Synopsis

After a couple weeks’ hiatus, I’m back in the Indie Ink Writing Challenge. It’s good to be back, folks. This week’s prompt comes from Head Ant, who writes:

An opera is being written about your life. Summarize the first act.

I’ve put the challenge at the top this time because I wanted to explain a little bit about what I decided to do with this totally exciting and incredibly daunting task. An opera about my life?? How in the world would anyone be able to put my complicated life into approximately three hours? I mean, heck, Harry Potter’s life had to be told in almost 20 hours, and they left out huge chunks of plot from the book. Not that I’m anything like Harry Potter, but you know what I mean.

Most opera plots paint pictures in very large brush strokes. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at some of this year’s Twitter #operaplot contest submissions, where you have to summarize an entire opera plot in 140 characters or fewer.

The whole medium of opera necessitates skimpy plots because most of the stage time is taken up with arias about how a character is feeling. Often, action will take place off stage and explained in exposition by one of the characters as a storytelling tool to move the plot forward.

In addition, the characters portrayed in opera are usually larger-than-life archetypes who make stupid, stupid mistakes. It makes for great storytelling, but terrible living…and I decided at a very early age that I had had enough drama in my childhood to last a lifetime, so I tend to avoid the stupid, stupid mistakes as an adult. (Not that I don’t make mistakes, mind you; I just don’t make monumentally stupid, opera-worthy mistakes. At least I try not to).

With that in mind, I decided to create my own autobiographical opera synopsis in the style of Les contes d’Hoffmann, which is a collection of stories in which the poet E.T.A. Hoffmann is the protagonist. Each act is a fantastical tale that deals more in metaphor than reality. (This way I can also protect the identities of the innocent and not-so-innocent…but the overarching story is still autobiographical in nature)

I also decided that if I was going to create an opera synopsis, I couldn’t just stop at the first act; I had to finish it. Also, I decided my opera was going to be sung in Italian. Just because. Clearly I had way too much fun with this challenge!

My challenge went out to Penny, who will post her answer to my prompt here before the end of the week.

The Adventures of Supermaren: the opera

Cast

Maren – mezzo-soprano
Teresa, her friend – soprano
Gianmarco, a suitor – bass-baritone
Giotto, a lawyer – tenor
Stefano, his friend – tenor
Raimondo – baritone

Chorus – friends, party-goers, wedding guests

Dancers
The Puppeteer
Young Maren (child dancer)
The Mother
Puppets

Synopsis

Prologue: Ballet-Pantomime

The Mother and The Puppeteer dance a pas de deux. Young Maren enters, and The Puppeteer begins a puppet show for Young Maren. During the show, The Mother leaves, and the Puppets begin to play with Young Maren. At first she is delighted by the attention, but soon tires and looks for her mother. The Puppets do not allow her to leave. She begs The Puppeteer for release, but instead, he attacks her and forces her to dance a twisted variation of the first pas de deux. The Puppets carry her off the stage.

Act I

A Victorian Mansion.
Maren is in a tower, singing of her romantic ideal and wondering if there is someone out there to sweep her off her feet (“Chi sarà il mio principe?”). Her friend Teresa enters, with news that the guests are arriving for her birthday party, and that the very rich Gianmarco is expected to attend. They sing a duet about the potential of a rich mate (“Non mi dispiacerebbe”). They descend the stairs to find a party in full swing. Gianmarco arrives with his friends and immediately declares his love for Maren (“Non riesco a respirare”). While he is singing, however, The Puppeteer arrives and Maren becomes afraid. She is the only one who can see him. The Puppeteer begins moving Maren around the room, throwing her first at Gianmarco, then making her spurn him. Embarrassed, Gianmarco becomes angry and tells her how worthless she is. She begs him to understand, with a reprise of “Non riesco a respirare,” but The Puppeteer makes it so that she cannot sing the right words.

Gianmarco laughs cruelly at her antics and says that two can play at that game; he picks a random woman, kisses her in front of everyone, and announces that the party will continue at his house. Laughing and cheering, the crowd follows him out the door, leaving Maren alone.

Act II

A library.
Giotto and his friend Stefano are arguing over a legal point and having a great time with their debate. Maren enters, singing sadly, with The Puppeteer not far behind her. Giotto asks who she is. Stefano replies that she is a singer who has been cursed to be unlucky in love. Giotto then asks who the man is behind Maren, and Stefano does not know what he is talking about.

Curious, Giotto approaches Maren and the two start a conversation about their love of books (“I libri possono cantare”). Giotto points out The Puppeteer behind Maren, and she becomes frightened. When Giotto addresses The Puppeteer directly, he does not answer, but gestures menacingly at Giotto. Giotto encourages Maren to confront The Puppeteer, using some of the most powerful words in the world: Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“Difenderci, O angeli e ministri della grazia!”). Defeated, The Puppeteer disappears and Maren is released from his clutches.

