Lydia’s Blog

I have recently quit my job. Well. Not quit so much as just made it really clear that I don’t want to stay. And by really clear I do mean submitting a letter asking them not to bother renewing any sort of contract binding me to to the culture plantation in whose fields I’ve been laboring these last few years.

So there’s that. And then there’s the apartment…the one where rats scuttle out of the toilet if I don’t close it at night, three minutes of hot water in the morning qualifies as luxurious and the remnants of an erstwhile basement sweatshop remain to be removed by the previous tenant.

My deliciously dysfunctional family will break bread and more importantly try to provide fodder for future therapists tomorrow and Friday, celebrating a feast commemorating a fictitious meeting during which shoe-buckles and decorative corn husks took center stage. My baby Jesus sister. My great sick Dad. This sweet feat of emotional terrorism will occur some six hours in the past for me…in a far away land called Connecticut.

I feel like I remember ideas like grace, charm and optimism the way a hardcore alcoholic must remember things like waking up clear-headed. It must have happened once…but fuck if we can remember what it felt like.

Shit in’t so bad though…as I do have my secret weapon here in this vast wasteland of southern German unremarkableness…my silver bullet, my kill button…

It’s called Jenseits. In German it roughly means eternity. It’s my neighborhood gay bar and I love it. There is just nothing some juicy beats, cheap wine and free internet can’t fix–especially after cranking some seventy people through a three-hour rehearsal.

Emil is the bar tender. If there is one thing more fabulous than normal bar sisters, it’s a turkish bar sister with a tidy homo-hawk. Considering what members of the immigrated Turkish community go through just to reach thirty without being pressed into some odd forced marriage, I find homosexual Turks to be an absolute phenomenon. And he makes a great wine spritzer.

Yeah. It’s an old lady drink. Build yourself a bridge.

I grew up watching Cheers with my dad. While he watched, I’d crawl into bed with him as a little kid, trying to escape from the sound of the filling bathtub, which terrified me. The idea of a place where you’re always welcome and everyone knows your name…it seemed the stuff of miracles. And to be sure it is. Aw, where are you Sam…

A buouy made out of candy, diamonds and featherdust is doomed, when placed in the middle of a sea of bullshit. I don’t mean this figuratively…I mean the fecal byproduct of adult male cattle….collected in some sea-like arrangement. The buouy doesn’t stand a chance.

But fuck is it fun to sit here for a while…getting drunk alone where everybody knows your name.

And the number for a taxi.

Happy Thanksgiving.

There are many things I doubt about myself, as is surely true of all of us. Am I a good director? Am I cut out for a life in the bizarre, self-involved cesspool that is the world of opera? Am I as smart as I think I am? Is The Kittensnake just a stupid platform for my unrelenting vanity?

Amid these doubts, there has been one element in myself that I have never called into doubt…for which I’ve never had to peer into any existential magic 8 ball. That is the following: I am a great fag hag. I have had years of perineum shaving (“Honey, there’s one spot I can’t get…you grab the razor, I’m gonna lie on my back, hold up my balls and you just try to be gentle…”), why-won’t-that-straight-guy-I-adore-just-let-me-blow-him-just-once sympathetic commiserating and long nights of practicing the fine art of animal husbandry at gay bars to prove this aptitude.

This one great certitude was called into question last night. My lady, Joolz, and I went to the Hollywood Bowl to hear Rufus Wainwright quote an entire Judy Garland concert from 1961. Possibly the least heterosexual public entertainment event ever, right? Well yes. And horribly so.

Before the concert, I didn’t know Rufus Wainwright from Ryan Seacrest. For some reason I had gotten it into my head that we were going to see Tom Waits sing Judy Garland…which would have at least been interesting.

There was nothing good about this concert. It looked as though some ultra-gay karaoke enthusiast was scouted by some shitty lounge-show producer that basically only wanted this kid’s brownberry…and attempted to conquer said brownberry by giving said ultra-gay karaoke enthusiast a show of his own at some trashy dive.

And then the trashy dive turned out to be the Hollywood Bowl. Horror.

Through my Haggery over the last fourteen years or so (since I was just a wee lass), my boys have introduced me to many gay musical icons whom I’ve listened to and learned to love, like Ethel Merman, Betty Buckley, Elaine Paige, Audra MacDonald, Eartha Kitt, Patti LuPone, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Dionne Warwick, and even Barbra Streisand. Mr. Wainwright decided to channel none of these legends in his whiny, questionably pitched renditions of seminal Judy Garland classics.

