Turandot was great. Since it was very warm today, the opera house was a little stifling. All those bodies close together and all that breathing makes for a stuffy balcony. The sets by David Hockney was fantastic, although I couldn't see all of it because I was up so high. I rented opera glasses, and that made sitting so high up not as torturous as I thought originally.

The balcony is an interesting place to sit. There is such a variety of people, including the very young and the very old. It's fun to see teenagers at the opera, or parents and their kids. I'm always amazed at the types of people you see at an opera, and the spent the breaks checking out what people were wearing. There was an older woman who was done up like Frida Kahlo. I don't think it was intentional however. She looked so fantastic, like she stepped out of a painting or something. I loved her.

The style of dress went from a young girl in a tshirt with cutoff sleeves, black bra strap showing, torn jeans and a body to die for, to my Frida Kahlo lookalike, to women in ball gowns. I don't know about you, but a ball gown at a 2 pm opera matinee is a little excessive in my view. A definite non-city, out of town, from the country/suburb look.

I loved the music of Turandot, but in the program I'd read that Puccini died before finishing it. Since the ending was a littel abrupt, I wonder what the ending was supposed to have been like had he not died. One article writer speculated that Puccini would have added a consumation scene between Turandot and Prince Calaf, which would have made the ending less abrupt. Oh well.

This is one of the most accessible operas that I've seen. The music is modern in that the singers get one chance to sing their bit. There are hardly any repititions like in other operas. I read about this in the brochure. And it's true. The singing is so much more dramatic because the singer has to put everything into the song, which makes for a highly emotional opera. I could hear sniffles in the third act, which meant people were crying.

The singer playing Prince Calaf, John Villars, was quite handsome as the prince. Turandot was sung by Jane Eaglen, who is an English Soprano, and Liu was sung by Patricia Racette. Nessun Dorma got a around of applause at the end.

I really got the feeling for what a macho guy the prince was, and how manly he was. He was so self confident that he would win Turandot. You do feel sorry for Liu the slave girl, and wish that the prince would fall in love with her instead, but then if he did there wouldn't be an opera. In marrying Turandot, the impoverished prince gets back what he lost, and I think this is what drives him partially, although I also believe that some people do fall in love at first sight.

What's diffcult to understand, is how Turandot goes from a heartless princess to one who can fall in love. To me it's almost as unimaginable as Juliet killing herself in Romeo and Juliet. Juliet starts off as a young teenager, and at the end becomes a mature woman who would kill herself because her lover has died. Very few actresses can pull that transition off. I'm not sure if the opera manages this kind of transition either, and again one has to wonder how different the ending of the opera would be had Puccini lived to finish it.

Turandot reminded me of the sleeping beauty myth, but in a twisted version. The prince in The Sleeping Beauty story has to cut through a wild thicket to enter the castle and kiss the princess awake, who was put under a spell by an evil witch. Turandot takes revenge of men, because some ancestor hers was raped, and in the end the prince kisses her and she comes to life. I was also reminded of the Shakespeare's play, The Taming of the Shrew. It's the universal theme of the icy, bitchy woman woman who must be tamed by the macho manly man, who himself must also undergo trials to have his love. And of course, true love triumphs in the end for the lovers.

I found myself identifying with both Liu the slave girl and the icy mean princess. I have played both roles in my life. The woman dying of love for a man, who doesn't know she exists or if he does, sees her as only a friend. And the icy woman, who lets no man near her out of some reason known really only to herself.

I never identified with the prince though, but I think that's only because I don't believe in love at first sight. I've met guys where I instantly knew that there was amazing chemistry and rapport, but I've never called it love at first sight. Lust at first sight maybe, but never love at first sight. I wonder if it's a guy thing, more than a chick thing.

The only experience I had that would come even remotely close to a love at first sight experience was in college. I saw sitting out with some friends enjoying the sunshine, when I saw this guy walk across campus. I immediately told my friend to check out the guy; he was really cute. I then told her, that I was going to go out with that guy some day. I never thought further about what I had said that afternoon. The following school year, that very same guy sits down next to me at a lecture on Russian Music. We talked for a bit and that was it. A couple days later while at a bar with a friend of mine, I again run into the guy.

To make a long story short, we both ended up going out with this guy, her first, then me. Very funny, I think. My girlfriend confided in me later that she thought he only really liked me, and went out with her to get to me. Whatever. He really was cute, and I think he's now a playwright in NYC. He was quite the romantic, and wrote me a poem, which I still have and one day will probably frame. He was into Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan at the time, so the poem reflects both these influences.

Not sure if this story quite makes it as a kind of love at first sight, or even one of those spooky coincidences story, because my college did have only 1,200 students, which meant that there was high probabality that I would run into this guy again at some point. I'm still chuckling at the memory of my friend and I dating the same guy, one right after the other. How college like!!

I watched the first episode of Ken Burns' Civil War series, and I have to agree with some reviewers. The series is very slanted towards the North, and towards slavery. Shelby Foote was in the series, and I want to get all his books on the civil war. In my elf girl chronicles story, I'm making the elf people were an agrarian culture which is the south was ike during before the civil war. I want to model some of the fighting in my story, on how the south fought in the civil war. The elf people are battling against the humans, who have more modern equipment and the civil war is perfect research material for my story. I also want to give the elf people many of the southern values of service in the military, strong family ties to the land, etc.

There will be no slavery though. The only slaves in the story will be the elf people, who are turned into slaves at the end and who were treated very much like the american slave population was in the time before the civil war. The humans will makes laws that will destroy elf culture, break up the families, take away freedom and landownership rites, keep the children apart from the parents, separate husbands from wives, etc. A background in civil war history, and a history of life in the south will defintely come in handy for my story.