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I’ve been tweeting about opera tonight, My experience of opera is a bit different from most...

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 23:01:19 -0400

I’ve been tweeting about opera tonight, My experience of opera is a bit different from most people’s.

I used to work for an opera company. I started watching opera as a student, when it cost me almost nothing, and I went to work there, in the finance department, for a pittance of a salary, because I loved it. I got to see all the productions for free, and a lot of the rehearsals.

Set design, like everything else, goes through fashions. The fashion at the time was for the somewhat surreal, and impractical. In one production of “La boheme”, when poor Mimi was dying, very vocally, of tuberculosis, as Mimi always does, being at the same time both challenged of lung and the leading lady with the best sing-y bits, her heartbroken lover Rodolfo raced to her in a passion of grief, down a spiral staircase. He gained momentum as he went, and it was clear from the second curve that he wasn’t going to make it. By the time he hit the stage he was a blur. He shot straight past her into the wings, leaving cheetahs coughing up dust in his wake. (He was lucky. A couple of degrees to the left and he would have landed in the orchestra pit).

Rakes were all the rage then. A rake, in theatrical terms, is a stage that slopes down towards the audience. Theatres strove to out-rake each other in those days. In “Tosca” the eponymous heroine throws herself out of a window to her tragic death. Having the window at stage level is anticlimactic. Putting a sign saying “6th Floor” with a big arrow pointing at the window does not fool an audience. Raising the window so your leading lady runs up a ramp and throws herself out of it is dramatic.

Having a competitively raked stage with an additional ramp so steep that your leading lady runs on the spot for three seconds in front of the window then slides down the ramp backwards on her face is so funny that you sometimes have to take members of the orchestra outside and threaten them with a good slapping before they’ll stop laughing.

This is my first post on Tumblr. Is it post or posting? Either way, it’s not what I...

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:47:53 -0500

This is my first post on Tumblr. Is it post or posting? Either way, it’s not what I expected.

I wrote this tweet http://bit.ly/13X7ANY about suicide on antidepressants. It came from the fact that my life is better than it’s been in 15 years, but I’m still unhappy. I’m not taking antidepressants (although I have done in the past, with no success, and a great deal of not being able to take antidepressants). The improvement in my life is through circumstance. Divorced, single, and childless, and at an age, and in an economic climate, when most women like me are losing their jobs, I was lucky enough last summer to not only get a full-time job, but one close to home, working with people I like, with a salary that’s not downright insulting, and in a field that interests me. I fretted through the 6 month trial period, and just hit the 7 month mark, when I realised the only person fretting was me. I haven’t suffered from a bout of real depression since I started working there. Anxiety, yes. Depression, no. (Yeah, I thought I was more complex too, but apparently not).

But I’m not happy.

One of the problems with depression is that it makes you depressing. You subdue the world and the people around you. You make things sad, through no fault of your own. When the house falls on your Witch of Depression, the munchkins stand around asking gloomily “What do we do now?”

I expect you have to do a lot of Not Depressed things before things look better. Coming out of sadness and depression isn’t MGM Technicolor rainbows. It’s a lot of little things. A lot of little nice things. Tell depressed people who feel better that the sad world around them is their own fault NO DON’T DO THAT.

Not being depressed doesn’t make your life good but not being depressed lets you at least have a decent look at it. I’m trying to tidy up the edges. At least now I know where they are.

What do I know? I had to write something eventually. (Do I sign my name at the end? Is it legally binding?)