We had the misfortune of sitting unnervingly close to one of the Bowl’s megascreens…giving us a close-up view of one of the least engaging live performers I’ve ever seen (and I work in opera, folks). It allowed me to see that the man’s reedy, unsteady tones were produced by a head tossed back (theoretically with emotion, but probably more to give the audience more of an “if you were on top of me” view) and a jaw jutted unnaturally forward. On climactic tones (or the ones I remember being climactic from having heard Judy Garland herself sing), Mr. Wainwright offered a wilting queef of a line…his breaths and cheek-against-teeth smacking made unpleasantly loud by the fact the Bowl’s sound people had to jack his mike up so high, in order to make his blazing vocal talent at all audible over the orchestra.

The one thing less tolerable than Wainwright’s singing was his patter. In one of the least classy caricatures of gayness ever, the man would, like, lisssp and, like, hum and haw and, like, stammer, and like, bat his eyes whilst delivering a string of increasingly obnoxious non-anecdotes. For example: “Like, did you guys see that? Like, there were just two drops of rain here on the stage and like, it kind of makes me feel, like, that Judy’s here tonight. You know you guys, before like the show tonight. It was, like, so amazing. Like I felt like she was in my dressing room and I was like, hey Judy. And so yeah. Look. Another drop. That’s like, crazy you guys.”

He or his producers also decided to pad the program with several other fourth-rate performers. For instance, the impressively mediocre Garland progeny, Lorna Luft. Two other members of the Wainwright crew joined their boy as well…the similarly limited Chanteuse, Martha Wainwright, and his mother, a jazz pianist who embarrassingly choked through a flash transposition of a classic ballad toward the end of the program.

The program’s conductor was another questionably talented pretty boy, who filled out his dull, incredibly square delivery of the orchestral arrangements with smoldering, pouty glances toward the camera.

What I require from gay entertainment is either quality or irony. The mixture of the two is of course preferable. Gary White, for instance, would have rocked the ever-loving shit out of this program. Or…if the acoustic qualities of the evening weren’t to be in the fore, that’s also okay. Camp it out, you know? Get Lady Bunny or Lipsynka to channel Garland.

But this was neither, and therefore nothing. What some could possibly construe as camp was actually the awkward flailings and coy incoherency of a man in way over his head. The only possible draw I can imagine for a performer like Wainwright is the fact that gay men might find him so imminently fuckable that they’d be willing to overlook his talent-free status and abject vandalism of Judy Garland’s music and legacy.

Would this have annoyed me so much if it had been a hetero Chanteur? I asked myself this question repeatedly. No. Irrelevant, actually. This program could not have been executed as such by a straight performer. Wainwright’s gayness is totally central to his show. It is this gayness, seemingly, that is called upon to supplant any evidence of the presence of an engaging showman.

As I looked around at the hundreds, possibly thousands of people in the audience—largely gay men—raptly hanging onto Wainwright’s every gormless warble, it made me kind of hate them all…and seriously question my status as international power hag.

Me, who first taped together a man’s tits at age 16, while working at a costume-shop-by-day, drag-haunt by night. Can it be that I’m not a good hag? Am I a hater?

I had to soften my brain with a lot of wine in order to repress the tragic idea that I’ve suddenly become a Shirley Temple Black parody…a once-beloved figure who proved to be an arch-conservative and homophobe in her late years.

I should work up that Shirley program. Maybe some idiot will let me have the Bowl.

So what do you do on Ticketmaster if you’re shite at typing?

Everybody in the world besides me has probably already used this service…but I’ll just offer up a quick breakdown of how it works.

1.) You type in the act you want to see (in my case, the Beastie Boys at the Greek Theatre in Los Feliz on Aug. 19). They make you fill out a few forms, including the one where you identify letters in a wavy field to prove you’re not a robot, before telling you that the show is already sold out. And may God have mercy on your soul.

2.) You repeat the process with another date…complete with anti-robot forms and a field where you can choose if you’d like to buy two tickets for $49.50 or two tickets for $49.50 (indeed a laborious decision).  You press send.

3.) Ticketmaster then offers you two tickets for $49.50 (surprise) in seating choice that looks something like SEATS 1288 & 1289 ROW YY-XTREME LEFT CIRCLE 7-BEHIND PORT-O-LETS, and offers you one minute to create an account with their service in order to reserve and later purchase your tix.

