The Opera Queen and I

This past fall I saw Anna Bolena at the Met. I went with a dear super hottie super platonic friend of mine who was perfect enough to get us tickets.

It’s a hot show so we were up in the nose bleeds a bit but there aren’t really bad seats in the Met. I immediately feel back at home whenever I hit Lincoln Center. Even just the smell. I spent a great deal of my childhood backstage at the Met. Sounds elitist perhaps, but fuck you. Live my life and then tell me that.

I could smell the Opera Queen that was to sit next to me before I saw him. His typically overpowering yet devastatingly tasteful cologne signaled the entrance of an Opera Queen. A type with which I am very familiar.

I am, in my own way, a heterosexual Opera (if not just straight up Drag) Queen. The majority of my childhood baby sitters went on to become World Class Opera Queens I’m proud to say. I can only hope my influence had a tiny bit to do with it.

It was a lovely show but, the Tenor struggled mightily. While there is a terrifying roller coaster element to watching someone struggling onstage it is draining and terribly, terribly stressful. Having grown up surrounded by performers living and dying on that very stage, I am biologically primed to live and die with them. When they fly it is exhilarating and orgasmic, when they struggle it is painful and harrowing for me. I hang on their every note breath movement, anticipating with horror the next high note or run that might be their final demise. It is a nauseating, exhausting, adrenaline drenched experience for me. Though as I said, also somewhat exhilarating. I, of course, want them to succeed. I want ALL performers to succeed onstage. I’m right up there with them believe me. But even failure or the threat thereof has its charge.

I tend to exclaim and gasp in apprehension (and elation) aloud (Yikes! No! Whoops! Shit!) and squirm around in my chair if not literally jump up. Like I said, I want them to succeed.

About a third of the way through the first act the Tenor’s troubles began in earnest. I squirmed and gasped and braced myself against the subtitle partition in front of me for support, as the Tenor ran out of breath before the ends of his phrases. No one around me really seemed to notice my reactions, except perhaps in passing. Some strange man squirming around gasping in the dark holds little allure or interest for the jaded Met audience. But the Opera Queen sitting next to me, he noticed. He noticed and he joined in. This is not to say he wasn’t fully engaged in his own extreme reaction set before. I’m sure he was, I was just too distracted by my artistic sympathy pain writhing fit to notice. But I quickly found our gasps of fear and/or disappointment were synchronized. Very soon after that his hand would squeeze my knee for support during a particularly harrowing passage. Then I upped the ante and actually took his hand at the beginning of the first act finale. It just felt right. We even began to slightly rock back and forth in unison, our clasped hands held at shoulder level, each chanting our own silent mantra of empowerment that the entire finale not be thrown off and descend into cacophony. We looked strange perhaps, but that thought did not even occur to me.

While sitting in the red velvet chairs of the Metropolitan Opera, holding hands with the strange, sweet smelling gentleman sitting next to me, lost in a mutual desperate prayer that the tenor finish the run or at least not give himself an embolism, puke onstage or cause me to do the same, I realized I was very much at home and where I should be.

We barely spoke at intermission and after the performance simply went our separate ways. But the sweet overpowering scent of his cologne stuck with me for hours, as did the sweet memory of our shared experience. Although I will most likely never see him again, there is little worry I will run into another Opera Queen by chance at the Met with whom to share the intense emotional journey of the failures and triumphs of the performance. After all, it’s the Met. The odds are stacked in my favor.