A Night at the Opera

The first thing I noticed about the opera was that the entire theater staff was smiling. From the elderly doorman in his smart braided jacket that he might have inherited from Michael Jackson, to the ticket takers grinning as if they had daughters to pawn off, big smiles were everywhere.

The next thing I noticed was that tickets were $60. That explained the grins.

The Orpheum Theater in Omaha is a splendid venue, one of seven ornate sisters originally built for the vaudeville circuit. It is resplendent in velvet, gilded in sweeping gold arches. It has a central chandelier the size of a bread truck. If I paid $5 for a show and the performers didn't even show up, I would feel I got my money's worth just to walk around, craning my head at its magnificence.

Grinning ushers herded us to our seat. It was in my favorite area, the narrow side of the loge, where there's extra velvet and gilding and you can spy on the floor people. We were right behind the box seats, so I kept looking over my shoulder and imagining, if anyone started shooting, how I might save the day.

But the only person who needed shooting was the old lady right behind me. The minute The Marriage of Figaro began and the cast started bellowing and hiding behind chairs, she began uncrinkling candy. It is a miracle of acoustics that a candy wrapper can drown out a professional opera singer, and second miracle that Italian music makes old ladies hungry for hard candy. For whatever reason, they always unwrap it as slowly as if it were given to them in a concentration camp and they had to make it last a week. I have never seen anybody, young or old, eat hard candy outside the theater.

Maybe it wasn't candy. After ten minutes of slow, piercing crinkling, I began to suspect she was making cellophane origami gifts for all of her grandchildren. I turned around a couple of times to give her that Midwestern faux-polite look, a combination of "how do you do" and "I'm about to give you a beating," a look that translates to "Perhaps, ma'am, you don't realize you're being obnoxious."  She might as well have been engrossed in her knitting, and didn't react to me. Perhaps she was knitting cellophane mittens.

Being a Midwesterner, I seethed to myself and never actually said anything. During intermission, after pretty much everyone in the cast had taken a turn hiding behind a chair, we moved up to the coveted box seats, long on leg room and short on crinkling. I always think of John Wilkes Booth when I sit there, knowing that at the Orpheum he would never survive the jump. He would not land dramatically on stage, but crash deep into the orchestra pit among the percussionists, where he belongs.

WI had not seen The Marriage of Figaro before. I speak a little Italian, so I'm pretty sure nobody got married, although I confess I napped a couple of times in the third hour. I also concluded that nobody in that performance had any business getting married, not until they made up their minds who they were in love with.

I was surprised by the youth of the conductor. He appeared to be a high school senior. He looked nothing at all like Bugs Bunny. But with talent beyond his few years, his hands swept in graceful waves, and his baton punctuated the air. The orchestra, in perfect unison, ignored him.

The musicians were arranged by attitude. The French horn players, according to some tradition I don't know, were all wearing flannel shirts. The oboists all wore expressions that said they had just argued about Nietzsche, and lost. The flutists were predictably slender and pretty, erect in perfect posture, blissfully ignoring the raging battle over whether they should be called flautists.

I knew the opera would be three hours long. I check details like that before agreeing to attend, ever since I was ambushed by a four-hour performance of Madame Butterfly, which was fat with madames but not one butterfly. The performance was touted because a famous ceramicist, known for making giant spotted eggs, had been convinced to try his hand at costuming. When the fat lady sang draped in a muumuu with large black spots, my mind drifted to Ben & Jerry's.

Soon came the moment I was waiting for, the reason I attended. My dear friend appeared on stage. He was among the chorus members, handsome in his newfound ponytail. Other ponytails in the cast looked suspiciously like they came from a Paul Revere costume. His rich baritone swelled to fill the open space as he moved with the confidence of Keanu Reeves.

The entire cast was fit and trim. The only lady remotely pudgy hadn't sang a note in twenty minutes, so the opera's end caught me by surprise.

We lingered a bit after the show, admiring the elegant surroundings. The ushers spread out in a dragnet of black uniforms linked across the aisles. Their smiles had eroded into grimaces. They swept us up and ushered us out.

"Wait," I said to my date as we stepped into the cold air, away from the lobby and toward a martini. "I never heard Feeeg-ahhhh-roooh! Figaro-Figaro-Figaro-Figaro-Feeeg-ahhhh-roooh."