*After this point in the Ticketmaster process, the rest becomes a cruel test of your typing skills–leaving one to conjecture that the service is really best suited to typing freaks like, say, savants, concert pianists, and those accustomed to typing with one hand through certain amorous internet activities. Or perhaps secretarially-inclined amputees.

4.) Time trial 2 (after reservation confirmation and account creation in one minute) consists of extensive registration of personal details, credit card information, billing address, contact information and perusal and acceptance of the Terms of Service agreement in under 3 minutes. If you can’t slap it together to type at Sri-Lankan-peasant-in-a-textile-sweatshop pace…you stand to lose the right to pay for the opportunity to stand several hundred feet away from three grooving ants who may or may not be the Beastie Boys.

5.) Only after the torments of TT2 do you realize that somewhere along the line, they’ve managed to stick you with an extra $20 of some service charge or another…presumably to pay for the wriggling, still live fetuses Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenburg like to crack in lieu of soft-boiled eggs for breakfast on their yacht off of Sardinia. This created a strong sense of indignance, not untinged with disgust.

6.)Time trial 3, in comparison to 2 is relatively relaxed…allowing you one minute to determine your preferred method of ticket delivery. Even the electronic variety cost $2.50. For one of those real tickets one can slap away into one’s "My first white boy hip hop concert" scrapbook, one can expect at least $20 extra.

7.) Feeling oddly violated, you press "send" one final time, and receive a confirmation number. It is a most hollow victory.

I remember back in the day, slapping a month’s allowance down on the counter in front of the morbidly acne-ridden junior manager at Strawberries Record Store in West Hartford and saying "One ticket for Color me Badd, please."

But Ticketmaster. Seriously. What is that about?

Seven minutes ago, I experienced my first earthquake. My girl Joolz in a native Los Angelean, and had told me a bit about them. The whole hiding in doorframes bit and all.

So there I was, lying in my bed checking out NYTimes slide shows when…suddenly…it started to feel like I was on the second floor of an extremely thin-walled building…where an enourmous thumping party suddenly began on the level below.

Yet completely without sound. And without a floor beneath. Very surreal. I watched the floor fan begin to teeter, and one of the pairs of meticulously set shoes on a small shelf softly tipped over onto its side.

It’s hard to know when the aftershocks subside…as their diminishment only enhances the rapid beating of your own heart…which in the end, feels not unlike a small earthquake in rhythm and texture.

Only after you stop thinking about yourself, your body and its well-being for a second, do you notice the car alarms and barking dogs nearby.

This little guy can be found at http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/ci14312160.html

So. Welcome to LA, I suppose.

Crazy.

Okay. Scheisse (or Scheiße) means shit in German. Most English speakers at least know that much. The Bolshoi is the famous Muscovite Opera and Ballet House, renowned for, well, overly ornate yet static staging practices. Bolshoischeisse is a term I’ve come to know in this season at the Staatsoper Stuttgart. It is a quick and dirty little word used to describe overblown, 1950’s-looking stage antics.

For instance, with our production of Jenufa here, Catalonian “enfant terrible” Calixto Bieito inherited a set and concept from David Alden and his designer, Gideon Davey. It featured an intricately carved silver ceiling over a trashed “factory” setting. With the Alden/Davey concept (which was scuttled under monumentally ungraceful circumstances), the ceiling made great sense. Calixto, rather a stranger to delicate design, saw the ceiling and immediately declared it Bolshoischeisse. All present nodded, as they tend to do.

For the record, the ceiling was kept and used to great effect.

For singers, Bolshoischeisse tends to refer to hand-wrenching, breast-beating, woe-is-me arm-flailing, throwing-oneself-conspicuously-onto-the-floor-at-inopportune-moments-and-then-raising-said-self-up-to-a-graceful-kneel-two-measures-before-beginning-to-sing-so-as-to-stare-at-the-conductor-in-a-pained-manner, and the like.

I hadn’t really come into contact with this form of Bolshoischeisse until I began remounting an upcoming production at the Staatsoper Stuttgart. Of course, I’d worked with awkward and oblivious singers on stage before, but that’s another point altogether. The fact is, that Bolshoischeisse and bad acting are not the same thing. Most practitioners of Bolshoischeisse produce an excellent presence on stage. They are intensely aware of themselves and the pictures their bodies present. In fact, were it actually the 1950’s these people, when blessed with great voices as both of my current Bolshoi devotees are, would have made excellent careers as singing actors.

