Great operatic experience

I met Lisa and two of her friends from New York at the opera last night. We had a wonderful time. We had two courses of our meal at one of the opera house's restaurants before the show. Then the bell rang for us to be seated. We watched the first act, then the bell rang again and we went back to the restaurant for our dessert. At the next intermission, we went back for coffee and petit fours. Now this is the way to enjoy opera -- to intermingle it with constant eating and drinking.

The opera itself was such a pleasure to watch. Renee Fleming was superb as Violetta, and when she finally died in the last act, I was almost crying. We got to meet her backstage afterwards as we were with a friend of hers. When her assistant opened to door to let us enter her dressing room, there she was dressed in a black finery and diamonds, looking beautiful, after having died of TB onstage just moments before.

Also waiting to meet Renee was Patrick Stewart, Capt Picard in Star Trek. I wanted to say ENGAGE! and MAKE IT SO to him but I stopped myself. I snapped photos of us backstage but he'd turn around so his face wasn't in the picture.

There he is behind Lisa and Rodger, holding a red program.


I was wondering how it is that celebrities get backstage passes to meet each other. Do they call up and say, "I'm a celebrity, I want a backstage pass to meet another of my kind?"


This is the only picture I have of us meeting Renee Fleming backstage. There is bad camera shake; my daughter's boyfriend fixed it as best he could but I think I'll just have to think of it as an 'artistic' photo instead of an accurate representation of what we looked like.