"That's The Barber of Seville," she replied. "Rossini. This was Mozart. Marriage of Figaro."

"Oh."

"The Barber of Seville," I asked after a few steps, "is the one with the rabbit?"

"Yep."

How does opera always find a way to make me feel stupid?

Book sale: 15% off!

The good folks at Lulu are offering a 15% discount on all books sold through their site, including mine, in honor of Presidents Day. Nice! At checkout, just enter the coupon code "WASHINGTON." It's valid all weekend through Monday. If you don't have Are You Going To Eat That? yet, now's a fine time. Thanks, Lulu!

iWish

It’s about the size of an Etch-A-Sketch, without the big white knobs. Like a Model-T, it only comes in black. It is named after a pad of paper, but it doesn’t come with a pencil. That’s progress.

The iPad, Apple’s much-anticipated, must-have Internet device, claims to do everything with nothing. It doesn’t even have a keyboard. You type using pictures of letters, which feels a bit like drumming your fingers in boredom.

Apple founder Steve Jobs calls the iPad a “window to the Internet.” Any window to the Internet ought to come with shutters, but the iPad doesn’t have that either. It runs all of the popular iPhone apps, those little programs that are cheap or free and entertain you like everything else that’s cheap or free. Maybe someone will develop an app for the iPad that is a picture of shutters, so I can block out upsetting Internet images of violence, porn, and Glenn Beck.

The iPad does look like a window. In the Apple ad, it’s a square frame surrounding a picture of rolling hills, with icons neatly arranged along the bottom, waiting for you to clutter them up with real work. You hold the iPad up to look through it and see whatever you want, like Miss Linda on Romper Room with her Magic Mirror. She saw Billy and Sarah and Tommy and Julie, but no matter how much I waved my hands in front of the TV, she never saw me. The iPad includes face recognition software.

The iPad is the latest time-saving convenience, and like all time-savers before it, I’ll spend eighty percent of my day playing games, and checking Facebook to discover what everybody is making for dinner. Since I got my iPhone, my regular job has waited patiently while I practice my air traffic skills with a game ironically named Flight Control. I presume an air traffic controller gets fired when two jetliners collide at the head of a runway, so my career lasts about two minutes. I estimate that as of today, I have killed 23,000 passengers. The iPad’s large screen would make room for bigger planes.

I would buy an iPad — I adore everything Apple makes — but I haven't had any money since I bought my iPhone. I know the iPhone, which I lusted for like a boy over a Daisy Air Rifle, would be cast aside in an iPad's skinny shadow, to idle just like my once-coveted iPod, which is now a $200 coaster.

For the new iPad to improve my life, it needs to include these apps:
iSlouch, a free app that counts the calories I’m not burning anymore. iStrain, a mirror app that reflects my own burned-red eyes, dried out from not blinking as I crash another 747 into a DC-10. And SkeeDaddle, an app that predicts the approach of the repo man.

America needs a better Internet fantasy device because reality is so disappointing. A real reality show would include an hour-long YouTube video of me with a mouth full of Wheat Thins, slumped over an iPad like a mother over a newborn.

There’s not an app for that.

Kiddie Porn

Terry Johnson has been my best friend since junior high school. Like any good friend, he mailed me a VCR movie of his knee surgery.

Without introduction (which is to say, without warning), the movie opened with his raw kneecap surrounded by pulsing red and cream meat. A magnified pair of tweezers and two gleaming silver picks were rearranging this tendon and that, as one might pick through a plate of spaghetti.

It took me a moment to realize that what I was seeing was not the overhead shot of a cooking show. TJ is proud of his knee.

I share that to explain how I felt when, in the fifth grade, Greg Kreitzer pulled a folded photo out of his pocket and showed it to me. It had been pressed into a curve by his humid wallet. The magazine ink was beginning to smear from being sat on. He opened it delicately, its fold lines worn white.

Such a cherished document — a treasure map? It took me a few seconds to orient, to make sense of the bright spotlight glare on the greasy body hair and sweat.

Greg grinned, as if he carried the golden ticket to eternal friendship. Greg was creepy anyway, even creepier now.

