Tuesday night Marshall and I kicked off our 22nd season of attending the Lyric Opera of Chicago. It’s amazing to think of how much time has elapsed and how the world has changed over that period. When we first attended the Lyric, they were just beginning to perfect a new-fangled technology called the compact disk, but they were as yet almost completely unknown to the public. There was something called the internet but I didn’t know a single soul who had ever been there- and at that point neither of us owned our own computer- nor did either of us even know anyone who owned their own computer. The Berlin Wall was still up. The Soviet Union still existed. We had not yet had the first George Bush as president, let alone the second. I had not yet met Kathy. I didn’t yet teach at Carthage. I had never even seen Holy Communion Lutheran Church.
And we churned our own butter.
One of the weird things about being faithful to the Lyric all that time is that we seem to be the only people up in our nosebleed section that are still there after all that time. Other patrons seem to either move up (which geographically means ‘down’) to more costly seats – or stop coming altogether, but we fancy ourselves to be the Elder Statesmen of the Top Balcony – a fancy title which means nothing to anyone except us! (And who knows – maybe there’s some shy person sitting two rows behind us who’s been there for 35 years, but it doesn’t seem like it.) I just know that this is one of the great delights of my life and I feel really blessed that Marshall and I can enjoy this together.
It was a long, rough trip down through pouring rain and traffic that was slow as molasses, but we had plenty to talk about and were at least glad to get downtown in time for a quick bite to eat. It says something about the state of the world, by the way, that we spent much of the trip down talking about the state of the U.S. economy rather than scintillating topics such as whether or not Renee Fleming is singing too much Verdi. I remember us going to the Lyric one year on Election Night (we took the train) and we talked about politics for most of the trip down, which was INCREDIBLE for us. Our verdict on the economy, by the way? We hope somebody a lot smarter than us is figuring out what to do.
As for the opera itself, it was Massenet’s “Manon” with Natalie Dessay and Jonas Kaufman, and both of us would count this among the very best performances we’ve seen at the Lyric in the past 22 years – so it was a heck of a way to begin our 22nd season. May there be many more glorious nights to come.
pictured: Marshall up in the top balcony. We’re in the third row of the top balcony, which makes our seats relatively inexpensive (for opera) but we like the openness up there. And with me weighing 61 pounds less than last year, I am able to climb the stairs to the top balcony without requiring a tank of oxygen at my side.