Simple, elegant…..all aboard!!
This timeless foto of Lina Cvalieri. So gentle and elegant. Having been forced off my feet with a nasty back problem, I sit propped sifting through all the magnificent archives in and about my trusty databanks.
Trying to get one’s equilibrium back. I throw myself as I did as a “wee” little girl, into opera, and stories of the opera throughout the ages. What a great world of variety and communication. How over periods in time mankind becomes bored with opera and they try to reinvent it. The period just before Brecht and Weil in Germany is so illuminating. Drastic change for change sake. Fascinating. The career and reformation that is the life of Mary Garden. What a pip she was. Love it. Or Alma Gluck’s story. Daughter wrote “Of Lena Geyer”, my all time favorite opera fiction.
The fashion and the decorum of the age. The ability to be bigger than life. It was the only place I felt I could be myself in. Now we all want to be ordinary. Singing opera is anything but an ordinary pastime. Life, as one careens through it, is ever beguiling. Perhaps one thing remains constant. Change.
As I seem to have this stream of consciousness running,where shall I go now?
What pops up……ah yes, train trips are vivid.
The wires on the telephone poles danced up and down as we raced past them. Miles and miles of them. I would become hypnotized of the ballet outside the window.
The houses lit and people who remain in the villages I whisk past, going about their daily lives. The houses late at night with chimney stacks and billowing black smoke and the often eerie feeling of being the only one awake in the world. The feeling of the vehicle you are in becoming a part of you, the rocking and rolling back and forth. The sleeper cars. Have I ever slept better than that? With my whole family for once in one place and all of us safe for the moment in that little car speeding somewhere new. I loved and love to this day, the round blue nightlight about the compartment light. Floating in the bluish sea of color that bathed the room and the loved ones looking peaceful and calm. a light indigo. I will always love that color and the peace it gives me to this day.
I would LOVE to be back in those speeding cars with so many loved ones who are no longer reachable. The smell of coffee and brioche in the morning, the scent of the polaroid snapshot fresh from the reveal.
I respected the invitation to immortality the camera affords us. The suspending of a moment forever in that little square piece of chemicals and ink. I would race to be in a photo, at 2 or three years old. I loved that it was a piece of history you could hold in your hand. I look at younger pictures of my parents, taken in the 30’s and 40’s, and you can feel the world was so different. I wanted to crawl Alice like through the celluloid and see for myself how it was all like.
Oh well, losing weight, trying so hard and it threw my back out, now I will gain some of it back trying to get the inflammation down, and get it “back” to normal to start working again to regain my “Figga”.
I got myself in this mess, and it will take a lot of guts to get it righted. I will do it, but sometimes,…………. it can be maddening.