I responded with an uncommittal "Dude…," before walking away. This was exactly the kind of thing I always got caught doing when it wasn't my fault.

Porn and I were not well introduced, but I got the hang of it, so to speak. I stumbled across images here and there, and I'd tear out the ones that intrigued me. Eventually, I had a little private collection of clippings. I shared a room with my brother but I could never admire my photos around him, because I knew he'd rat me out just for the fun of watching me run for my life. When I wanted to view my collection, I'd fold them up carefully and creep into the bathroom, the only room in our house with a lock. With two parents and six kids, visits to the single bathroom had to be judicious.

I've since wondered how the person reacted who walked into the bathroom the day I accidentally left my photo collage behind. I didn't realize it until the next day. The obvious choice for my parents would have been to beat my older brother, because they never accepted that I was old enough to do the things I did. I was eighteen before my dad realized I had a driver's license. But my brother showed no signs of punishment. Nor did he reveal any hint that he found the photos himself: no smirk, no long trips to the bathroom. If my sisters had discovered them, there would have been screams. Perhaps God intervened and whisked them away, to everyone's relief.

I got older. I collected whole magazines. There was an abandoned school stadium near my house where my friend Harold and I stashed our contraband. Old magazines acquire a unique smell when they are stored in dank places. To this day I think antique stores smell like porn.

I don't remember how I got the magazines, and I don't remember where they went. Probably they were discovered and stolen by younger boys, who like me acquired a very insufficient education.

Barbie and Ken were surprisingly plain under their disco duds, given their exaggerated proportions everywhere else. Smooth, featureless skin, and nothing to their nethers but the joint of their legs. I know that some families paraded around naked all the time, but my family was a buttoned-up bunch, so I had to learn anatomy the hard way.

My first hands-on experience provided little revelation. I was with a boxy Mexican girl I had just met, who wanted my class ring. Was my hand under her bra, or wasn't it? She felt like Barbie. Something wasn't right. It took me a while to realize she had Band-Aids over her nipples. A hundred reasons raced through my head before she explained that her mother made her do that, and it was another decade before I understood why.

Two years later, to everyone's surprise, the small town theater booked an X-rated film. A high-school buddy swore he could get us in with fake IDs. As we gathered up the suavity to saunter into the lobby like we were regulars, I noticed my ID was for a 45-year-old Hispanic man who was a foot shorter and forty pounds heavier than I.

I looked up from that painful ID to discover that the ticket-taker was my next door neighbor. He eyed me me, looked at my ID and said, "You gotta be kidding." I was dead. "Welcome, Mr. Rodriquez," he rasped, rolling his eyes and waving me in. I was reincarnated.

The movie was about as sexy as The Three Stooges, but not as funny. The more I saw, the less I wanted to learn.

The first drive-in movie of each season was usually a racy one, and I knew if I rode my bike down a certain street, I could watch over the fence. I surmised that the plot centered around an enormously endowed woman who suffocated her suitors. It was hard to tell without the metal car-window speaker.

I don't know what became of leering little Greg Kreitzer and his folded up photos. Maybe he became a pornographer. Or a knee surgeon.

Brain Pain

I can't remember a time in my life when a muscle or bone didn't ache. I just healed up my right shoulder, and now my left one sprung.

I didn't do anything to it. It just started hurting. A lot. Maybe I brushed my teeth too hard, or slept funny.

I've always had aches, bruises and dings. Tall, bony and clumsy, I constantly bump my head, stumble down stairs, fall off my bicycle or tumble down a ditch on wayward skates. Those bonks and twists were earned honorably, a badge proving I was doing something. I'm far less tolerant of aches that just show up on their own, like uninvited guests.

My shins never had any meat on them. Only skin. It is a deformity. They're as bumpy and raw as a tree branch. You can read every woody detail of my shin bone like the rings of a tree, or like that clear plastic Invisible Man we played with in elementary school, the one with realistic organs on the inside and one missing on the outside, the one we had the most questions about. During a softball game I once took an errant pitch to the shin, and from the sound everyone thought I got a hit.

