We Experience Different Worlds!

Saturday was a wild day of cold and wind and snow here in the mountains! Temperature hovered near the freezing mark all day, but the wind gave Willcox a “feels like” of 24 degrees, so you can just imagine how much colder it was here at our elevation. My walk to the mailbox with Sarah was quite an expedition, so when the Artist wanted to drive into town around midday, I almost stayed home. Once we got out on the highway, only a mile or so from the cabin, I was very glad I hadn’t missed the larger day! 

There was sunshine down below but none back in the mountains when we returned to the cabin. We are in another world up here. It may be raining in Willcox, but that can easily be snow in Dos Cabezas and above.

Tough day for LBBs (little brown birds)

Later we drove again to Willcox, through the dark, into swirling snow -- oh, what a day! You may remember that back in February of 2015 we were part of an audience of six people (including the manager) in the Willcox Historic Theatre for a screen viewing of the Opera of the Bastille, from Paris, performing “The Marriage of Figaro,” and how absolutely transported I was by that show. Well, last night we were practically the King and Queen, the only two viewers (in the much smaller Studio 128), given our own private showing of Peter Wright’s 1984 “Nutcracker,” performed by the Royal Ballet in the London Opera House. It was absolutely magnificent! Every moment was stunningly beautiful. What a great Christmas gift, one I will never forget — well, until I forget my own name, anyway.

There had been a large group for the afternoon show, so you should not get the impression that we were the only people in Willcox to see and appreciate the show. There had also been a Friday afternoon show. Maybe everyone who wanted to attend had already been to the show, or maybe the storm gave otherwise eager viewers second thoughts.

But here’s the thing: While I know it would be a thrilling and unforgettable experience to attend the opera in Paris or the ballet in London, there is also something magical and moving about seeing these performances in a little old theatre in a cow town in southern Arizona, being transported to Paris or London and from there into the story of the opera or ballet, and coming out again afterward into the quiet, dark, high desert night. No crowds, no traffic, just dark stillness, except for brightly colored holiday lights in Railroad Park. Both times the whole experience felt so unlikely — and last night, I thought, it felt as unlikely as the “Nutcracker” story itself, as if we ourselves, like the young girl in the ballet, had been transported into a fantasy world.

Then this morning the sun came up over the mountain and lit the snowy ground, flooding the cabin with light. Birds clustered around the suet feeder. Another winter storm is past. Was it “only a dream”?

On the World Stage, Opinions Are All Over the Map

Years ago I heard for the first time, so memorable it never afterward left me, on Interlochen Public Radio’s Saturday morning call-in request segment, the tenor and baritone duet from Bizet’s opera “Les pêcheurs de perles” (“The Pearl Fishers”). For only the second time in my life (the first was a violin piece by Paganini), music on the radio stopped me in my tracks so that I had to sit down and do nothing but listen, with tears in my eyes. I knew nothing of the opera’s story. Subsequently I borrowed a CD from the library with music from “The Pearl Fishers” and listened to it over and over. Of all the operas in the world, this is the one I most wanted to see and hear live.

The New York Metropolitan last staged “The Pearl Fishers” in 1906. Even before I had any idea it had been such a long time since they’d done it, when I heard that the Met was mounted a production this month, I had to see it. That dream made possible by the fact that the production would be available to patrons of the State Theatre in Traverse City through HD simulcast (as well as by a good friend who, unlike me, doesn’t mind ordering tickets online). Many people we know regularly attend the opera simulcasts at the State Theatre. It would be our first time David and I had gone.

Were my expectations impossibly high? Was disappointment inevitable?

Saturday became increasingly complicated. I had already planned to take care of fairly urgent banking business in Traverse City when David got word of a friend’s funeral to be held that morning in town. We drove in early, and I dropped him off at the church, going on to credit union and bank by myself. It was a snowy winter day.

On Division Street (U.S. 31 South) another driver insisted on following practically on my rear bumper. The highway was snow-covered and slippery. Apprehensively glancing between windshield view and rearview mirror, I missed my turn and had to circle around, crabbier by the minute.

Driving back into town along West Front Street, not far from my old (as in “long ago”) neighborhood, I thought about driving on snowy Traverse City streets back in 1970-71 and how much has changed since then, the “City” part of the town’s name much more appropriate now. And yet, back then all streets, sidewalks, and alleys, not only downtown but throughout residential neighborhoods, were plowed 24 hours a day, much to my initial astonishment that first winter. “I miss it the way it used to be,” a friend said to me last spring. Sometimes I do, too.

But heaven forbid that irritability should ruin a day so long anticipated! Back in the 1970s, after all, the struggling State Theatre had a very outdated sound system and didn’t show many movies I wanted to see. Once again, “Something’s lost, and something’s gained,” as Jonie Mitchell sang in “Both Sides Now.”

