bitter sweet

There is a bitter-sweet thing about coming home from an opera run. First of all the opera gets under your skin and you wonder what, apart from get pissed on côtes du rhône and cuddle cats that smell of moonlight, you can do between 8 and 11.30 pm. (I know it's sad) Then there's the people. What was E's date like when she got home? Will A's shoulder get better? G's tendonitis? Will T and R get married? H accept the full time job? J pass the audition? D get her acupuncture degree? One gets used to hearing the daily updates. Above all, will M still think of me - the person he described on his facebook message as such a nice lady - when he eats pasta puttanesca in some hip joint when he is singing at the Met in New York?

M, our marvellous bass, our Figaro and frequent visitor to the pit (no primo uomo he, rather a primu emu) and I decided, over Thai prawn curry, that in the chaotic improvised scene before number 20, his 'mamma mia' and 'spaghetti' were getting a bit boring, so a list of Italian ingredients was, it was agreed, to be posted by me on his facebook page before each show, and he would try to slip the words in. They ranged from fagiolini (little farts as well as beans) to the aforementioned whore's pasta, full bodied tuscan reds such as brunello and montepulciano to strange rarely heard of pasta forms suggested by our Italian bass player (orrechiette, strozzapreti...) Each night we would sit through the hysterical laughter of the conductor and the orchestra members who could actually see the stage, and the odd polite twitter from an audience member (am I really allowed to have fun in mozart?) and wonder what they were all going on about. You can imagine how, under the black canope that was the underside of the stage, we looked forward to scene 20! M was a star. He kept us waiting and he delivered. Every night. (Well, except for one.) He even managed to get the word vindaloo (rhymes with ragu, I thought) in on the last night as he rushed out of that scene for the last time in a good while.

So, home at last.

I know! I'll make bitter-sweet green tomato chutney!

Well, perhaps i'll do that tomorrow.....

Meanwhile, Julian is upstairs having the first real massage of his life. It's taken me and Kelly a year to get him on that table with his ohthisshoulderhurtsandthattendonfromholding brushesandthebaseofmyspineouchand....
and now he's already talking once a week.

Cheers! I'll drink to that!



ps. Here's a painting Belinda did of me playing at our friends Max and Lucy's wedding.