Unfortunately it’s about sixty years too late. Opera today relies on a flexibility in actors to be both nuanced and earnest in an almost cinematic style (altered of course for a room full of some 2000 rich old people), and a physical readiness to move purposefully and sometimes tackle the most acrobatic or unpleasant of tasks while singing. Our Laca in Jenufa, for instance, loads a forklift wagon full of clothing sacks while nailing high Bs. This is expected of today’s opera singer.

Exactly these things, however, are perceived as anathema by performers trained in the “Bolshoischeisse” tradition.

My two singers, for instance. Both are excellent singers and effective stage presences. They both seem, however, to be inexorably drawn to the very downstage tip of the stage, dead center. The situation is not helped by a set that features, well, nothing. It’s not like I can say. “No, dear, you have to stand next to the table.” or “Go sit on that couch”. Its just 18 meters by 18 meters of flat space. Since no such guidelines can be given, it is my task to sit there and simmer while the two float from their intended positions to the lip of the stage.

The idea of “cheating” is familiar to most people who have ever done a musical at summer camp. It is the practice by which one “sings out” while also appearing to communicate his or her thoughts with someone else on stage. Rather than sing directly at each other (or toward the front), one “cheats” a diagonal position. This is difficult to communicate in the world of Bolshoischeisse. Singers are somehow instructed only to sing straight out into the audience—regardless if they’re professing their undying love to someone, condemning someone to a painful death, etc.

And monitors…what are monitors? Eyes trained on the conductor, baby.

Violent scenes are also especially difficult to refine when working with people trained in this manner. In the third act, one of my singers must slap the other, causing her to fall. Pretty easy, eh? Slap and fall. The first time we tried it, the slapper missed the slappees face by about two feet, and then recoiled in horror at his act, one arm extended in a “keep away” gesture, and the other curled in a rueful fist at this temple. The slappee, for her part, waited the seven seconds until end of her phrase to react to the slap, and then fluttered to the ground like a drowsy butterfly. Where did she land? You got it. Downstage center. We have worked the tits off of this scene. It actually looked pretty great in a rehearsal we had earlier today. Still, there is the old rule…

During a performance…singers will invariable do what they’re convinced of. Not what they want to do, as many of my cynical colleagues may think. That’s really my job, to convince. The thing is, in the Bolshoiworld…I lost that battle before I even began.

The afore mentioned scene ends with a simulated rape. It looks like Peter Pan wrangling a wayward fairy. Anyway…

Singers with limited acting chops (which is referred to as Amischeisse (Ami meaning American, flatteringly enough)) can be forced and finagled into stronger performances on stage. When such forcing and finagling is done with some grace and patience, the results can be quite startling.

Bolshoischeisse is actually a chosen style. Because it’s perceived as more flattering to the voice and singer (and proves a tacit resistance to the bolder theatrical style more commonly practiced in Europe), it is nearly impossible to shake. It’s difficult to “motivate it out”, because when you use terms like “you’ve already condemned her, she’s already dead to you”, it comes out looking like a more strident version of the Sherrill Milnes “claw” gesture you’ve just tried to correct. When I try to explain that the hard lines and stark lighting of the opera call for a more cinematic approach to the opera, any Bolshoi-school soprano will just look you in the face, nod, and proceed to perform her keynote aria kneeling and flailing. Downstage center.

Shit, I like to get gay on old Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas videos on YouTube as much as the next guy. I actually love Bolshoischeisse. In context. Still, in this bizarre, misshapen world of European Regietheater…it kind of doesn’t fit.

Oh well. Upwards and onwards.

On Saturday I have six horses to audition for our next production.

A couple of weeks ago, as I was meandering toward the opera’s cafeteria, I noticed a couple of cool colleagues from the props department in a large storage room that’s usually bolted shut. The room was well on its way to claiming empty status. The two guys, Ralf and Martin appeared to be clearing it out.

Why not? I thought.

“Hey guys, what are you up to?” I chirped. Ralf, the head of the props department (who sounds uncannily female on the phone, to the extreme embarassment of many a colleague, me included) informed me that they were emptying out the in-house props storage, to make room for an additional costume vault.

“Seriously? You mean you’re throwing everything out?” My interior-decor bone suddenly sprang to full-blooded erection. “Everything?”

