Letter from Paris: A Plight at the Opera

Dear friends,

I hope you are sitting down as you read this, because it’s in this letter that I will reveal the shocking truth: I am an uncultured swine.

This will not surprise those who know me well. They are aware that my family tree is more of a creeping vine–spreading widely, but never far from the dirt. I’m not ashamed in any way of it, quite the contrary. But if things I’ve said or written have given the impression that I must have been raised by the sort of people who were never without a volume of Keats close at hand, or who thought of Tchaikovsky as pop music, you are mistaken.

My relations, if they still think of me at all, will tell you I was a horrible little snob even as a child. That is true. Nevertheless, there are significant chunks of my brain that remain stubbornly lowbrow, and from time to time they flash like my hometown’s single traffic light.

That’s what happened last week when I went to the Palais Garnier for an evening of contemporary dance. I have nothing at all against contemporary dance. Unfortunately, I lack the prerequisites required to appreciate it. Therefore, I do not seek it out.

On this night, for reasons, I was compelled to watch it.

The member of our party who organized the outing mistook the start time, which meant we were too late to be seated for the first half. I did my best to look disappointed and suggested we drown our sorrows across the street at the Café de la Paix. The others would have none of that.

They allowed a kindly usher to lead us to the tippy-top of the house.

We were slipped into an empty box from which about five percent of the stage was visible. On the other hand, we were just below Marc Chagall’s gorgeous ceiling and at eye-level with Charles Garnier’s famous chandelier.

While they craned their necks trying to see whatever gyrations were going on, I realized I had a new-to-me perspective on what is, after all, my favorite building in the entire world.

I took a bunch of pretty souvenir photos,

then pulled a chair into a corner–it was dark as a mineshaft in the box–and took a nap.

After the interval, however, we were transferred to our official seats several floors down. I, as the shortest, was put into the front row so that I could have the best view.

The best view of this.

Yes, that is a bidet on the stage of the Paris Opéra.

My friends, nothing good ever follows a bidet in front of the act curtain. I considered bolting. Too late. There were four pairs of dance maniacs crammed between me and the door of the box and the lights were going down.

A lady lurched onto the stage. She wore a flowing tunic and a single long braid that to me signaled unhealthy obsessions with macramé and wheatgrass juice. Hidden musicians struck up an electronic dirge.

The lady danced a Sad Dance around, and with, the bidet.

The crowd was silent. Breathless. The house was nearly full, and every pair of eyes except mine were fixed on the stage, where the pas de bidet gave way to an agitated Highland Fling involving vacuum cleaners.

The piece was all in that vein: convulsions and stomping and household appliances, in the service of blazingly original points such as “relationships are hard” and “modern life isolates us from one another.”

I certainly felt isolated. Little me in my little seat, bewildered, while several thousand people sobbed because the lady on stage (a different lady, wearing the wrap skirt of ennui and the fedora of frustration) was dancing an Angry Dance with a door.

I had knitting with me. Right there in my bag. The bag in my lap. Deadline knitting. I could feel the knitting inside the bag, so close, not being knitted. I’m working night and day on samples for Season Ten of Knit Stars, in which I (along with my bosses here at MDK) am one of the Stars. (They said it, not me.)

My series will be about shadow knitting, with two new designs, and this one was in the bag.

I wondered if I could gently, gently, slide open the zipper and slip out the knitting. I wondered if I could covertly work a few rows in my lap, in the light spilling off the stage.

I imagined two thousand angry dance freaks, aghast at a stray click of the needle, tearing me limb from limb like modern maenads in fancy sneakers.

I can’t tell you how long the second half of the performance was, but it felt like six weeks. It was one of those agonizing situations–if you are reading this, I’m sure you know it–in which one is uncomfortable and/or bored, but one is for whatever reason not able to get through it by pulling out something to work on.

It was an “if only I had my knitting” moment. Yet I did have my knitting. Yet I didn’t dare knit.

Please let me be clear. I don’t expect anyone to express a tear or even a modest sigh for my having been bored in a box at the Palais Garnier. The flip side of my upbringing is that I’m still grateful, desperately grateful, to be able to live where I live and see the things I see.

Even when I don’t understand the things I see.

Even when the bidet starts to dance.

Cordialement,

Franklin

PS The performance got an enormous, endless cheering ovation. To my great relief, however, it appears that contemporary dance companies do not believe in encores.

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