Filled with gratitude, Maren declares her love for Giotto, who sadly informs her that her love can never be requited because he only has eyes for Stefano. He leaves her, quoting the holiest of books, Winnie the Pooh: “You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

Act III

A Renaissance Faire.
Maren and Teresa sing bawdy songs about how they don’t need a prince anymore: just someone who will please them. Raimondo, who has been watching them sing, stands up and applauds. He will please Maren quite well, he boasts, and takes her into his arms. As he does so, The Puppeteer appears, and attempts to capture Maren once again. But she is no longer afraid of The Puppeteer, and she joins hands with Raimondo and Teresa to banish him once and for all (“Basta, basta!”). Defeated by the power of love, The Puppeteer loses all his magic, and his Puppets, now freed, surround him an devour him.

Epilogue

Maren and Raimondo are married, and for a wedding gift, he gives her a red cape and tells her that she has the power, through her words, to reach others who have been abused or held captive by their own fears. As she puts on her cape, Maren pledges her love to Raimondo and they declare that they shall conquer the evils of the world together, to the cheers of the throng (“Evviva, evviva!”).

Here are some of my own submissions to the #operaplot contest (no, I didn’t win):

Exiled prince meets tyrannical queen who decapitates her suitors. Of course he’s got to have her now. Typical. [Turandot]
Don’t you hate it when your boss is after your daughter and you try to assassinate him but you kill your daughter instead? [Rigoletto]
Bad-ass dude is taken down through paranoia by a disgruntled worker. Though strangled, his wife sings for a while before dying. [Otello]
Hey girls: saved by a hot guy in a swan boat? Do you want to marry him? Then listen carefully: DON’T ASK HIM WHERE HE’S FROM. [Lohengrin]
Ugly monster gets bullied by children, grows up to be an existentialist. [Grendel]
If you love someone, stab her in Act IV. [Carmen]

May 18, 2011May 18, 2011

Slow Dance

“We need to find you a boyfriend.”

6th grade Maren with violin — This was me pre-braces, circa 1984-5. I can't find any REALLY awkward-looking pictures from that time period, but maybe that's a good thing.

It was the fall of 1986. Earlier that year, the space shuttle Challenger had disintegrated 73 seconds after launch, and Halley’s comet had reached its perihelion. I was 11 years old, going on 12, and had just started the seventh grade. My gangly limbs seemed to grow faster than my body. I wore braces and glasses, and my frizzy brown hair had a mind of its own. Never mind the fact that I played first violin in the orchestra, attended GATE accelerated classes, and couldn’t get enough of Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels. You guessed it: I was a nerd.

“Who, me?” I glanced at my new friend. Rose and her father had moved into a house down the street a few months earlier. She went to Hoover Middle School, just like me, but she was far more sophisticated than I. We ran in completely different social circles at school, but when we were at our houses, away from school, we got along just fine.

“Yes, you. Don’t you want one?” She held up her hand to her face, palm facing me, and began gently blowing on her newly-painted blue fingernails.

I wasn’t sure what to say, so I picked out a bubble-gum pink polish from her collection and began to paint my own fingernails. I always kept my fingernails short to play violin, and I was dismayed to notice that my stubby-fingered manicure paled in comparison to her graceful, slender digits.

“What kind of boy do you want? I can get you anyone,” she boasted.

“Uh…I don’t know.” My mind lept to Richard, my first crush, but I quickly tossed out the idea. I had come on a little strong the previous year, and now he wasn’t talking to me anymore. Okay, so I’d named my pet rabbit after him and drawn lots of pictures of him in my notebook. In hindsight, maybe that was a little creepy.

The only other boy I really knew was Gabe, a scrawny pipsqueak of a kid who was in my English class. He had a ready smile for anyone and liked to make fun of our English teacher, which made me giggle, but…well…he wasn’t exactly dreamy.

“Well, let’s see…” she paused, mulling over what must have been her extensive mental Rolodex of single boys. “Do you want a virgin or a non-virgin?”

The question took me aback. Were you supposed to pick out boyfriends as if they were bottles of olive oil at the grocery store? “I…er…”

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “I think you’d be better off with a virgin. That way he won’t pressure you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

This kind of conversation was a little beyond my comprehension. I had only just begun to read ‘Teen magazine, which touched on issues of sexuality, but only in an abstinence-friendly kind of way. I had not much contemplated being kissed, much less that there might be something else to do after the kiss.

But I could tell Rose was determined to set me up. “Um. Okay,” I said, as I watched her frosty glossed lips curve upwards into a smile.