The best thing about being tight with the folks in costumes, props, tech, and all other varieties of backstage concentrations (besides the fact that these people tend to be much more generally palatable than most other colleagues), is the little prezzies that one can scavenge with some charm and a bit of luck.

This is especially true for someone like me, whose design sense tends toward the “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” end of the spectrum.

I told Ralf not to move another object until I had a chance to come back with some form of transport.

And so I called Daniel. My boyfriend Daniel has, among other valuable qualities, a car…and a spartan preference for minimalism. Until now, he’s been remarkably patient to live within the tangle of Catholic kitsch, mannequin bits, French postcards and antique medical diagrams that constitutes my apartment in Stuttgart.

“Can you please bring your car around later this afternoon? The props department are clearing out their storage rooms and I NEED to get on it.”

There was only silence at the end of the line. “But Lydia, you’ve already got SO much…”

I might have blacked out from disappointed annoyance at that moment…because the next thing I remember is whimpering like a dog into the reciever while he groaned “JESUS. Ugh. Fine, just cut that out. I’ll see you at five.”

Me, Martin and a stone-faced Daniel arrived in props storage later on with a small garbage bag. We would leave about an hour later with a shipping crate. Two busts, one plaster and one bronze, three sets of mounted stag horns, four enormous medical diagrams (one of a horse) and several other delicious effects. At Daniel’s calm, pained insistence, I forewent the toy tanks and oversized greek masks…as well as a waist-high bust of Apollo.

“Nugget, are you okay?” I asked.

“Stuff.” He said dully, fearfully eyeballing the remaining shelves which I’d not yet attacked.

Later, after he’d driven off with my swag, I got to thinking about why I’ve become so militant about such artefacts, which range from the valuable and rare to the cheap and absurd.

I think it’s this: I have no real home. The apartments I live in are rented furnished, for short periods of time, and I move with a station wagon full of boxes, rather than a truck full of sofas, tables and wardrobes. Every second I’m alive, I’m reminded of the temporary nature of my practical life. These bits and pieces amount to the sum of my experiences for the last several years, and their stories are important to me…and are also in many ways much more interesting than the reality I’m living at the moment.

There’s the eight French postcards (basically softcore porn from about 1910) I bought in Amalfi, the two latex headpieces from the tours of “Plays for the Poor Theatre” in Dublin, New York and Berlin. The cigarette poster from Hong Kong. The crude painting on a scrap bit of 2 x 4 I bought from a homeless guy near the Empire State Building. The blinking “God Bless our Home” Jesus and Mary given to me by a dear friend in London, the cheap mini-icons I bought in Vatican City. The head of a 1950’s child mannequin at Karstadt. The CAT scan images from my bike accident in Berlin five years ago. The “The Enemy is Syphilis” lunch box…

Anyway, my props storage swag sat in Daniel’s car until just yesterday, when we had to clear it out in preparation for a visit from his grandmother, mother and her boyfriend.

While he went to gather his family from the train station, I went to work on the plaster bust. I slapped some hot red lipstick on him and topped him off with a lovely pink wig. Then, I placed him high atop a rented bookshelf, next to the red foam head which supports the antique bonnet I ganked from an indie film-set in Berlin a while back.

He’s absolutely delicious. I don’t know what I’d do without him.

Or the rest of it.

There are plenty of you (okay, well like three) who have been asking why I’ve not been writing the last few months. The answer is this:

I was sort of waiting until I had something witty, appropriately trivial and charmingly self-depricating to expostulate upon. In other words, I was hoping that this pesky cloud of cursed fate-splattered self-loathing would dissipate for long enough for me to write something, well, characteristically cute.

Seeing as that prospect doesn’t even qualify as a speck on the horizon at this point, I’ll just throw something together. Hope it doesn’t spoil any well-deserved office procrastination time you’ve chosen to devote to the Kittensnake.

My favorite tortured decision of the last few years of my adult life has defiantly refused to resolve itself in my frequently alcohol-soaked brain. Should I leave Berlin for Stuttgart?

Well. The decision was made. I now fear that it wasn’t the stifling hierarchy at the Komische Oper that was sucking my will to live…rather…it was assistant directing in general. House assisting, to be specific.

Here they’re called Festregieassistenten. In England they’re called staff directors. In the U.S., they’re called staff ADs. Here is the fun little life paradox endemic in all three forms: When you’re contractually bound to an opera house (and that seal is pretty air-tight), you will invariable receive all forms of offers for really well-paid freelance work elsewhere…all of which you’ll be forced, kicking and screaming, to turn down in favor of the gray, thankless labor expected of your contractual obligation.

