On Saturday afternoon I complained to Lynette that I miss our friends, all of whom live in other states and other countries. I miss our impromptu get-togethers with George and Noelle, I miss “doing the weirds” with Debra, and I just generally miss having time with other adults, doing adult things, talking about adult things...I love our family beyond description, but it’s easy to get lost within the needs and problems of adolescence when raising three teens. It can be a little overwhelming and I sometimes feel like I’m run over like a speed bump on the road of teen life. I miss talking about music, travel, philosophy, politics, and all those things, now that our topics tend to focus on diets, dirty bedrooms, homework, sibling rivalry, skin, and emotional dramas with no seeming cause. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not diminishing the stresses and concerns that our kids face, because living with three young people does keep one young. I receive great satisfaction from the new discoveries I make about life as I watch these kids make their own new discoveries; things that kind of passed me by when I was their age. I suppose we can’t grasp every single thing as we grow up, and this is a great opportunity for me to fill in the gaps. I learn a lot from our kids, but I’m half a century old and I sometimes need to share conversation not about what I’m learning, but what I’ve learned. And all too often I see the kids’ eyes glaze over when I utter those verboten words: “When I was your age…” I learned back in the 80s (when I was fifteen years older than most of my friends) that young people hate it when you bring up age, and I have to say that I felt a certain amount of diminishment coming from them, as if my being older was a liability rather than an asset.
Anyway, I needn’t have complained to Lynette, because on Sunday afternoon she went to a recital at the university, where she met up with her voice teacher, Kate Butler, April Golliver (another voice professor) and our friend Allen Scott, who is a professor of Music History. After the recital, they all congregated here at our house, along with two voice students, for pizza, beer and wine. It was Super Bowl Sunday here all right, a Super Bowl of milk… MEOW!!! Apart from Allen and myself, it was a room full of operatic sopranos, i.e. Classical Divas.
It was great! I spent most of the evening talking with Allen, selecting just the right CDs to play and pouring drinks. But I knew I was in with these gifted ladies when I placed a dish of Dove chocolate hearts on the coffee table before them. As their eyes saw what it was I had, a collective, “AHHH!” rose to the ceiling, filling the room. I was in their good graces.
Do I know opera singers, or what? I should. As a classical composer I’ve worked with and have been befriended by Divas for twenty years now.
Allow me to me share a little of that knowledge with you. Opera sopranos are pirates. Burping, farting, beer-swilling, cat-scratching pirates in pointy-toed stilettos. Don’t tell me about Cecilia Bartoli, Kiri te Kanewa, Marilyn Horne, Kathleen Battle, or Leontine Price. They’re all wild women. And who would want them any other way? Not I! I love sopranos. They’re delicious, petulant, driven, spoiled and vain—and they’re goddesses, all of them. They’re usually the most intelligent women on the planet, and the most fun—as long as their claws aren’t being sharpened for, or on, you…
After Allen left, I put on my last CD and slipped upstairs to allow them the sanctity and comfort of their own breed. It was a great evening.
