust and disdain for bakery cake, that we won’t even serve cake at our wedding. Anyone who has half a tastebud knows that cakes made from a box are far superior to all other cakes anyway. My grandmother made beautiful Ukrainian breads, lemon meringue pies, and rice puddings from scratch all her life. When my cousin requested her special birthday cake for her baby shower, everyone made a big fuss over “Grandma’s special cake”. When someone at the shower asked her the secret, Grandma replied; “Duncan Hines: Butter Recipe Golden”. It remains my family’s cake mix of choice. Cakes are for special occasions anyway. I say, live a little and consume some preservatives. Cake mix is just fine by me since the act of baking itself doesn’t suit my personality anyway. I am decent at making pie crusts and I like pie enough, but once the thing is thrown in the oven, I can’t futz with it. And futzing is a must for me.

          This brings me to my final topic. For someone who doesn’t enjoy cooking very much, I am very quick to boss others around in the kitchen. Just as I have very strong opinions about design aesthetics in the home, so too, I feel strongly about food sanitation, preparation, and presentation. My parents’ have imparted much of their wisdom regarding these components. I actually have a friend who texts me with questions of how long he can leave a particular food in the fridge or at room temperature before it is inedible. If I cannot reply reliably, I will call my mother and ask. So, I am one of those obnoxious kitchen hoverers, who, even when not asked to help, demands that meat doesn’t get overcooked and that the knife for the raw chicken doesn’t come anywhere near the vegetables. I'll also loudly condemn any items with any ingredients I can't pronounce, so I'm really just as bad as any conflicted Brooklynite. Not that I do anything particularly productive in this process, mind you.  I see myself in a supervisory role. 

          One time the fiancé’s friends called and invited him to dinner. He asked them if I could come along because we were both free that night. They said I could, but only if I promised not to help cook. “She gets too bossy.” I couldn’t even be mad. I know how ridiculous I can get after all. We all appreciated the special irony that the only woman in the group was to stay out of the kitchen.

"Work is the curse of the drinking class" ~Oscar Wilde

A few weeks ago, two friends, my fiancée, and I had the amazing opportunity to be tourists in Ireland with the additional bonus of experiencing an Irish wedding.  Trust me, it is an experience.  I must say that while I was excited to see a new landscape and couldn’t wait to see my dear friend Kate on the occasion of her wedding, my past experiences in the UK had me prepared for bland, fattening food and dreary, depressing weather.  I was really pleasantly surprised by how flavorful every dish we ordered was.  We had robust stews served with hearty brown bread, fresh smoked salmon, garlic and white wine mussels, Bailey’s cheesecake, and plenty of Guinness.  Compared with the entirely white, lukewarm plates devoid of flavor I had continually been served as an exchange student in England, I was delighted.  Considering the reputation of their climate, we had pretty great weather, with the exception of two days- the worst being a monsoon-like situation in Dublin.  That day, we just found a lot of excuses to head into shops and cafes for hot chocolate. 

Hot chocolate is not the beverage of choice in Dublin, mind you.  I was personally struck by how apparent the Irish stereotype was in this city.  At night, the Temple Bar area in Dublin is like Bourbon St or the strip in Vegas.  It’s the hen and stag party central of the UK and with the city center being quite small, it is extremely congested with drunken partiers. Then we’d see people stumbling around drunk at 2:00 in the afternoon in the streets of Dublin— seemingly functional members of society otherwise.  We took a tour of the Jameson factory and our guide once said: “At this point in the distillery process, the alcohol is 80 proof, and tastes extremely foul, but for my money you can’t beat it.  You’re drunk instantly for 40 minutes and hungover an hour later.”  Maybe I am getting to be an old, stodgy American, but that didn’t actually sound fun to me.  I suppose I should give the city of Dublin the benefit of the doubt, because we were there over a weekend.

