Here comes the sun
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It’s been sunny in the Valley this week. Though when I say sunny, what I really mean is it’s been roasting-your-arse-off, hair-is-a-fire-risk, hot. Temperatures were sweltering, so Mr Tweddle wasn't entirely thrilled when we had to leave the comfort of the air conditioner and travel downtown to see an opera. (Yes that’s right, I said opera. Take that, Timothee Chalamet.)
I have always loved opera. Not all of it obviously, I'm not mental. I'm not a big fan of old tubby guys in tights pretending to be war-torn soldiers, or giant women in Viking helmets singing about dying of consumption and the like. And you give me Gilbert and Sullivan and I give you a punch in the face. But show me something with mental costumes and great sounds, and I am wholeheartedly in.
My boys reckon I say I like opera just to annoy them, so I explained that I think opera is a bit like Cirque De Soleil, but instead of people doing amazing things with their bodies, they do incredible things with their voices.
I told them how my first proper opera was Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, and sitting in the theatre watching an entire chorus of guys dressed in bowler hats and suits blast out this crazy song in Latin about the great plague was such a bizarre assault to the senses that it made my skin tingle.
And they were almost convinced, then I made one mistake. You see, they asked what was my favorite opera. And I answered that I wasn’t sure, but it could be this one, where a sea monster falls in love with a lady who isn't interested in him because she's in love with a shepherd. Lachlan looked disgusted, and Fergus asked if I was on drugs.
Anyhoos, there were no sea monsters this week. Mr Tweddle and I headed downtown to watch LA Opera perform Philip Glass’s Akhnaten.
If you don't know about Akhenaten, he was a real-life renegade pharaoh, who changed Egyptian religion from worshiping many Gods, to worshiping just the one God - who was called Aten - who was depicted as a big disc like the sun - and Akhenaten conveniently represented himself as the son of Aten.
Over the years, historians talk about him being either a religious lunatic or the precursor for Jesus. Either way, he was rubbish at the day to day pharoahing of Egypt and people were pissed that he pulled down all their old favorite temples. So, when Akhenaten died, he was replaced by his son Tutankhamun, who brought back all the old favorite Gods again. And that was the end of my TED talk. (You're welcome.)
I loved loved loved the whole thing - even though there was actual juggling on stage (of which I’m generally not a fan). The theatre was completely full of people who seemed to feel the same as me, as for the most part, the audience were mesmerized. I say, for the most part, because there was a group of four women in the row in front of me, who I think must have gone out for a chicken dinner, or something, and someone inconveniently started performing a large-scale opera in front of them. They were chatting and nudging each other, and I was about to get all snarly until I realised they had one pair of opera glasses between them, which they were passing to each other. This passing of the opera glasses became much more frenetic when the guy playing Akhnaten got his kit off, and there was the chance of a penis to be observed.
Mark is not a big fan of opera, and also has his own penis to look at - should the mood take him. But one of the things I love about him is when he knows I love something, he will try to understand why. So during the first interval we had one of those, ‘What do you think? Well, what do you think?’ discussions.
Mark was never going to be a fan of the music of Philip Glass - he is a verse-chorus type of guy and Philip Glass is what they call minimalist - there’s no karaoke favorites in any of his compositions. And Mark dislikes juggling even more than I dislike juggling. And the amount of money that had to have been spent on the production must have been astronomical because the sets and the costumes were so lush, and the sheer amount of people on stage must have cost a kidney or ten. So he asked me the question I always ask when something has annoyed me, “Why now? Why make this now?”
And my answer was easy. “Because this is a story about a guy who invented a new God that he claimed to be the son of. And at the end of the day he died. And right now, there are a load of guys reinventing themselves as Godlike, with their money and their power, believing somehow they will be immortal. But at the end of the day - spoiler alert- they die, just like we all do. And these guys who run the world right now and see themselves as untouchable will one day be nothing more than a picture on a commemorative vase, or a curiosity in a museum, or, if they’re very lucky, they’ll have opera made about them, and they’ll be played on stage by a guy with an impressively sized penis. That’s why now.”
And Mr Tweddle must have liked that answer, because we drank our drinks and went back into the auditorium for another two hours of mesmerizing music, and sound, and four women getting in a scrum over opera glasses whenever the guy playing Akhenaten opened up a full frontal.
When the opera came to an end, Mark and I clapped for a bit and then escaped through an exit door at the back of the auditorium into a dark, musty set of stairs that was miserable enough to be the passageway inside a pyramid - had the inside of the pyramid been furnished with 1980s linoleum.
Mark, channeling his inner Indiana Jones, led me down level after level of stairs until we pushed through a final door to emerge into the richly decorated foyer, feeling a sense of joy akin to Howard Carter in The Valley of the Kings.
We were in and out of the parking structure by the time the mass of people emerged from the opera, and we were back home sitting in our own backyard in 40 minutes. Sipping on some cold drinks, Mark said he didn’t not like opera, but suggested that next time we could go to one that was ‘a bit more songy.’ And I agreed.
And the next day the sun rose. The self same sun that once had risen on Akhenaten and Tutankhamun and on the trillions and trillions of other lives that have existed under its light since the first sunrise of this little blue planet. And I thought about how I was glad I hadn’t been born a pharaoh, or a pharaoh’s wife, or a cockroach, or an amoeba, or a Trump, or a juggler, or a mongoose, or a goat.
And I thought about how the most valuable things in any life aren’t really things at all, but moments and choices and connections and experiences. And I thought about the four women battling over the opera glasses to view the most prestigious penis in town. And I laughed.
Lynn
Xo
PS: Every time you click on the wee heart emoji, some wee woman with opera glasses gets to view a very prestigious penis. Total lie of course, but wouldn’t it be magic if it were true.
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