In the middle of the city park near my childhood home there was a cylindrical building that housed some mysterious industrial function. We couldn't figure what accounted for the droning hum that came from inside because, although we could climb the walls, we couldn't see clearly through the dirty windows. The outside had a rocky facade rough enough to get a toe-hold, a natural scaling wall up to the tempting flat roof with its castle-like edge.

My friend Eric scampered up the side of the building like a gerbil. "I did it, you do it!" he crowed, a phrase that has taunted countless children to their deaths. Scared of heights but more afraid of being an outcast, I slowly worked my way up, wiggling over the square roofline like a fat raccoon.

The view was heady. Squirrels were eye-level. I studied the clouds to see if they were closer.

Going down was a lot scarier than climbing up. Eric, his face scrunched in concentration, worked his way quickly. Eric was small, nimble and lithe, the kind of kid who could get away with teasing you because, wily and slippery, you could never get a good enough grip on him to pound him. I was as graceful as a can of Pick-Up Sticks. Barely able to breathe, I managed to work my way over the edge, fingernails digging into the rock, and down to the first ledge. It took a while. Mindful of the setting sun, I gave up and jumped the remaining twelve feet or so. I felt (or heard) a ringing in my feet as all the cartilage melted into jello. I held still, afraid to walk or lay down, that my feet might lose their shape.

"If you're not going to do it, get off." This was another magic phrase Eric uttered impatiently. I psyched myself up to prove I could do a back flip off the park swing at the height of its arc. The feat would be no harder than letting go of the chains, but I had to convince my hands. I wanted to rehearse it in my mind a few more times, but at the sound of Eric's nagging I kicked my head back into the the roll. My hands did not let go, not until the swing began returning to Earth with me no longer sitting in it. I rotated too far before finally releasing the chains, landing on my back with a dull huff! The next day Eric and I returned to the spot to admire the impossibly angled imprint of my  arm and palm in the dirt, my broken wrist now in a thick, heavy cast. I hit him with it, and his head resonated like a ripe melon.

My nose looks like my dad's, long and curvaceous with a preference for the left side of my face. His was broken in the Navy, by the first punch of his first boxing match. But one does not inherit a broken nose.

"Dad," I asked, "did I ever break my nose?"

"No, I don't recall anything," he replied after a thoughtful, eye-wandering silence.

"Then how did my nose get so crooked?"

He thought some more. More eye-searching. "Well, there was that one time when you were three, and you walked in front of a kid with steel-toed boots who was swinging on the swing," he recalled. "When he hit you, you did a back flip and landed standing up."

Yeah, Dad, that might have done it.

Or maybe it was Plunger. Plunger was among the pile-on games we played in the park after school. I once heard Bill Cosby refer to it as "Buck-Buck." Kids on one team would form a human wall-chain by lining up, then bending over and wrapping arms firmly around the waist of the kid in front of them, who did the same. It looked like a mule train or a woven rope. The front-most kid would secure himself by wrapping his arms around a tree. Then the other team would run up one at a time and jump on the fortified mass, using their compounding weight and relentless impacts to knock the wall team over. To protect the tree-grabbing kid's collar bone we'd insert the littlest kid as padding in between. He was the Plunger.

I only recall playing the game twice. The last time, while I was in the middle of the wall team, we held up a record number of our opponents before the entire matrix of kids collapsed on top of my nose.

Nose blood is vivid red, rich with oxygen. The other kids ran home. I retired from Plunger.

As I get older my injuries continue even though I play less. I scratched a cornea when I picked up a basketball and didn't notice the juniper branch in front of me. I turned my head to look as I backed up the car, and sprained my neck.  I pulled a muscle in my shoulder by sleeping funny.

It's as if my body is accustomed to feeling injured, and repeats it out of habit. As if it says to itself, "Say, it's about time for a pulled tendon, isn't it?"

"No, tendons are Monday. Today's Thursday. Cramps day."

"Foot cramp?"

"Sure."

Oww! What did I do?

The Wrap Artist

Just days before Christmas
Foul weather is pending
Rain into ice into snow neverending

I try to wrap presents. For hours I linger
Could tape stick to anything else but my finger?
Of all of life's mysteries, I want to know:
To save our own lives, why can't men tie a bow?

