medium pimping: Star Search Opera Sty-L
formerly
'le vie c'est tres droll'
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I make friends relatively easily. And that, my friends, is an understatement. It's a blessing and a curse: I have to keep my head down when I'm walking down the street in order to avoid making new ones by mistake.
So the train home to DC was no exception last weekend. I was yakking it up with a cutie who disembarked in Philly and then a woman got on and immediately started pouring over soprano arias. Really difficult ones. She was practicing them well, aloud really, but hell I was on the cell phone, so we were pretty much even. Then we both fell asleep and awoke to the woman behind us intoning, "This train is full of extremely stupid people today."
I suggested that we try not to take that personally, and she laughed and we got to talking.
She was going to DC to participate in the Metropolitan Opera National Coucil Finals. Read: Star Search for Opera singers.
This is a pretty hot event, if you swing that classical music way, and virtually unadvertised except by word of mouth. She invited me & my whole medium pimping posse to come and witness her singing 2 out of 5 completely obscure arias including a Spanish one - La Maja y el Ruiseñor. She was scheduled to go first which she was none too happy about.
Okay, fast forward through Friday night, an evening of much drinking and eating and sex, well with myself anyway, and on to the competition. My train buddy was a lovely singer, a little nervous, but a beautiful voice and presence. And they just kept getting better from there. These voices, Lordy! Unbelievable. One woman sang "My Man's Gone Now" from Porgy and Bess, she just tore my heart right out of my chest cavity. I have to confess, I find arias far more palatable en ingles, and I studied classical voice for several 100 years myself. Later a basso who sang the devil's aria from Faust was HI-larious. You have to laugh a lot in that song, and he and the audience were literally doubled over. But the divas will prevail.
And prevail she did. Out she struts - what a freaking entrance. She sweeps on wordlessly conveying: Yo, I am hot shit. Wrapped in a long tight red skirt, huge long curly hair, some impossible eye color - aquamarine?, and just completely gorgeous in an ambiguously ethnic way. Already, she's got the audiences attention. My dad dropped his program. And she sings beautifully and is a strong actress. But are we hornswaggled? Is it all aesthetic arrest? Is that what art is all about anyway? Or is her voice really that much better than the other ones?
What does it matter? She wins. And faces 10 more divas in the next round.
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