The other side of the coin, from what I’ve gathered from some friends who decided to avoid contract-renewal, is that once you’re free of a “fest” (firm) contract, guest work becomes as scarce as heterosexual men at a midnight screening of “Dreamgirls”.

Why bother with a house contract then? Well. Good question. We idealistic jackasses are somehow lead to believe that this particualr form of white slavery will put us in a better position to begin directing our own mainstage work…that we’ll earn, from our blood, sweat and tears, the respect of those in positions of power…so as to eventually make that fairy tale jump from assistant director to just “director”.

Lies, people. All lies.

Sure there are seductive moments. Remounting a show is like a hard narcotic…making you high on responsibility and (loosely interpreted) power…so much that you forget that this particular baby, no matter how cute and roly-poly it is…actually belongs to someone else.

I am actually in the unfortunate postion of having directed quite a bit on my own. University stuff. Offity-off stuff (that was fucking dope and toured the U.S., Europe and Asia, I’ll have you know…) and chamber-mainstage stuff. I am significantly worse off that most in my caste…those that are still waiting for their first shot. I know what it feels like, and oh baby, do I remember…

So here I sit, trying to figure out how I’m supposed to stage two brand-new casts into a questionable production of a certain monster Verdi tragedy I’ve learned from a video, a few reviews and an interview, in three spottily attended weeks with only one chorus rehearsal and no final run-through.

Stuttgart, Berlin, Rovno Gubernya. It’s all the same. I guess in the end my decision didn’t really matter.

The problem for me, I guess, is that I still believe in opera. I still love it more than anything. I still believe it can move and change people when it’s used in the correct way. It’s formal powers are nearly limitless. However, in all these hours of list-writing, rehearsal-plan wrangling, glazed-eyed video parroting and general asshole-licking, I can sense my own wonder and innocence in this entire world drying out and crumbling. The bottom line is this. If I didn’t love opera so much, I’d be a much better assistant. As it is, at best, this is basically a state of suspended animation. Every time I fabricate a smile or nod for some dramaturg’s robotic justification for idiocy…I feel the foundation of my entire personality strain to the point of cracking. Every time some talent-impaired yet up-and-coming young director asks me how I managed to sit out a performance in the Artistic Director’s box wearing a bandana on my head…

Well, I just feel like ditching this shit and going to law school.

Paying one’s dues is a normal part of professional life, one tells oneself constantly. Still, if paying one’s dues becomes tantamount to auto-amputation…can it really be worth it? Can it?

The administration floor in Germany is called the Verwaltungsetage. Verwaltung means administration. One of my charming yet mortifying German mistakes is mixing up the word Verwaltung with Vergewaltigung…which means rape. I’ve been corrected for slipping and saying “Vergewaltigungetage”.

The rape floor. In some existential sense, maybe it’s not really a mistake.

And the melodrama draws to its close. Lydia goes to bed. And goes to work in the morning.

With a smile, however frozen, on her face.

As I drew breath after a long session of Chorus notes to say “Thanks, have a good evening!”, a female member of the chorus tugged at my arm and looked sternly into my eyes…

“Lydia. You have to do something about the rabbit.”

Knowing me, I probably tried to smile reassuringly…but it no doubt by that point came across like a sheepish grimace. “I understand,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do”.

The most discussed aspect of the Staatsoper Stuttgart’s latest production of Jenufa wasn’t the mysterious change of stage director four weeks before the premiere, nor the infant beaten to death onstage toward the end of the second act. No.

It was the skinned rabbit carcass carried around by the Kostelnicka character throughout the last third of the opera, as the four months decaying corpse of the afore mentioned baby.

Now, admittedly, I did nearly vomit the first time that thing was used in a rehearsal. The sound it makes when hitting the floor is, well, fairly sickening.

Many arguments have been made in protest of this least fortunate member of the Jenufa cast. There is the Salmonella angle. Also the animal rights angle. The latter was refuted by the argument “Only two, at the most three people can enjoy a rabbit on a plate. Thousands can enjoy the rabbit on stage.”

Okay, I guess that’s a point. In some form or manner.

The main argument, with which I can sort of agree, is that the thing is just fucking nasty. The carcass is worn around in a pouch underneath one singer’s dress (making sure it gets nice and stinky) until it falls out in the third act, prompting an angry chorus scene.

