As I left the Met a week ago on the last day of the season, I must confess I breathed a sigh of relief.  Götterdämmerung would be the last strains of opera I heard for at least a couple months.  This past year Shawn and I saw over 20 operas at the Met alone, not counting NYCO and other small productions.  This is not to say the operas weren’t great, but going from a couple operas a year to close to 30 was a test of endurance at times. And I have to admit my audial overload has caused the line between operas to blur a bit in my head.  Rondine pieces will blend into scenes from Turandot or Otello into Ballo in my audial memory.  A sad side effect from my opera crash course.
So it was a relief to my inner ear this past week to be invited to a cocktail party, not an opera, by one of our friends, Alice Kandell, a Met Super and Patron of the Arts.  She was having a celebratory event for Vital Voices, a group which is not at all opera related, as I had feared.  Vital Voices is a non-governmental organization that grew out of the U.S. Government’s Vital Voices Democracy Initiative started by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Madeleine Albright in 1997.  Vital Voices, among other things, identifies, invests in and brings visibility to women around the world.  They do this by investing in leadership and skills training for entrepreneurs and leaders in business, human rights and political policy.  They have many programs, but the party our friend was throwing was for women who had just spent the past three weeks at Vital Voice’s Mentoring Program with the likes of Martha Stewart and other top female executives in New York.  The mentees were from all over the world and enjoying their final night in New York.  What a great program.  And no opera.