Her “Bell Song” was to die for.
10:31 a.m.
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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