Our first night’s stay in the Dublin hostel was an adventure unto itself.  The only space available for that particular night was in a co-ed dorm for twelve.  Brendan was on a later flight, so Christina, Rachele, and I were on our own that night and then were scheduled to stay at Kate and Peter’s apartment the second night.  Having stayed in four or five hostels before in Europe and having had no problems, I figured we’d be fine.  We met a handful of gentlemen with whom we’d be sharing a room when we tried to catch a short afternoon snooze.  We’d gotten only about 3 hours sleep on the red-eye.  They were very cordial when we asked if they would please be quiet at four in the afternoon.  We figured we’d better stay out late that night, in preparation for the wedding, but also to give our dorm mates ample partying time.  Surely, they would be in shortly after 2:30 or so.  How naïve we were. 

Our hostel's vending machine

When we arrived back at the room, there were several people asleep, and no sooner did I get into bed than the man in the bed next to me started to snore… loudly.  He flipped over, and I considered myself saved.  Falling asleep in an unfamiliar bed is an arduous task for me, but I was bleary-eyed enough from the flight to be up to it.  Approximately, every half hour following though, another loud drunk Irishmen would roll into the room and talk loudly for an hour.  Every one of them had a mouth he couldn’t kiss his grandmother with, (and trust me, I’m no prude.  We were told later that one word in particular doesn’t hold the stigma it does in America).  Most of them had actually lost their room keys and just banged on the door until their friends let them in.  The one guy came in crying that his friends had left him and then continued to loudly extol that it didn’t matter because his cheeseburger would be the best he’d ever eaten and would save his night.  He then chewed it very loudly while continuing “Ode to his Cheeseburger” for another half hour until he finally fell asleep mid-bite, aspirating cheeseburger with every breath.  It was shortly after two men started throwing punches at one another above Rachele’s bunk that Rachele and a friendly and sleepy Scottish man in the corner insisted repeatedly that they please be quiet.  I approximate that this was around 5 or 6am.

And then they woke up at 8am, and all started chatting again.  I know it was 8am because I asked Christina what time it was and one of them said: “There’s more than one of you?” (I assume he meant that there was more than one joy-killing America woman in the room.)  “YES!” we all yelled; “There are three of us”.  It was about an hour later, when the chatting hadn’t ceased, when I suggested with no too few profanities, that they find another space among the many common rooms of the hostel, in which to chat.  When this didn’t work, I shouted: “Why can’t you sleep until 11:00 like other drunks?!”

One of them did apologize when he left, but when I also found that they had eaten my precious Galaxy Ripple chocolate bar, we took the bottle of whiskey they’d left, checked out, and hit the road.  We enjoyed a blissful, night of peaceful sleep at Kate and Peter’s that night. 

Furbo Beach- Spiddal, Galway

Our next stop was Galway and I highly recommend it.  Galway City is a great university town and its surroundings are wild and beautiful.  We tried an “Air bed and Breakfast” stay for the first time and our hostess was lovely and animated and wanted to show us all around her town outside the city.  She took us on a local tour of abandoned stone homes.  We would reach a structure where the entire room was the size of our apartment’s living room, and she would say: “The family that left here in 1920 had ten kids and all twelve of them slept right here.”  Travel is often a good jolt to one’s perspective.

Cliffs of Moher

Brendan deserves a shout-out for navigating the narrow and windy roads, in a stick shift, with this left hand, on the opposite side of the road.  Those of us with minimal standard vehicle experience had to bow out of that one.  The drive to the Cliffs of Moher was pretty eventful, and shall we say, stomach tossing, but the view was spectacular and unlike anything you’d see on the east coast.  We also found a pub in a nearby town that Brendan and his family had visited when he was fourteen.  We had to call his parents on our prepaid mobile to be reminded of the name of the place, but we were happy we did.  My cousin who’d spent a semester in Dublin said that all you had to do in Ireland was see the Cliffs of Moher, catch some great live Irish music, and befriend the locals, who are all admittedly, extremely friendly.  This brings us to our next stop on our travels: The Wedding.

We had been warned by the bride that at Irish weddings, they close down the bar at 3am… to restock.  She even said she chose a castle with a lot of couches “so the Americans could rest”.  And so, we trained all week to stay up and party, as if for a decathlon.  As a friend from Galway, now living in Boston put it: “Yes, a decathlon is a good analogy.  There’s the beer round, the whiskey round… Ok, there are only two rounds, but you have to do them at least five times each.”  The ceremony began at 2:30 in the afternoon.  When I went to bed at 4:30am the party was still going. 

