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Carmenizing

In the morning, I gave the keynote address at the annual Washington Homeschool Organization Convention. I put up a sign in the back of my book-signing booth, though. “Leaving at 4:00 p.m. Singing an Opera in Hoquiam. (Really!)”

It was a busy day. Up at 6:00 to get to Puyallup (I’m not even going to begin to try to help those of you unfamiliar with the place to pronounce it properly), pack up my wares, jump in the car, drive through Olympia, pick up older daughter who was selling her sculptures and jewelry at a local fair, and speed (guilty as charged) another hour-and-a-half to this small coastal community, change into costume (gypsies don’t have to be too precise), throw on some makeup (mascara takes care of the gray in my moustache and I am young again!), and be on stage for the 7:30 curtain. I’m still recovering.

It had never been one of my life goals to sing opera. In fact, I can truthfully say it had never really crossed my mind until less than a year ago. I have been an intermittent opera lover for more than 30 years, but the closest I had ever come to actually being part of one was when I’d threaten the kids that if they didn’t clean their rooms, I’d sing the high coloratura soprano aria from Norma at full volume. (Hint: it always did the trick, but you’ll have to invite me to your home until I can figure out how to market the CD.)

I happened upon the new opera company by accident (or perhaps it was part of some higher plan.) A flyer announced the need for choristers for Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and Aliyah desperately wanted to sing. Knowing (or at least imagining) that it was unlikely a new opera company was going to take a flyer on a 14-year-old (however experienced a singer she happened to be), and also aware of the great shortage of male singers in most communities (let alone those interested in singing Mozart!) we figured to offer ourselves as a package deal. It worked! And instead of having to drive Aliyah to and from interminable rehearsals at all hours of the day, night, and weekends, I was already there!

To call our semi-professional company “Opera Pacifica” ( www.operapacifica.com ) a labor of love is an understatement. It was founded by two local aficionados whose paths to each other, and to us, could hardly be more unusual.

Claudia, the music director and conductor, now in her 50s, grew up in rural Georgia. By the age of 10, she could play the piano, pipe organ, clarinet, oboe, and baritone ukelele. She moved to Las Vegas where she became part of a successful nightclub act that toured the U.S., Canada, and the Bahamas. When the act went out on the road, they quickly realized they could save money if they had their own airplane pilot. Claudia volunteered, and logged thousands of hours in the air, so many, in fact, that she became one of the first three women hired by Continental Airlines to fly 727s. But the opera bug had bitten her early, and when she retired from Southwest Airlines in 1997, she spent the next five years in training as an opera conductor, including a stint with the National Opera Orchestra in Beijing. Now she rushes downs to conduct rehearsals from having spent the day training pilots on a flight simulator.

Bob, the vocal director and tenor soloist, grew up about three miles from me in New York City. Having joined the military after high school, he ended up in the (supposedly non-existent, but very real) CIA operation in Laos during the Viet Nam War, for which he learned to speak (and sing) fluent French. Returning stateside, he studied for a couple of degrees in vocal performance in Philadelphia, but soon enough realized it was no way to make a living. Fate would have it that he met a famous Spanish tenor who was giving a master class. The tenor told the class that he had elected to pick and choose his engagements rather than make his life on the road. He spent the rest of the year selling real estate on the coast of Spain. Not slow to take the hint, Bob’s opera career slowly but surely went by the wayside, even as his real estate career flourished. He now had plenty to eat, but was, at age 55, hungry! Soon it was off to Beijing with Claudia to cut a CD – “An American Tenor in China.”

Our little company includes (among others) a Montessori teacher, a pastor, an environmental engineer, a Wal-Mart shipping manager (who in college had some serious training as a makeup artist), a fisheries expert, a retired video producer, two college students, a high school student, a middle school student, an insurance company clerk, another realtor, a mental health counselor, a construction worker, a coffee barista, and a soldier. Funny where you find opera singers these days.

Oh, so what did we sing? Bizet’s Carmen. Wholesome family entertainment. Lots of sex and sexual innuendo, jealousy, lying, cheating, violence, intrigue, murder, cruelty toward animals, alcohol abuse, and ethnic stereotyping. Typical operatic fare, the same sort of stuff our kids should be learning when they study the Roman Empire. Lots of gyrating hips, though, unlike in the opera Salomé, we all got to keep our clothes on. Most prominent of all, risqué tobacco use – we should have attracted Philip Morris as a corporate sponsor. Among other roles in the chorus, Aliyah played a young woman working in a cigarette factory, who sings [in French of course, since the scene takes place in Seville (???)]:

    Smoke rings make their lazy way,
    Softly curling, softly curling,
    Skyward they stray,
    In a fragrant cloud unfurling.

    Their perfume pervades the air,
    Gently stealing, gently stealing,
    Soothing our mind
    To a mellow pleasant feeling.

    Those tender words you lovers say
    every day, fade away!
    Your promises, too, like the smoke
    in the blue, fade away.
    Smoke rings rise and float away
    In the blue of the sky.

    See them curling and rising
    And vanish at last in the blue of the sky.
    See them rise,
    To the skies

I do so love the classics! (We found a great book on the history of Carmen, locating its context in 19th Century French cultural history). Before Opera Pacifica, the last time I had sung on a stage was in a “Fresh Air” camp for poor kids from New York City when I was 13. Now, I got to do my first-ever stage kiss, flirt with the cigarette girls, and sing the Toreador Song! And, by the end, my extremely meager French pronunciation likely approached Haitian (Aliyah’s is much better, and with apologies to those from this studiously unstudied Carribean island which staged the first and only successful national slave revolt in the history of the world -- you do have that one marked in your homeschooling history books, right?)

“In Hoquiam, of all places,” Aliyah and I kept repeating to each other, reinforcing each other’s prejudices, having sung the opera twice in our own booming metropolis of a state capital. Hoquiam is an old logging town that has been in serious decline for decades. Its population peaked in 1930, and now numbers under 11,000. Half the town seems boarded up, the other half seems about ready to fall down.

The performance was to be a fundraiser. A beautiful theater had been constructed in 1927, when the timber boom was in full swing. Spanish-style stucco walls, fine grillwork balconies, rococo columns, colorful light fixtures, painted, exposed-beam ceilings. It must have been a magnificent place in its time. But our fundraiser was to deal with the reality that the roof is caving in.

So who would come? Would you believe 700 people? If they were all from Hoquiam (about 75% were; the rest from a slightly larger town of 20,000 people next door), that would represent roughly 7% of the town’s population – including children and shut-ins! Except the hall was filled with children, and the elderly, and the town council, and lumbermen and fisherfolk and car salesmen and bankers and supermarket checkout clerks. They cheered lustily throughout the performance, and they cheered afterwards, and we all joined them in the lobby to thank them for coming.

Bob and Claudia already have a sparkle in their eyes. This could be the perfect location for a regular opera summer festival, like they have in Spoleto, Italy, and Charleston, South Carolina (if you live on that other coast, in late May/early June this is the place to be! www.spoletousa.org ) People would flock to the coast to fish and swim and hike and play golf, and spend the evening at the opera. The Hoquiam Chamber of Commerce would no longer be an oxymoron. We could be part of rescuing an entire town!

Next up? The Marriage of Figaro. The two of us have to brush up on our Italian.

Nice to be homeschooling!