posted: January 18, 2004
I shall, henceforth, curse and damn the members of They Might Be Giants, the cast and writers of Gilligan's Island and everyone who ever worked at Warner Brothers animation division prior to 1955. Let me elaborate.
Trippingly, I trot off to see the opera Carmen, dragging my remarkably easy-going husband along. We, of course, are not dressed up, much, but choose to go in Bohemian black, largely because that's what we already own which doesn't look like an ad for Old Navy. But we don't stand out. You can hardly find your seat for the yards of black coats, suits and dresses swathed about and the wonderful thing about black is that it doesn't show a lot of detail. From a distance you just look... dark, which is a kindness to a great many of the audience members. The lobby and auditorium look like the scene of a funeral. Who knew we all shopped the same place?
Or maybe it's just that the common age of the patrons causes them to come prepared. Returning from a quick foray to the gentlemen's relief station, my husband contends that the Opera is doomed to financial failure within 10 years if the specimens populating the Men's room are anything to judge by.
In spite of the fact that they start 5 minutes late, the audience somehow senses the approach of the conductor, even though he and his musicians are firmly ensconced in a hole in front of the proscenium. (I later discover that a small camera is pointed at a square of white card, taped to the inside of the pit, and the interruption of the maestro's head into the vast white expanse can be seen by everyone on stage and in the first 6 rows with the alarming clarity of a display board in Times Square.) The orchestra makes a few last-minute adjustments and the Overture begins with the strange, disembodied fluttering of the conductor's baton-tip diving and swooping, occasionally, above the pit edge in a massive spotlight, as if the baton, itself, were the star of the show.
The music leaps into the familiar, curvetting march-time and I bite my tongue and cast a quick look toward my husband in the dark. A gleam of his eye and a squeeze of the hand inform me that he, too, now has the lyrics to TMBG's Beer Song galloping through his head: "What is the malted liquor, what gets you drunker quicker, what comes in bottles or in cans? Beer!"
With that dancing in our heads like visions of leggy Rainier Rain Beer, the opera launches ahead and the curtain rises on a tableau of a Seville street scene in the 1890s. Pretty. Nice set. Nice forced-perspective (an illusion later destroyed by an exiting actor stumbling into a pillar which bends, flutters and proves to be painted muslin, just as in an unrelated song about paper moons...). Everyone is singing a piece too weirdly-tempoed to make fun of in popular music, for which we are grateful. In a while, the cigarette girls show up and everyone awaits the arrival of "the beautiful Carmen."
We had been warned by everyone who saw the show before us and a write up in the Times, but we are not truly prepared when, at last, Carmen arrives on stage. A gorgeous voice, pouting, red lips... and the size and beauty of a Mac truck. The beautiful Carmen is at least 5'10" in her bare feet and three times as wide as the unfortunate tenor who shall be paying her court all night.
For a moment, I want to howl at the notion that this is the opera femme fatale of all time. Only good manners stop me from hacking. Well, that and the fact that she's got the most amazing voice. If I close my eyes, I can believe that she is, indeed, a ravishing creature, so sensual and enthralling that none can resist her and only those who do stand a chance.
But if I close my eyes, I can't read the subtitle prompter above the stage and, regardless of how much my French sucks, even a native Frenchman would have a hard time following the diction around Bizet's wiggly score. The music has more tricky double-speak and odd little scurries than a politician in an election year.
Not to mention the fact that when I close my eyes, I suddenly behold in my imagination, not the plus-size diva singing about how love is like a bird which must be free, but the angular, be-wigged figure of Bob Denver as Gilligan portraying Hamlet and singing the unforgettable (and don't I wish I could?) "To Be or Not to Be?" to the same tune.
By the time we reach the torero, Escamillo, singing about how wonderful it is to be him, I can barely keep myself from giggling, imagining Bart and Homer Simpson crooning the immortal words "Toreador, oh, don't spit on the floor! Use the cuspidor, that's what it's for!"
Just imagine the fits I'll be in next year, when the opera does Wagner and I am beset by visions of Elmer Fudd singing "Kill the Rabbit, kill the Rabbit, kill the Rabbit!" among the Valkyries. And The Barber of Seville is right out--it just wouldn't be the same without the barber-chair race to the sky featuring Elmer and Bugs.
Y'see: my youth was not a cultural wasteland. It was just a slightly misplaced one. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw and a tenor from a tenner.
posted: January 30, 2004
I like tango music, from La Cumparsita and Jalousie to silly fusions like Shakira's Te Aviso, Te Anuncio and In-Grid's In-Tango. I like Latin music, in general, but there's something particularly compelling about tango. Let's face it, music which can make a massive lunk like Arnold Schwarzenegger seem sexy must be magic (at 6' 2" and built like a tank, he's no Fred Astaire, nor even Cesar Romero, who was at least acutally Latin and a dancer, and certainly no Antonio Banderas--grrrowwl!).
Of course, it is not just the music. It is the dance. Tango, whether rendered on a traditional, solo bandoneon (a sort of accordion), orchestra, marching band or modern electric guitar is music for dancing. And this is not the "dance of loooove" unless we are being euphemistic. Tango is about confidence and drive, power and sex. Which probably explains its current and re-current popularity. There can be no timidity in Tango. A nervous or unsure dancer cannot execute a convincing tango and anyone who gets nervous about rubbing up against their partner should stick to low-tempo foxtrot.
And it's not just a man's dance of domination over women, either--no matter what some people think. The following partner must dance with equal confidence or the dance is dull. Which, I suppose, it part of the reason you see tango featured in films about dangerous or passionate people, even when the film may be relatively lightweight and silly--like True Lies or The Addams Family.
On the other hand, there are films like The Last Tango in Paris--which barely has a tango in it, but evokes the idea of them very well--and the recent Assassination Tango where the dance operates as metaphor, plot device and motivation in one go. An impressive trick for a bit of dance-hall tomfoolery. I expect that, someday, a brash and obnoxious young film maker will eliminate the metaphor and cut straight to the action flick--someone already beat him to the porn--which would be an accomplishment requiring as much brass-cajones as dancing the tango, itself.
Someone once said that dancing is "the vertical expression of a horizontal urge." Like most catchy slug-lines, though, that's too blatant and over-simplified. Tango, at least, is a pantomime of social intercourse where the timid get left behind or driven into a wall. It is a challenge to live with passion, style and confidence. Other dances are fun, athletic, charming or gracious, but not a challenge to one's mode of living. To tango, you embrace passion and confidence.
Would that we could tango in all our endeavors. And maybe I shall tango a book, someday.
Back to top of this page, please.