The Bride and Groom

First of all, Kate and Peter have a beautiful love story and I would be remiss if I didn’t tell it.  Kate, originally from California, was in her second year of grad school with us at NEC when she was at a bar in South Boston for St. Patrick’s Day.  She literally bumped into a handsome Irishman and the love of her life there.  Peter pursued her that night, telling her that even though he lived in Dublin, people meet for a reason and that that’s what phones and email are for.  So it was after about 3 or 4 get-togethers in Boston, California, and Dublin, that she told us she was going to move over there to be with him.  Her logic made sense.  She didn’t have plans after grad school, she was burnt out with singing, and she thought she would take a chance.  I cried, but then that’s not unusual for me.  I was worried for her.  She said; “If he turns out to be an asshole, I’ll come home.”  That was five years ago and she hasn’t regretted her leap of faith.  Peter has turned out to be every bit as amazing as she deserves.

Back to the wedding itself, the castle hotel in Sligo where it took place was stupidly beautiful.  It was once-in-a-lifetime, can’t-believe-how-idyllic-this-is beautiful.  Kate told us the church for the ceremony was a small gray stone church on a corner, and we must have passed about four gray stone churches on the road there, (along with plenty of cows and sheep butts).  After the beautiful Mass, it was back to the castle for cocktail hour.  Then, there was a slowly served, but decadent dinner.  “Oh, more potatoes?  But I have potatoes on my plate already,” seemed very funny to the Irish when I said it.   There were several toasts, including a rather emotional one from the groom.  He made a connection to Kate’s Irish great-grandmother and how Kate was now, in a sense home after her family had sought and found a better life.  Then the Irish band played, followed by traditional Irish dance led by children and the teacher from a local school.  And then at about 11:30, the DJ arrived to set up.  At 12:00 they served sandwiches and tea and coffee.  This is a key step in the process for recharge.  We are told that if this does not happen, the wedding will be remembered for ten and twenty years to come as that damned wedding with no sandwiches.  What we realized later in the evening, is that while we were dancing for the first two hours of the DJ’s timeslot, the Irish were resting in between, and so they were able to dance until he stopped at 3:30, while most of the Americans were more or less prone on the couches.

 

And then, the “Sing-song” began in the bar.  Apparently this is a thing.  There's no piano or anything.  Everyone just belts out the old Irish tunes.  Sometimes there were solos, but mostly it was just a group effort until everyone forgot all the words.  Peter’s dad has an ardent love of country western music so there was randomly a good deal of Patsy Cline and Hank Williams thrown in there.  Peter’s dad was also yelling at everyone who was not singing. This is my kind of after-party.  Too bad I started falling asleep in the middle of it.  I nearly wept when Brendan told me the next morning that it was 10:00 and checkout was at 11:00.  The partying continued for several days after back in Dublin, but we were headed in a different direction. 

Next it was off to Limerick County where Christina’s godmother, Joan lives. Upon our arrival, Joan had ordered us fresh fish and chips and she and her quick-witted sisters entertained us for the evening.  The next day we visited nearby cities.  Adare was a lovely, albeit touristy old village full of thatched cottages.  At this point I could barely walk I was so tired, and I was often blinded by my own involuntary tears of exhaustion.  (You may be noticing a theme here.)  Then we headed to Limerick where there was a River Festival going on.  The appeal of legally drinking outdoors in public places never gets old for Americans.

Joan also lives next door to a complex of “Travelers”.  That’s right.  Irish gypsies now essentially own the town of Rathkeale where she grew up.  They have these enormous stone mansions with gates and padlocks, where they keep all their things, and when they are in town, they park their trailers outside of them, where they continue to live.  We even visited a Travelers’ cemetery, because we were told we would see nothing like it elsewhere.  Every elaborately carved gravestone was decorated to the nines with balloons, plastic flowers, handwritten messages, and even baskets of champagne and chocolate.  We were intrigued to see that so many of them had passed in their 30’s and 40’s because of all the inbreeding.  Ever since spending a semester in Rome, (and performing in the opera Carmen), I’ve been fascinated with gypsy culture and how they have remained an “other” for so long.  Apparently today, it is in large part due to the massive amounts of drug money they make.

