The Met.
A gala dinner for Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann.
My friend, whose name is on the program, is wearing a floor-length, gold Christian Lacroix coat with a matching gown and a great many diamonds. I'm in the same Agnes b dress I wear every time she takes me somewhere glitzy - from the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race Ball to the Opening of the V&A Couture Exhibition where she was photographed on the red carpet. My seat at the table for dinner cost more than my entire outfit - hell, hiring the car that drove us through Central Park cost more than my entire outfit since the dress is ten years old and the velvet coat I'm wearing over it is vintage (ie second hand) from a shop on Goldborne Road, as is the grey taffeta jacket which came from the same place. Actually, to be absolutely accurate - even the blow dry I had in a salon downtown earlier in the afternoon cost more than my outfit. I think I paid about the same for the root canal I had done the last time I went to the dentist - but it hurt a lot less. My hair is so bouncy it's like there's elastic in the conditioner.
I try not to feel like one of the ugly sisters which is relatively easy since I've borrowed from the safe and huge chandelier earrings dangle from my ears crusted with diamonds and semi precious stones while on my right wrist there's a five inch cuff made of quartzes and tourmalines the size of a giant's cough sweets. I'm like Wonder Woman, but with bling. You can kiss my big fat amethysts.... And though I'm not going to win any beauty contests, I'm at least able to walk unaided and my skin - while lined - hasn't been tacked behind my ears into a death's head mask. Despite the glamorous occasion and the copious number of furs, approximately fifty percent of the audience seem to be bordering on geriatric - so much so that if you forgot that you were in the Met you might easily imagine you were in a very well appointed nursing home where all the inmates were insanely rich. If you were ever in any doubt that it was possible to live too long, a gala evening at the Metropolitan Opera would clear that right up for you. Women (and yes, sadly it is mostly women because the men have done the sensible thing and died earlier) with walkers, with carers, with wheelchairs, mechanical and electric. Women with crutches and walking sticks, and brittle bones, and terribly bad plastic surgery so that they all look like they have some odd leonine genetic disease, with wizened elbows and withered arms and shriveled decolletages, but very plump lips, startled eyes and breasts like snowglobes, except they don't shake. Most are tiny little candy canes, bent out of shape by age and osteoporosis, glittering with baubles and swathed in ostentatious furs, but with dresses that went out of fashion before I was born and shrouded with the dusty patina of age. The women look like they too have been stored in a plastic garment bag for the last twenty years.
After we've eaten tepid butternut squash soup and a veal medallion, we glide across the dress circle - named after one of the benefactors who is sitting at another table, towards our seats. We settle ourselves in our box - my friend and her husband the silver fox, two handsome uncles, my friend's son in law who has been dragged along as my companion, and a young attractive couple who are colleagues of the host. The women get to sit in the front row to show off their frocks, or in my case, my borrowed jewelry, and the curtain goes up. The music is absolutely beautiful though I'm less convinced by the women stomping across the stage in pasties and high cut knickers with their buttock cheeks hanging out (I don't think the men are complaining because you know - those girls are singers, and there's as much bounce on stage as there is in my blow dry).
The basic plot seems to be that Hoffmann (Joseph Calleja) is remembering his past loves - Olympia, a wind up doll (Kathleen Kim), the sickly Antonia (Anna Netrebko) and a courtesan Giulietta (Ekaterina Gubanova) - all facets of womanhood pretty much represented there then, wouldn't you say? - before deciding that they are all really different parts of the same woman - his current love - Stella (Anna Netrebko again).
The man has a point, I think as I zone in and out of the performance like a badly tuned radio station, swapping sleep for static every now and again (I was jet lagged). Haven't I really been dating the same sort of person for the last year or so as the one I was married to for twenty five years - first with an Italian accent, then with an English one? From uberhusband to husband lite, I've pretty much sought out the same sort of type time and time again - it's Freud's urge to repeat. I just do it less musically.
I struggle through the second act after a glass of champagne and a dessert for which we withdraw, once again, to the little gilt chairs on the dress circle surrounded by the creme of the decrepit while tiers of people stand leaning over the balconies above us, watching us like we were in a zoo. Note to self - sugar and alcohol are not friends of the somnolent. I pinch myself. I kick myself. I hold my eyes open while pretending a rapture I can only summon up for the idea of curling up in bed. I count white hair. I count members of the cast. I count people sleeping and then my chin slips. Only afterwards do I discover that sitting in the box next to the arm that's propping up my head is the General Manager and his party. I sincerely hope none of them see me nodding off.
By the third act, however, I am suddenly wide awake again. A state which I manage to prolong until three am (eight am Pedantic time, when usually I’m just getting into work). Tomorrow night it’s my birthday party. Somehow, I don’t think I’m exactly going to sparkle… There’s just not enough bling in the safe. Pass me my zimmer frame.