Thing about the rabbit, however, is that it really does disgust the people on stage. When the Kostelnicka runs around, displayng it…the soloists and chorus actually recoil in authentic horror. Some people literally do retch. The scene is, either as a result or despite the fact, totally gripping.

And you know, thank god for that…because to be honest, even from the front row of the audience…no one can even tell that it’s a real rabbit carcass.

Holy fuck this business is strange.

As I was poodling around Stuttgart today, trying not to gnaw my fingernails to stubs over the start of Jenufa rehearsals in two days, I passed by Dr. Müller.

Dr. Müller is a pretty greasy sex shop chain in Germany. Well, I thought, a few minutes of looking at crotchless PVC thongs would be better than the next few minutes spent looking at ground plans of the rehearsal room.

I went in. There I found the most amazing feat of translated English…possibly ever. I spent the twenty euros to buy this odd contraption…for the sole purpose of bringing this magnificent literary artefact to you lovely people, word for incredible word (all errors original).

Enjoy.

LOVE FOLLY: Libido Pulsator

Multifunctional libido transmitter.

APPLICATION: Pull the air-filled pulsator over the erected penis as far back as possible to the penis root.

Effect No. 1: The progressive telescopic effect and air make the penis rampant, thick, superstiff and steadfast.

Effect No. 2: Powefully, stiffly beaming cock.

Effect No. 3: The rampant cock, enlarged in diameter and length, is now introduced into the vagina. The vagina voluptuously accepts the beaming cock which can intrude up to the uterus area. The rampant cock reaches now the G-point without the need for any auxiliaries.

Effect No. 4: The female partner is now exited to wild libido when the cock is thrust against the G-point and, simultaneously, the air-filled pulsator hits the clitoris. The result is a paramount fulfillment of lust.

INFORMATION G-POINT

Prior to the detection of the so-called G-point, this type of excitement was generally refered to as vaginal orgasm (contrary to the clitoral orgasm). Women, who experience the vaginal orgasm describe it as much more intensive. These women most probably get the so-called G-point stimulated. This makes obvious that the G-point (located above the uterus) is generally hardly reached and, therefore, some women prefer sex partners of anatomically strongly shaped cocks. Consequently these women prefer men from specific races such as Africans.

A PRODUCT OF A WELL REPUTED COMPANY

INVERMA

Upon request, I will also offer interested parties the Germany, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and/or Polish translations.

Sick, eh?

I’ve been in the United States for exactly a week now. After five days of attempting and/or accomplishing nothing more than marking the skin of my buttocks with the upholstery of my parents’ couches in Connecticut, I decided to head down to New York City to take care of some business.

And by business, I mean the long-standing "loosely arranged" appointment with the Metropolitan Opera. The Met’s first request for said meeting came about a year ago. "Let us know when you’ll be available to meet"…to which at that point I could only reply "In about nine months, when I’m back in the U.S. again".

Declining my offer of a phone interview, I was told to simply get into contact with the Met should I find myself in New York. I did so about three weeks ago, in preparation for this Thanksgiving visit. I was told to check in on Monday, November 20–late morning–in order to arrange an appointment for later that day.

And that’s what I did. I put on my sleek black pomo best, jumped a train in New Haven (with my mother, who paid for the tickets and then gave me $50. I made the call at eleven, from somewhere near Rye. My contact at the Met, after seeming to totally forget who I am, began a long explaination about why "today and really also tomorrow" would simply be too booked for the colleague I’d hoped to see. During this monologue, my phone lost service (Verizon is a plague). About three minutes later, when I found a signal, I tried calling again.

The call went through to voice mail. I left a message knowing full well that this particular permanent floating crap game would probably not end up taking place in 2006.

So what does an overdressed, overambitious and overly frustrated girl do with an unexpectedly empty day in New York?

She drinks. Wine at The Cirque with my mother. Two cosmopolitans at my dear friend Beth’s HUGE new riverfront apartment (followed by a few rounds of straight Chopin). At some point the phone rang.

The Met: "Hi Miss Steier. Wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wuh-wah wah wah wah wah keep in touch."

Well. At least they called. I hope I was at least able to slur something gracious before hanging up.

Shortly thereafter, Beth and I bounced down the street, where I spent the $50 from my mother on a manicure and pedicure.

All in all, a perfect New York Day.