Our last night there, Joan said we had to get outside for a walk because the Irish air is particularly fresh and we certainly agreed.  I’ll remember the greenness of the hills and the smell of the peat in the air, hopefully as clearly as I will remember our night in that Dublin hostel. 



Token sheep butt shot

The Secret to Longevity

          A few weeks ago, my Mom’s family lost its matriarch, my great-aunt Mac, or Macdalena in German. She was the remaining sister of my grandfather— the second oldest of six children, and she managed to outlive them all, at 103 years old. She would have been 104 in July. She was legally blind at this point, due to a hereditary disease where the peripheral vision degenerates, but she was lucid, and for a 103 year old, she was pretty independent. She wasn’t cooped up in a nursing home, but in the condo she and her husband had bought years ago. She had a devoted caretaker, Marie. Aunt Mac’s dignity always being maintained, Marie was never referred to as a caretaker by the family, but first as her “driver” and then as her friend. As her obituary so nicely stated, she retained her sharp wit and accurate memory right up until the end. Several people have remembered the way she left my dad’s 70th birthday party in July. She stood in the doorway and waved saying: “See you next year!” You may recall that when she found out about my engagement, she immediately quipped: “He was supposed to ask me first”. She was so sharp in fact, that just two weeks before she died, she told me a story I had never heard about my great-uncle George getting arrested during prohibition because my great-grandfather, (owner of Rapp’s Restaurant), was making liquor in the bathtub and telling his sons and daughters to serve it to patrons in coffee mugs.


           My family has acknowledged that the death of a 103 year old is not a tragedy. It’s not unexpected. But we really will miss her and it does mark the end of an era. When I was young, my mom’s family, my grandparents and aunts and uncles would all meet at “the dairy”— DiMauro’s Dairy and Diner in Shelton, CT— every Sunday after church. It was a rotating group of extended family. My aunt Betty would do the rounds of calls, and she’d let you know if any cousin in particular were visiting from out of town or home from college. It was one of those places where everybody knows your name. The waitstaff reserved a large table for us in the restaurant’s one room, where the pink and blue country cow décor never changed, and aside from weekly breakfast specials, the menu never did either. We were loud and we made our frequent patronage known, but no one else ever seemed to mind, and most friends from days gone by knew where to find my great aunts and uncles on Sundays. My great-aunt Betty was the youngest and probably would have lived the longest of her siblings if she hadn’t been in a car accident. After she died, we didn’t get together as much and shortly after, the dairy closed its doors. It’s all very Fried Green Tomatoes.

          Food and humor were of the utmost importance to my great aunts and uncles.  One example was when my great-aunt Josephine lost her sense of smell after a head injury in the 90's.  She greatly lamented her inability to smell chocolate specifically, but I also remember one brunch, when she was saying that she had recently almost forgotten to turn her gas stove off and she obviously couldn't smell it in the air.  "Then", she was reasoning, "it wouldn't be such a bad way to go.  You would be eating your sandwich and your head would just slowly fall to the table."  Her sister, Aunt Mac said; "And when we found you, we'd say 'At least she finished the sandwich...'"

          When you asked my Aunt Mac about the secret to her longevity, she would tell you it was restaurant food. She grew up over a restaurant, took over that restaurant’s management, and later, ate lunch out at restaurants five days a week, even up until the week before she died. This side of my family— the Rapps’, also left a food service legacy in the Housatonic Valley not to be forgotten. There was Rapp’s Restaurant, Rapp’s Paradise Inn, and Rapp’s Grassy Hill Lodge. My German ancestors were tavern owners all the way back to the 1500’s and there must be some kind of gene for it, because I have a few cousins who ended up in the food business even when their parents had other careers. Even though I grew up in a neighboring town, I am still often recognized as “a Rapp” when I run errands in the Valley. When this happens, I am always proud.

Some bunny loves candy...

          I have a notorious and hereditary sweet tooth, as noted in another entry. The fiancée does not. So here is how occasions like Valentine’s Day and Easter work in our new household now. My mother mails us each an equal amount of candy. I devour all of mine in 1.5 days. Then, Brendan’s half of the candy sits out on the dining room table for almost a week, torturing me at every moment I am home. While we are sitting on the couch, I squirm for an hour while he nonchalantly goes about his business on his laptop, until I finally cry out: “ARE YOU GOING TO FINISH YOUR EASTER CANDY??!!!”

