Week Twenty-seven......Time For Silliness

My baby has some interesting tastes for a child.  She is a "show junkie."  If it's playing at the old Art Deco theater, she is happy to go and see it.  It doesn't matter what it is, really - kids' musicals, Haendel's Messiah, Broadway shows, even (or perhaps especially) opera.

Now, I love music.  And my tastes range widely, from Eminem to Josh Groban (who, by the way, is Babygirl's favorite after Selena).  But opera has never really been my gig.  But that was, honestly, before I ever got to SEE an opera.  So although I'm still not a fan of listening to it, I do like to watch it, especially with my little one. 

But I have learned something important about opera.  It isn't just music, and pretty costumes.  It's libretto.  And the words to opera add up to some pretty incredibly heavy themes.  I made the mistake of taking my baby, then aged nine, to see Faust.  The libretto is flashed for the ignorant unilingual among us on a screen above the stage.  I am reading this to Babygirl as we go along.  But really, how does one explain a deal with the Devil that returns you to your youth so you can seduce an innocent maiden, get her pregnant, abandon her so she loses her mind and kills the baby?  And then she choses the death penalty rather than make a deal with Faust and the Devil to extend her freedom? 

So I've learned to check ahead.

Three weeks ago my mom called.  She wanted to go and see Madame Butterfly and take Babygirl with her.  Hmmmm.... "Mom, it's a pretty dark story.  Butterfly cuts her guts out in the last scene."  "No way!  I saw it when I was nine and there was no such thing!"  So she keeps bugging me about it and I finally said okay, but I just know this is going to be another Faust LOL. 

A week before the show my mom is going on about how excited she is to be seeing a Gilbert and Sullivan show.  Pardon?  Madame Butterfly is so NOT Gilbert and Sullivan!  Finally I figured out that mom was thinking of The Mikado, which, to give her some credit, does have Japanese characters also.  Needless to say, the suicide in the final scene of Madame Butterfly came as something of a shock to her.  Babygirl took in in stride (I HAD warned her) but argued that Butterfly  just "should have divorced that loser and gotten on with her life." 

Between the two of them I had all I could do to not simply laugh out loud in the middle of a death scene.

We are going to see Peter Pan tomorrow.  That should be easier to handle.

DeeDee