I tried to find presents creative and neat
That I'm almost done isn't any small feat
Just things here and there for a last minute run
An LED Frisbee and Daisy air gun

But what to my wondering eyes should appear?
A blizzard forthcoming! Must get in high gear!
Is everyone shopping? What is this rat race?
Is it too much to ask for, just one parking space?

A sharp elbow here, a karate chop there
And I finished my shopping, just hours to spare
I got what I went for, my mission undaunted
A Daisy air rifle, like I always wanted!

My hands wrapped around it—it felt so much bigger
Than I had imagined. I fingered the trigger
And Blam! How should I know the damn thing was loaded?!?
The dog barked, a glass broke, the lightbulb exploded

The cat screamed and leapt and clamped onto the dog
Who squealed like a pig as he spilled my eggnog
With puss on his ass he dove under the tree
Where the cat got entangled and couldn't shake free

The Christmas tree trembled, it shivered and quivered
And teetered and tottered before fate delivered
The final Ke-Bash! And before I could get her
Down came the ornaments, tinsel and glitter

We stood there agape after all of that riot
A clatter, a tinkle — and then all was quiet
The dog licked his wounds as he glared at the cat
Who pointed at me and said "That's who did that!"
Then both turned to me through the mangled-up muck
And eyed me as if to say, "Dude, WTF!?"

I only intended to give it a tryout
It ricocheted back and damn near put my eye out
But all I could think as it lodged in my tuchus
Was what if I'd got one of those toy bazookas?

Routine Maintenance

It's freezing in the room. I get out of my warm bed; the dog stays behind. He used to jump up whenever I budged, following my every step as if I had bacon for feet. By now he has figured out I'm just going to the bathroom and that I'll be back to get dressed. He knows there's no point in following me until I venture downstairs, where he'll hover on the chance that I might drop a crumb of toast.

I have become routine. He and my cats know everything I'm going to do. As I shuffle barefoot into the kitchen, my cat Spekky is already there, waiting. She knows she'll be fed a moist pâté of ground fish out of a can within the next three minutes. She begins to meow at 1 minute 30 seconds just to go along, but it doesn't change anything. The dog stands by wistfully, knowing the cat bowl is off limits. But what touches the floor is legally his.

They weave between my clumsy feet with the agility of egrets picking food from a hippo's mouth. Their choreography requires that they know exactly where I'm going to move next. They do.

People say days go by faster as you get older. I know one person who is certain that time literally is going faster, and although he says it with scientific authority, his theory still smells as if freshly pulled out of his ass.

It's more likely that as we get older we become more routine. It gets harder to distinguish one day from the next. When you're a kid, every day is unique. Your brain is an empty pan. As you age you start developing preferences, then favorites, and soon your patterns start to cement. I can barely read a newspaper if I don't start with the front page.

The last remarkable day you remember may have been months ago. "Why, it seems like 4th of July was just last week!" When days are identical, time condenses them into one.

I just had lunch with a friend, and he was off to get a new tattoo.

"Of what?" I asked.

"I don't know."

He's not new to this.  He already looks like an ad for the tattoo parlor.

"You're getting a tattoo that will last your whole life, and you haven't made up your mind yet?"

"I had some space to fill."

As tattoos go, I am a blank slate. I can't commit to anything for fear I'll change my mind about it later. Even the classic "Mama" is chancy—she could turn on me any day. Maybe she was just being nice because I was little and she felt sorry for me, and now she's just waiting until I'm old enough to hear what a pain in the ass I was.

"Each tattoo reminds me where my life was at the time I got it," he explains. "It's not the design itself that's important, but the memories it stirs up." He is a walking scrapbook of unconnected imagery: a wagon wheel, an eagle, a sheriff's badge. I don't ask.

To shake up my life I try to do something unique every day. Maybe I'll get a tattoo when I'm 90 and there's not enough time left to change my mind about it.

I cringe when people get engaged on Christmas, or have birthdays on New Year's Eve. I know I'd forget one event or the other. When I plan a celebratory occasion like an engagement or wedding, I'll look at the calendar and pick the longest stretch of time between two existing holidays, and stick the new event right in the middle. My goal: when I'm 90 years old, every day will be a unique holiday, and time will stand still.

I usually write a story for this blog every Tuesday. Today is Wednesday. Whoa, baby—look at me shake it up.