“Fantastic! I know just the guy.”

At homeroom the next day, the tinny voice over the loudspeaker announced that Hoover would be holding its annual winter dance in two weeks. Rose looked over her shoulder at me and mouthed, “This is perfect.” Embarrassed, I looked down at my textbook and pretended to be studying math.

At this point in time, the entirety of my romantic world view was informed by Judy Blume books and movies like Sixteen Candles. All I knew was that a dance would mean that I might meet that special someone, and I would have to dance with him. Maybe even slow dance. How would this even work? Was Rose going to invite this boy to our school dance? Was he going to pick me up and take me there on his bike? Or would we have to take the bus? What if I didn’t like him? What was I going to wear?

Endless questions swirled in my mind for the next two weeks. Rose was swept up in her own preparations and had no time to talk to me, even after school. And then, the morning of the dance, Rose slipped me a note in homeroom. I opened it to find these three hastily-scrawled words:

“HE’S NOT COMING.”

Crestfallen, I glanced at Rose, who was studiously avoiding my gaze. I thought I should feel sadder, but somehow I was okay with not meeting this mystery boy. Truth be told, I had been a little frightened of meeting him.

I decided to go to the dance and just hang out with my friends.

The winter dance was held at the gym of the school, just as you might expect. There were some balloons and streamers decorating the walls, but it still looked and smelled like the gym. The lights were dimmed and a DJ was set up on one side of the room. Kids were mingling, but not very many were dancing. Everyone seemed a little too scared to actually get on the dance floor.

I did a little bit of bobbing up and down to the beat from where I was standing, but mostly I looked around to see what everyone else was doing. Rose was in the corner with her circle of friends, laughing loudly. Only two of my nerd friends were there, and they weren’t dancing, so I felt a little exposed.

I saw Richard on the dance floor. I waved at him, and he half-smiled and turned away.

I swallowed and felt my cheeks getting hot.

“Hey, how are you?” a voice said behind me.

I turned around. It was Gabe. Skinny Gabe with his crooked teeth. He was smiling at me.

“I’m okay, I guess.”

“I can’t tell if you are dancing. Are you dancing?”

“I don’t know.” I smiled and shrugged as I bobbed to the music. “This isn’t dancing?”

All of a sudden, the song ended, and the next song that came on was “Open Arms” by Journey. The piano/synth introduction played out as many of the kids fled the dance floor. Gabe held out his arms. “Do you want to dance with me?”

“Um. Okay.” I took his hands.

It was awkward. We didn’t know where to put our hands as we swayed to the music. Gabe kept making jokes about how silly the other kids on the dance floor looked, and I tried not to think that we looked just as silly. I didn’t really feel like leaning in to him the way they did in the movies, and he didn’t make any moves to pull me close.

After the music ended, he waved goodbye to me and went to talk to some of his other friends. I joined my nerdy friends at the side of the room, and the dance was over soon afterwards.

Gabe never stopped smiling at me in class, but he never made any attempts to go out with me either. I think neither of us was ready for that kind of commitment, but we both wanted the experience of dancing a slow dance. And I don’t know about him, but I’m glad I got to do it with someone that I trusted.

This week’s Indie Ink Challenge came from Runaway Sentence, who gave me this prompt:

open arms. not the journey song. unless you insist. ah, it’s up to you.

Most of what I wrote here is autobiographical. I had to change up some of the time frame to help with the storytelling, but essentially it’s all true.

You can read FlamingNyx’s response to my prompt here before the end of the week.

April 18, 2011April 22, 2011

Brisé (Broken)

I loved you from afar for so long.

I first saw you on stage at The Nutcracker, and immediately I wanted to be in your arms. I was so young then, a child — far too young for this kind of love — and you were already older than I realized, but I had no thought to our age difference. You had the ability to sweep me off of my feet and carry me away from all my troubles, and that’s all I cared about.

But you knew I was too young. You were kind to me, but made no demands, and when I left you to pursue other pastimes, you let me go.

I was 16 when I thought I was ready to pursue you. I was barely a woman, limber and energetic, but I knew that was the kind of girl you liked. So I went for it.

That was before I found out how cruel you could be.

First it was my weight. If I was serious about you, I’d have to lose the weight, you said. And then, when I didn’t do what you asked, you hurt me.

The punishment started with little things. A sprained ankle here and there. I wasn’t too bright, you see. I didn’t know exactly what you wanted me to do. But the day you pushed me down in front of my entire jazz class and dislocated my knee, I started to get the message.

After that incident, you and I parted ways for a while. I healed, but not completely. We met again that year after college, when we both worked at Busch Gardens. I was more mature, a little more savvy, but I couldn’t help but fall back in love with you. We danced the tarantella every day. When we were together, I felt exhilarated. Beautiful. Graceful.