I was still nervous about picking David up at the church, getting downtown in time, parking the car, and meeting the friend who had booked our tickets, but all went well, and once we found our seats I could relax and look around in good spirits. So many friends in the audience! And soon we were transported to New York City (where the people in the audience at the Met looked pretty much the same as the one in Traverse City). David and I tried to think of people we knew in New York to look for them in the audience. Later I heard that one of the couples we’d thought of had been in the audience, though we couldn't spot them onscreen. The wife told me they found it “amazing.” Same here!

The opening sequence of the opera was a spectacular technical tour de force, lyrical and captivating, but I was impatient for the full stage and the appearance of the singers. For me, there were no disappointments.

I loved the opening set with rickety wooden seaside docks and pilings, the ensemble of singers (villagers from the little pearl-fishing community) and the way they moved onstage with the music, the colorful but down-to-earth costumes, the mix of traditional and modern elements that felt like such a realistic portrayal of life in that part of the world, but always – above everything else – the beautiful music and exquisite singing. Not for a single moment did I feel the slightest hint of tedium. The voices of tenor Matthew Polenzani and baritone Mariusz Kwiecien, singing Nadir and Zurga, seemed made for their lyrical duet, and soprano Diana Damrau’s delicate, soft seemingly effortless trills made me hold my breath. We were also impressed by Nicolas Testé and the way he inhabited the role of the high priest, Nourabad. Throughout, the music swept me up, held me, and carried me away. In fact, days later, the magic is still with me. A couple friends from our group spoke of similar responses.

So imagine my shock when I looked online for a review, in hopes of finding someone in the larger world who shared our delight, and found one of the most negative opera reviews I’ve ever read, in which the reviewer actually calls the production “tawdry”! He liked almost nothing, from the composer’s music to the work of the set designer. I could only imagine what terrible things must have been going on in his personal life. Another reviewer, the second I found, raved about the singing and acting and the sets (thank God!) but faulted the story of the opera for its thin plot and contrived ending.

Okay, I'll admit it straight out – I am a naive opera-goer. My parents’ love of opera failed to capture me at an early age. I’ve never studied the musical genre and have attended very few performances in my life. But others in our group of ten greatly surpass me in musical sophistication, and we all loved what we saw and heard, so I hardly think my enjoyment can be chalked up to nothing more than naiveté.

As for “contrived”? Opera is contrived! The artificiality of it is the main reason I was immune to its charm for so long! Accepting contrivance now as part of the package, why would I be disappointed in a thin plot or an unrealistic ending? It’s the music, the music, the music, the voices, the voices, the singing -- and I was enraptured by the music of these voices from start to finish.

Told the New York Times had a positive review, I went over to read it. Thank heavens! Someone who saw and heard the same opera that thrilled me!

I still feel sorry for that poor Spectator reviewer, for whatever prevented him from feeling the magic, and as for history’s opinion, cited by the Guardian, that the promise of this opera of Bizet is “unrealized,” I can only be grateful to the Met for ignoring history’s opinion and staging their triumphant production in spite of it.

Bravo, les artistes! Et merci mille fois mille fois!

Launching Into Another Year’s Reading

Dog Ears Books will reopen on Wednesday, January 13 – weather permitting!!! – and will be open Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week. We will, however, be closed on Saturday the 16th, which I know is bizarre beyond words, but a simulcast of Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers” is being shown at the State Theatre in Traverse City that day, and of all the operas ever written, it is this one I have most longed to see and hear. So that’s where I’ll be. Then, back the following Wednesday and open Wednesday through Saturday for the remainder of the winter, weather permitting, and unless otherwise announced. Sound complicated? It really isn’t.

Meanwhile, during my time off, in addition to fun with David, outdoor time with Sarah, kitchen adventures, ubiquitous laundry, and the horror of deep-cleaning my desk and catching up with business bookkeeping (I’ll spare readers the discouraging details that task revealed), I’ve indulged in quite a bit of reading, a report of which follows.

Poetry is the perfect bridge from one year to the next, and Jim Harrison’s new book of poems, Dead Man’s Float, arrived before the end of the year. At last! I took the book up with the feeling of deep gratitude I feel for every new book of Jim’s poetry. There is a lot about pain in this collection and a lot about birds, too. A small book, in which most of the poems fit on a single page. Once many, many years ago now, when I dragged my IBM Selectric typewriter up from Kalamazoo to Lake Leelanau to work alongside Jim in transcribing a sheaf of new poems he’d written for a new book, on the way from the house to the granary where he worked I became as shy as if we’d never met before. “I feel as if I’ve been reading your diaries,” I told him. He replied matter-of-factly, “You have.” Some people believe that modern poetry differs from prose only in the line breaks. I continue to maintain that the best poems differ from prose in being exquisite distillations. Most modern poetry is also very intimate. Exquisite, intimate distillations of one man’s vision of life. Thanks again, Jim. I’ll be taking this book up again and again....

Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer’s, by Thomas DeBaggio, is as terrifying as the title suggests. Once I got into the rhythm I speed-read through it, but I must say that getting into the rhythm was initially difficult. Three different strands – memories of his life from childhood on; facts about Alzheimer’s; and observations of his own deteriorating mental condition – appear in turn, and the jumps from one to the other had me questioning my own mental processing. Bits of what might be called a fourth strand, some of the author’s brief specific insights or thoughts, are set off in italics, but the three major strands are all in the same typeface, so although long passages of quoted factual material are indented, it wasn’t as easy to distinguish at first glance the author’s present writing from his childhood memories. Another odd difficulty is that the book is so coherent. What I mean is that the book’s cognitive coherence, along with perfect sentences and perfectly spelled words, is so at odds with what the author writes about his difficulties with spelling, remembering words and events, even reading his own handwriting, that often it feels more like reading fiction than memoir. We read and feel deep sympathy, and yet it’s hard to believe the man is “losing his mind.” How can he express the mounting losses so clearly? (Just how much editing was necessary?) And yet, a reader does believe. DeBaggio accomplished what he set out to accomplish, leaving a stunning personal account of his own loss of identity.

I mentioned the Paris book in December when it first came in. The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs, by Elaine Sciolino, could not fail to interest me, as that market street in the 9^th arrondissement is one I know fairly well. Not, I hasten to say, as intimately as Sciolino knows it. I did not, as she did, develop friendships with the vendors whose shops I visited daily. Astonishingly (and as someone who generally haunted the churches of Paris every time I was there, I cannot account for this omission), I don’t believe I was ever inside Notre Dame de Lorette, the church at the base of la rue étroite qui monte au Sacré Coeur. And so Sciolino gave me inside glimpses and historic background of many buildings outwardly familiar to me. Now I am more than curious to learn how someone unfamiliar with the street will respond to the book. Ed? How did it strike you? And don’t tell me you haven’t started reading it yet!

Having heard on NPR of a new book about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., I felt moved to give his fiction another try. I don’t remember which novel I tried to read years ago before deciding I just was not a Vonnegut fan, but this winter I elected to read Cat’s Cradle. What a lively writer! What a romp through the dark landscape of deadly 20^th-century American ideas and inventions! How on-the-nose the definitions of the wise Bokonon! (Ah, yes, the granfalloon! I’ve been welcomed into a few of those in my time, and surely you have been, too.) I laughed aloud many times while reading, and once, in the car, laughed just recalling a bit of dialogue from the book. The final disaster I saw coming, so no surprise there, but the final image I had not foreseen. Thus there were many laughs along the way but no laughs in closing the book. A dark vision, indeed. But worth reading. I’m glad I gave him another try.

On Writing Well, by William Zinsser: I’ve read it before and will read again, and I quoted it here in Books in Northport on my previous post. Often, listing to news on the radio, I can’t help editing what I’m hearing, eliminating clutter as Zinsser prescribes. What, for instance, is with the words ‘happen’ and ‘happening,’ which now seems to creep into every report? “The event is scheduled to happen on Saturday at 2 p.m.”? Why not simply “The event is scheduled for Saturday at 2 p.m.”? But that is just me being crabby. More importantly, as a writer criticizing my own prose, I value Zinsser’s directives. Where I fail, the fault is, obviously, mine own.

I continue reading the Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji, and should finish it by spring, despite myriad distracting temptations along the way, the most recent being M.F.K. Fisher: Her Life in Letters. I fell in love with MFKF when I happened, long before I ever went to France, upon her Map of Another Town. Now I read her letters and realize that in her books she created a persona, so that the writer we meet in the books on Aix-in-Provence and Marseilles is not the Mary Frances we meet in her letters. This is not criticism! I am not disappointed! I am fascinated both by the solitary, mysterious MFKF and by the warm, approachable, letter-writing Mary Frances. And in reading the letters, I feel a new point of sympathy when she writes to a friend that she is (I must paraphrase to save myself hunting through pages for a direct quote) a letter-writer in the same way some people are alcoholics or “Benzedrine-boys.” I too am a letter-writer in that way, though my pen-and-paper correspondents have dwindled terribly over the years. From time to time I think about arranging to print out voluminous e-mail correspondence with various friends but doubt I ever will. Letters on paper are precious keepsakes, their value rising – for me, anyway -- as they become increasingly rare in our world.

