A night at the Opera. This was a memorable experience, yet not for the reasons you would think. We arrived at the "Queen Elizabeth Theater" early. Our logic was that an opera house must be an interesting elitist establishment to explore. See people in their formal attire attempting to belong in a world and class which they normally do not frequent. Also, see people who really belong in a class which WE do not frequent, the Lawyers, corpodroids and moneyed real estate magnates of BC.

Well if that was our intention, we were in for a disappointment. We arrived at closed gates. A reception was going on, though nowhere to be seen and the plebs had to wait outside for a few minutes in BC's coldest weather (sub zero I tell you). An amalgam of retired school teachers, accountants, young professors (that was us), and some more retired folk patiently wearing faces of expectation and frustration stood outside the doors waiting. The agitators were of predictable origins, they were a Greek, a very critical American (N), a local elegantly dressed elderly gay man and a french-Canadian lady (the one I have branded as a school teacher). The Anglos were predictably quiet, accepting their fate of queuing, as if they were waiting a bus on Piccadilli Circus.

The time of our wait in the cold was used productively as we scrutinized the apearance of the building. Well the QET is no architectural gem. (S)he who tells you that is a big fat liar. In fact the QET tries to appeal to your more nautical senses. It evokes the lines of a ship in its indoors spaces, only it is no modern Norwegian or Danish floating pleasure palace that we are experiencing here but rather the Greek Island hopping ferry with its worn 1970s carpet and exposed metal ceilings. The crew itself, fits the profile of such a naval extravaganza, for all that they are at least more polite than the Greek sailors.

Entering the concert hall itself you notice that the seats are the same seats on which your mother sat when she attended that Barclay James Harvest concert wearing a collar that hang to her hips and bell-bottom pants. In describing all this I should note that the idea for this purely objective invective was not mine. It was N's declamations, worthy of Quinntilian's pen and Cicero's tongue that inspired my writing here. Like a Lady Macbeth of the blogworld I slash away and describe. Like her, I have no guilt. In any case eventually the lights were dimmed and we were exposed to what originally was a very weird spectacle. you see, the stage decoration for the opera was overall very good and quite effective, yet the first choral piece where the choire of witches predicts Macbeth's future was so badly done, with such kitschy dresses, funny choreography and 70s disco lighting that we were truly afraid that the whole opera was to follow along the quality of our sinking ship of an opera house.

Happily for our experience, the rest of the opera was quite good, though admitedly not the best of operas (put the blame on Verdi for that though). Lady Macbeth was certainly the largest presence on the scene, not in terms of her talent (of which her CV says that there has been a lot) but rather in terms of girth. The woman for all her singing skill, had the worse presence one could bring on the theater floor. When enntering the scene you were not sure whether she was going to say something sinister, omething dripping with blood, or whether she would ask for the potato peeler and head for the kitchen.

The evening ended well, with the good guys winning and us on our way home to a cat in need of attention.