A Day at the Opera is a remembrance by Jack Rusher, published here Wednesday, January 21, 2004. It is part of Memories.
Loose connections sometimes persist beyond reasonable boundaries.
In December of 2001 a new opera by Robert Wilson, based on the play and with music by Tom Waits, came to the Theatre De L'Europe at Paris. I am a great fan of Tom Waits and I was, at the time, living a kilometer from the theatre.
The advance tickets were sold out. I arrived early and queued up for will-call tickets. The will-call queue was extraordinarily long, especially for a matineé — we stretched far into the lobby and up the stairs, seated in order of arrival.
As I sat on the stairs, writing in my journal, I noticed a lovely young woman seated one step down from me. She was also writing in a journal, but her writing used a different alphabet from mine, Cyrillic or very stylized Greek. I overheard her answer a question in distinctly North American English and, later, another in very serviceable French.
I couldn't help myself. Her name was Lenka. She was from Belgrade, but she had an American mother and an aunt in Paris, from whom she had acquired her surprising linguistic versatility. She had hitchhiked to Paris to see the show, listening to Tom Waits the entire way. We chatted for the rest of our time in the queue, both despairing of missing out on the remaining will-call tickets.
When we arrived at the ticket counter they had only two tickets left, both in the grand box of the theatre. We each purchased a ticket and were treated to the best seats in the hall for something on the order of thirty-eight dollars.
The opera was fantastic, in turns dramatic and hypnotic, frenetic and heartbreakingly sad. We both wept during the final scenes, holding hands in a momentary bond of artistic solidarity.
After the opera, I helped her into her winter coat, donned my own, kissed her on both cheeks and departed. We never saw each other again, but I still feel a connection to her over this time and distance because of the experiences we shared that day.