Outgoing

P.S. In addition to today’s new post on my kitchen blog, I’ve gone back and added a couple of photos to the preceding post, pictures of Sarah waiting for her special treats. Not to be missed! 

In My Dreams, I Have Always Been a Cowgirl. Was That a Singing Cowgirl?

Ready for ME?

Dream Scenes

It’s true. Ask my mother. My very earliest career aspiration was cowgirl. Later came veterinarian, poet, singer, actor, writer, philosopher, and, finally, bookseller. But girlhood cowgirl dreams are like creeks during drought times: they may go underground for years, but they never die.

Is there anything on earth that smells better than cows and hay and fresh cow manure? How about horses and hay and fresh horse manure! What about combining the horses and cows? HEAVEN!

When David read about a weekly livestock auction in Willcox, he knew that expedition had my name on it, and we drove over a couple days beforehand to make certain of the location. Cochise County leads the state of Arizona in cattle production, making Willcox (and not Bisbee, the county seat) the Cow Capitol, so I guess that makes the Willcox Livestock Auction (WLA) Arizona’s Cattle White House. 

Thursday finally came! Auction day! I wish I could include here the feel of the hot sun, the sound of calves bawling, and the smell of the dust and the cattle and the horses and the hay. I wanted to be everywhere at once – watching the riders and horses work the cows,

inside where the calves came in one side to be auctioned off and then scrambled out the other side when the gate was opened,

out by the pens where groups of calves awaited their turn in the auction house,

and especially in the outdoor stall shelters where the cowhorses, in turn, took breaks from their demanding work. 

I wanted to be on a horse, too, and also flicking a flyswatter at calves to move them from one side of the auction “ring” to the other, and I wouldn’t have said no to opening and closing an auction ring gate.

We sat indoors a while to watch the buying and selling and at first weren’t sure about the prices being knocked down. Per lot, or per animal? Because sometimes as many as eight would come through at once. Light dawned at last: the calves were being sold by the hundredweight. So if a 500-lb. calf brought in a $120 selling price, that calf would cost the buyer $600. It made sense.

We went outdoors again, into the sunlight, to watch the horses and riders work the cows (Midwesterner that I am, it’s hard for me not to put that word in “scare quotes,” when we’re talking calves and often steer calves) through a complicated system of pens and gates on their way to the auction ring. A man in a cowboy hat, walking by the pens with his little grandson at his side, asked, “You folks buyin’ today?” “Not today,” David answered. “Just lookin’ today.” David was wearing his cowboy hat, and his boots were appropriately scuffed and dusty. Two little boys looking for adventure caught their mother’s distant but vigilant eye. “You boys get outta that pen right now!”

As we were leaving, I was surprised to see one truck pulling out with an empty livestock trailer but quickly realized the driver must have been selling that day, not buying. We left in a Toyota sedan with a Michigan license plate. What did people conclude from that?

I could have stayed all day. I could go every day and stay all day! As we came back down Haskell Avenue into town, I noticed the new custom T-shirt shop open in an old gas station. “COWGIRL IN MY DREAMS,” I told David. “That’s what my t-shirt would say. And I bet a lot of other women would love it, too!”

Happy girl, living my dream

*  *  *

But the day was not over yet. After a lazy interlude of iced tea and corn nuts at Railroad Park, we went home to rest, have a light supper, change clothes, and then –

The Paris Opera

I’m not kidding. It was Les Noces de Figaro, i.e., “The Barber of Seville,” a videocast from the Opera de la Bastille in Paris, France, and we saw it at the Willcox Historic Theatre in Willcox, Arizona. 

The tickets were only $5 each! Never could we have seen such a show at that price in Northport or Traverse City, let alone in Paris! But yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s true: for a mere $10, the artist and bookseller on winter sabbatical were transported to Paris for the evening. I couldn’t believe it was happening!

Intermission interview

There was the handsome, urbane but enthusiastic announcer (whose name has escaped me), introducing the production in French (with, as you see, English subtitles for export audiences), and indeed, after a magnificent orchestral overture, the curtain rose, and we were there, in the Opera de la Bastille, watching Damiano Micheletti’s electrifying 20^th-century staging of this well-known work.

I didn’t take any photographs during the opera itself. Even though the performers were not, in person, onstage in the theatre with us, it just didn’t seem right. Here, though, is the barber, a perfect Figaro!

And here is the chorus, taking their curtain call, a shot that shows you part of the two stories of the fantastic four-story revolving stage set. 

My heart had wings, there were stars in my eyes – and yet, on the way home, I kept an alert eye on the road ahead for javelinas and coyotes. We’d seen two dead javelinas on the side of the road the morning before, and they didn’t look like anything we’d want to run into ourselves.

Again – what a day! Quelle journée! Époustoufflante!