Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Her “Bell Song” was to die for.

Sunday, Feb. 4, 2007
10:31 a.m.
With my new digital camera in one pocket and a pair of birding binoculars in the other, I joined up with a number of opera enthusiasts at the arches yesterday to board the buses that took us to Montreal and a performance of Lakmé. I sat next to a woman I know, the mother of an elementary school friend of my son’s, whose first name I couldn’t remember until we got off the bus in front of PIace des Arts. My conversation alternated between her and the new classics hire, who was on the trip with her husband, a very large-headed man with a strong Irish accent. Even though I couldn’t remember Christina’s name (you see, I eventually got it after someone else addressed her), she remembered me and all my family members and asked rather detailed questions about me and them when I really have no interest in her life at all. I find that kind of annoying.

Arriving in the big city, I got off the bus with three other girls, one of them is actually a music student, a flutist, and we four floundered through the layer of dirty snow on the sidewalk, making a bit of a gaggle.

Eventually we found ourselves at ArchambauIt, the music store, and met up with many of the other people from the other bus, who invited me to join them for dinner at a restaurant on St-Denis and DuIuth, but wander around as we might, I and my gaggle never found it, deciding instead to eat at Le CommensaI, a vegetarian, cafeteria-style eatery where the food is excellent and cheap, and we could get out of the cold. The most entertaining part of that, besides the very tasty meal, was that the tall girl in the photo totally loaded up her plate with a little bit of everything, and ate it all. I was impressed. Her plate was as clean as though she had licked it. Thus fortified, we walked back to the concert hall and climbed the seven flights of stairs to the balcon for our seats in the nose-bleed section.

The opera itself was spectacular. The story is set in India during the Raj: English boy meets Indian girl, they fall in love, boy has to leave girl, girl dies. The costumes and sets were wonderful, and the soprano (which is the only reason one puts on a production of this opera) was spectacular. Everyone was good, actually, but she was incredible.

The bus got us back to L’ville just before 2 a.m., and that was my day at the opera.

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