The rake's lack of progress

Saw the COC's Don Giovanni whilst in Toronto and honestly, it was one of the low points of my vacation. You know the climax of that opera? When the rake is confronted by the stone statue of the man he killed, and the stone statue demands he repent, and the rake refuses, and then gets dragged off to hell? You're quite likely to know it, rather likelier to know it than the climax to most operas, both because Donny G is awfully famous and because it was featured in Amadeus, as the thing that showed Salieri how to get to Mozart.

Anyways. The COC staging was repellent. They'd obviously broken the bank on War and Peace, which my opera boyfriend told me had actual trench digging in it, so they staged the ending cheap, as a conspiracy to scare Donny G to death by the other characters. The timing was thoughtless; the character had just plowed through a massive dinner so it looked like he died of indigestion. Holy. Fuck. COC. People notice when you cut corners. You're not a businesswoman who can get away with picking up a new blazer at Winners from time to time. You're a fucking opera company staging fucking operas. If you can't show Donny G getting carried off to hell, don't show Donny G.

All that having been said, the actual singing was charming, Donny G looked like a peice of ass, and Zerlina and Masetto were delightful. I did enjoy it, after all. Obviously. It's a great opera. But the only thing I got out of it that I wouldn't have got out of listening to a CD at my opera boyfriend's swanky new condo on the Esplanade was a sense of vertigo from sitting at the fifth ring railing.

Dealing with the décalage: a Red Dragon story

Home again, or here again, anyways. I was pitching a bit of a sulk on the way back as there was nothing I was happy to be returning to after the lovely time with my family and with the great city of Toronto besides the F-word, who's mobile. But now that I'm actually here, where for the moment at least things are green (Toronto was still orange and red as well, but North Bay was in the grip of an early winter when I'd left), and my cat is happy to see me, and my coffee is made with unpasteurized milk, and people can walk places instead of taking cars without starting rumours about their financial ruin, and sex is even better than I'd remembered, and we have meals without animal flesh in them so maybe, possibly my weeklong intestinal bricks will soften somewhat, and my boss is so lovely and accomodating that when I blearily called from Paris at 8:30 in the morning moaning that I'd be late because I'd got stuck on the tarmac for three hours because of a security scare while I'd been sitting in the middle of a gaggle of Italian 14 year olds - yeeeeeurgh - he told me to not bother showing up until today.

Wise of him. I was barely functional yesterday - just happy to be back with the F-word. Didn't sleep a wink in between the time I woke up in my neice's bed at 8 in the morning on Sunday in Canada until I finally collapsed last night at 6:30 in the Belgian evening - kept myself awake all day yesterday after scraping my sorry self into the apartment around 11 in a desperate bid to cope with jet lag in one fell swoop, despite increasingly frequent and heartrending hallucinations about my neice, nephews, Luke Duke and consort still being present in the room/vicinity. The bid seems to be working so far; eyes popped open at 7:30, unbleared as two little daisies.

We'll see how things go as the day progresses, and tomorrow maybe I'll wake up in time to tell you about the seven movies I managed to watch on the Air France flights. I love that about Air France, those lovely screens in the back of the chairs. Too bad their stewardesses are such bitches. I got up to change my rag on the flight back during the constant fucking turbulence only to get a peremptory 'non!' from one of them, as the seatbelt light was on; not ready to start spitting out the cursed Gallic language once more after two glorious weeks of Anglo-Saxonia, I wordlessly flashed her my unwrapped menstrual pad in front of the aeroplane, and enjoyed watching her face turn red as staining panties while she shrugged and gestured me onwards towards the can.