Magic Flute

For my birthday I told Robert that rather than buying me a thing, I wanted an event. So he bought me an event, and I loved it. I haven’t even had a chance to write about it, because I’ve been processing it. For Robert’s birthday I took us to The Met—Live! at a movie theater. They were showing famous operas, and neither of us has ever seen an opera. I’m reminded of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman when she sees an opera for the first time and blurts out something inappropriate, just like her counterpart in My Fair Lady at the prim and proper horse race. Beauty like you experience in the opera takes some getting used to, but once you get it, especially for the first time, you react. That’s why I love being a teacher. I introduce kids to art that they never would have touched on their own, classics that they never would have read or appreciated, and when I’m done, they say, “Wow, that was good! I understand now why you made us read it!” Or not. Philip says his favorite book in high school was Wuthering Heights. How many high school boys do you know that like Wuthering Heights? On the other hand, he still demands to know why in the world I made him read Metamorphosis. You can’t win them all.

So the opera I chose for us to see was the only one really familiar to me, one that my kids had listened to in a kids’ version on tape (yes, that long ago) many times. I knew who Papagino the Bird Man was (papa-papa-papa-papa-gino) and Papagina, and the terrible Queen of the Night. The costumes were outlandish, the sets complex, the singing startling. Try it. For ten bucks, you can’t go wrong.

For my birthday, Robert did something more elaborate (of course. One of his love languages is gifts. I remember that when his Oma was having difficulty reading her Dutch family Bible, he spent hours on the phone tracking down a Large Print Dutch Bible, which she read until she died. Robert is like that. He likes finding just the perfect gift.) So my birthday gift started across the border at the Classic Irish Theater in Buffalo. We saw a play by Arthur Miller called All My Sons.  Many years ago I’d seen his The Crucible at the Shaw Theatre here in Niagara-on-the Lake, and was impressed. We were reading it for our American Lit class. It’s about the Salem witch trials and how people killed one another out of fear, and how things to hide or self-righteousness, either one, can make us turn on each other (devour one another as Paul says). In my English class, we tie this play to the movie Good Night, Good Luck¸ based on the true story of the newscaster who brought down Joe McCarthy’s infamous Un-American Activities Committee. Arthur Miller was one of the writers interrogated by this witch-hunting committee. Good Night, Good Luck, produced for our times, is asking the question whether we’ve learned any lessons about witch-hunting.

All My Sons dealt with how we distance ourselves from the suffering of others. If it doesn’t affect our immediate family (for whom we’d do anything), we don’t care as much. We do things for “my own son.” By the end of the movie, the main character realizes that in trying to help his own son by cheating, he hurt other people’s sons. But in reality, all of those young men, the 21 pilots brought down by faulty plane engines, were “all my sons.” As Martin Luther King Jr said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” In God’s eyes, an injustice done to anyone is done to him. Because from God’s vantage point, the people suffering are “all my sons.” The tension in the play just kept building and building until the final breaking point. We kept talking about it over brisket and ribs at Dino’s. Much to think about.

For Christmas, I gave Robert, not a tool as usual, but tickets to see Bruce Cockburn in concert when he shows up here in February. Robert has already sent him a FB message inviting him out for coffee. I think I finally got the perfect gift.