Frozen in August

It is exactly one month until the opera; I so haphazardly wandered into, will open.
How does one wander into an opera project?

I wrote a book about September 11th, A Mother’s Essays From Ground Zero; then two years ago I produced a fashion show (horrible incongruity I know, such is my life.) For the show I hired a young, most fabulous composer Doug Geers. After the show Doug and his virtuoso, violinist wife Maja asked me out to tea. I went. They inquired what I wanted to do next.
I blurted, “ I want to turn this book I wrote about 9/11 into an opera.”
They are an under spoken couple. “ Oh, let’s take a look at the book.” They sighed.

As I rode my trusty nearly 40-year-old Raleigh bike home from the meeting I had a spirited conversation inside my head.
“ I never knew you wanted to make an opera, you never tell me anything!!”
“ I thought you knew, after all you live inside here as well, do you pay attention to what I am thinking or are you too bludgeoned by the quotidian details of your stupid life to ever spend time with me, your interior life.”

My interior life won that battle, she was right I had been absorbed in editing a magazine, putting money away for college payments and falling in love with a garden, yet all this time my crazy imagination had been creating a secret opera. As soon as I was given a chance to talk about it, the idea blurt itself out, as if it had a life of its own.


And now it has a very real life, a web site, music, libretto and, a small, mostly volunteer team, growing astoundingly larger by the month, and now by the day. They are composing, designing, building and tinkering with this project, now entitled Calling: An Opera of Forgiveness. We open in the 99 seat LaMaMa First Floor Theater officially on September 12, but we have an invited dress rehearsal on September 10 and a benefit September 11. Today is the 10th of August and I am frozen in fear, even as the air around my shoulders reflects my inner body temperature. Heat surrounds me, but I am frozen.

Again there are two of me. The frozen, who is screaming,
WHAT DID YOU DO ??
WHY DID YOU DO IT ?
Then there is the calm rational worker bee who is making lists, creating blasts, writing small, small checks and attempting to think of every detail from folding beds to foot lights. I pass out post cards and ask each person to take one and pass one on. As if this Luddite, viral distribution will achieve the full houses we so desperately need for funds and a future.

The warm air beckons and I have a stack of gorgeous postcards, designed by a young Russian designer ( Vikotria Televnyy) yes of course for free, that sit here and upbraid me, begging to be handed out.