          He then says, (after a good chuckle), that it’s his and I am not supposed to eat it. He says this, not because he is particularly interested in the candy, or because he is territorial, but because he knows that if I eat it all, I will feel guilty. “THEN YOU HAVE TO HIDE IT!” and I am serious. Today he took his chocolate bunny and remaining treats with him to his office, or at least, I hope he did. If I come home and they are still sitting out, I am going to lose my mind, or eat it all. I can’t say which would come first.

Vive la vie de bohème! (Insert shameless plug here)

I am in the middle of a very exciting run of La bohème.  There are several reasons why this run is so exciting.  First of all, the production and staging have been very well done and have been very well received so far.  For me personally, it is my first time reprising a role that I have previously performed.  The character of Musetta, with all of her fiery narcissism could never be boring, and ultimately she reveals her good heart.  The first time I performed as Musetta was in Italy, and every strain of Puccini’s melodic score takes me back to some memory of eating pizza in a small hilltop village.  I also remember when the elderly gentleman who was hosting us in his upstairs apartment saw me on the staircase of his home after our opening night.  “Musetta!” he yelled and stretched out his arms to hug me. We’d probably had only one or two conversations in my poor Italian up until this point, but it was clear that he knew me as Musetta, and I thought that was just fine.  This time around preparing the role, however, the stress of it diminished considerably.  Musically, it is like coming back to visit an old friend. 

There was a time in my undergrad studies when I thought Puccini was rather low-brow.  The libretti weren’t heady enough or filled with enough psycho-Freudian interpretations for my taste at the time, and those very melodic strains struck me as indulgently pandering to the masses.  It wasn’t until my semester in Rome, when I attended a lecture by the famous Italian tenor’s son, Tito Scipa Jr. that I started to change my tune. 

He analyzed this one musical gesture in Tosca.  Puccini writes the strains of a church bell just before the music shifts and Floria Tosca receives the news that her lover is sentenced to death.  The church bells resume in the orchestra after that musical passage, indicating that nothing has changed outside, contrasted with everything that has changed for Tosca.  It is this rather simple, but still very specific and compelling musical language that makes Puccini great.  He does not usually grapple with the cosmos, but seeks to find, in musical terms, heightened emotional moments reflected from real life.  At this past Sunday’s lecture before the opera, we learned that Puccini purposely did not leave space for people to applaud after many arias, because he wanted the realism of the momentum of character interactions not to be interrupted or lost by the audience’s reactions, (which in Italy are very enthusiastic and expressive).

I further fell in love with La bohème specifically, after a masterclass in grad school featuring “Donde lieta”, Mimi’s third act aria.  Puccini not only writes the aria in staggering phrases to emphasize the way Mimi is trying to stall the end of her relationship with Rodolfo, but also to reflect the staggering breaths of her tuberculosis.  And the disease is written into the final act of the opera.  There are bouts of euphoric singing in Act 4 that correlate directly to euphoric stages of the progression of TB. 

My own snobbery seems laughable, as I am such a huge fan of this opera now.  In my mind, it is not perfect, but Act 3 is about as wonderful as it gets.  As she tells of her relationship struggles to her friend Marcello, Mimi’s music is beautiful and cathartic, and her stoic breakup with Rodolfo is brilliantly contrasted with Musetta and Marcello’s more aggressive parting of ways in the same scene.  These are the moments that make it understandably one of the most popular operas of all time.

There is another reason this is an exciting production in which to be involved.  Sadly, I wish that this particular part of the equation were not the case.  The city of Boston took a blow this year, with the surprising recent closing of Opera Boston.  The shock to the singing community cannot be exaggerated.  Many of my friends lost a great deal of income and opportunity, not to mention the administrative staff and the arts community at large.  Really, an opera about struggling artists could not be more palatable in this current climate.  The record attendance we have had at La bohème, we hope is some sort of affirmation that opera can survive in Boston.  If you have a chance, come see what audience members and reviewers are calling a charming and elegantly staged production of Boston Opera Collaborative’s classic La bohème.