Coincidence

I had dinner with a friend last night. Pasta, wine . . . the good stuff. I went home and didn't sleep well; had strange dreams, tossing and turning with images of kidnappings and small, enclosed rooms and being in a high rise, floating above a nameless city with no hope of escape. Not a great thing to wake up to in the front of your thoughts.

I found out today that my friend had almost exactly the same dream. We were nowhere near each other and we did not talk about kidnapping or high rises or small rooms. It was baffling and creepy and goes way beyond coincidence.

That's only happened to me once before and it was not a good thing. On the day my uncle fell into a coma after a terrible car accident, my mother and I both woke up with the same dream in our thoughts. A hideous red snake was chasing us in the dream with a wide-open mouth and an ability to spring upwards towards people as they tried to get away. We were sitting at the breakfast table and both just happened to mention it.

How does that happen? How does such a strange image imbed itself so deeply into the subconscious of two separate people? I am in awe of those things I know I do not understand.

We decided that it must be the wine...

Besides supernatural occurances, rehearsals are going very well and we have worked through the entire show several times over. I think the cast is ready for stage (as am I), but I'm not sure the stage is ready for us. I hear them pounding away down there, sawing and cursing and listening to bad arena rock while we are up in the rehearsal hall with our arpeggios and cadenzas. This set came to us as a partial. Much of it was destroyed in a flood and so we are left with a shell and the opera has had to build large portions of it. In a way this is good because the set will have an automatic touch-up, but it makes for more work than this company is used to methinks.

It's just now dawning on me that I will be touring with this company. Granted, we only go to two more cities in the surrounding area (the furthest being 3 hours away I think), but talking to the asm tonight about piling in a van and trying to fit the luggage in and stopping at truck stops on the way (a van full of opera singers at a truck stop?) was a little more than I was ready to bear.

I really like this show. It's some of Handel's most inventive work. Agrippina sings an aria in the second half, "Ogni Vento," which is a positively triumphant little waltz, and another of her arias "Pensieri mi tormentate," has a downright modern feel to it as she does her own version of a mad scene, clamoring barefoot up the steps to hang on each gold throne in turn, screeching to the audience before she collapses at the footlights with the creepy supers in their punk wigs staring down at her.

Also in the second half, Nero sings an aria, "Quando invita la donna la mante," that has the feel of a drug haze, and it is, as his minions surround him feeding him cocktails and drugs. The modern dress and sentiment fits easily into the music and story. It's dirty and seedy and awful and terribly funny all at the same time. A bedroom farce told with some of the most unlikeable characters in human history.

It's nice to have such a scintillating cast (and I say that with no sarcasm whatsoever) as well.

Thank god for good work; life on the road would be all but unbearable without it.