But I still wasn’t good enough for you. I saw you with those other girls, those younger girls, those prettier girls. You had plenty of pas de deux to dance with them, and I got jealous.

We had fought that morning, you and I. During our warm-ups, you threatened to hurt me again. I ignored you. I didn’t think you would possibly do it again.

But you did.

It was the last show of the day. I was exhausted and sweating under that hot sun, and we danced one last tarantella. I made a turn, and you pushed my knee out of place. The same knee that you dislocated before. I collapsed, screaming, on the stage. And suddenly, you were nowhere to be found.

A few days later, at a follow-up visit with my doctor, he told me that the muscles around my knee, because of the repeated injury, were intrinsically weak. I went through physical therapy to get back to baseline, but I would have to continue to maintain my leg muscles for the rest of my life if I wanted to not dislocate my knee a third time.

That’s when I knew you had broken me in a way nobody could fix.

That’s when I realized you and I were never really a good fit.

But you, Dance (Terpsichore, Nataraja, Cernunnos, or whatever you wish to be called), you are a bigger dream than I could ever hope to catch. I still love you…I always will. But I will love you from afar, watching you leap and promenade with my dancer friends, the ones who are strong enough to stay with you.

I know you still love me, too, in your way. I see you in the eyes of my waltz partner. I hear your heartbeat in the rhythm of the songs I sing. But I stay on the safe side of your love now, because I am afraid of what you might do to me if I wander too close to your brilliance.

This week, my Indie Ink challenge came from FlamingNyx, who wrote:

Write an uncensored letter to the one person that broke you in ways no-one would ever be able to fix.

I hope FlamingNyx can forgive me for taking a little bit of artistic license, since Dance is not technically one person. Everything else about the story is true, however.

You can read Leah’s response to my challenge here (it’ll be up by the end of the week).

April 12, 2011April 12, 2011

Eggs Wait for No Man

I was six years old when my mother started teaching me how to cook.

We started by making chocolate chip cookies, and I loved the idea that you could take several different things, mix them up, and they would magically turn into something else. We had taken it slowly, step by step, my mother watching as I carefully measured and poured the flour and sugar, and even letting me stir the batter until my arms got too tired.

The next morning, I was eager for more kitchen wizardry. “Mommy, how do you make eggs?”

Ever obliging, she pulled a chair up to the counter and invited me to stand on it so I could watch and learn while she made breakfast.

Crack-crack-crack went the eggs on the side of the bowl. I watched the yolks pour out of the shells and float like little golden islands in a sea of egg white.

My mother pulled out a fork and started furiously beating the eggs in the bowl.

“Can I try?” I asked.

She handed me the fork, but all I could do was impotently stir it around in the bowl. I looked up at her questioningly.

“You have to do it really fast, Mae-Mae, and you shouldn’t really be stirring. Watch me in slow motion.” She lifted the fork a half an inch above the liquid and then plunged it back in. She started off very slowly, and got faster and faster, until all I saw was a vertical fork-colored oval shape rising out of the frothy eggs.

I giggled.

She handed me the fork again, and this time, she moved my hand to show me how to do it. I could make the motion now, but I was not nearly as fast as she was. I was upset that I couldn’t blur the fork, but she said that I didn’t have big mommy muscles, so of course I couldn’t go as fast as she could.

When the yolks and whites had blended into a lovely yellow mix, my mother announced, “Now we add the special stuff.”

She directed me to sprinkle chives into the bowl as she added a dollop of milk to our concoction (“to thicken it up,” she insisted). Mix-mix-mix went the fork, and at last it was time to heat up the pan.

She dropped a tablespoon of butter into the heavy cast-iron skillet, and I watched the creamy square bubble and sizzle as it melted. She picked up the pan by the handle and angled it this way and that so that the butter could slide all over the skillet (“No, no,” she warned, “only strong mommies should pick up the pan.”). It was important, she explained, that we cover the whole bottom because we didn’t want the eggs to stick.

“And now,” she declared, “it is time to cook the eggs.”

I watched, enthralled, as the golden liquid poured out of the bowl and began to coalesce into solid form before my very eyes. My mother began to quickly move the eggs around with a spatula, telling me that this is why they’re called scrambled eggs, because she’s scrambling them around the pan.

And then, to my dismay, I felt the call of nature.

When you’re six, and you get that urge, you don’t have a lot of time before it turns into an accident. “Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom. Can you wait for me?”

“Okay, sweetie.” She continued working on the eggs as I raced to the potty.

When I returned, refreshed, I was very disappointed to find that my mother had finished making the eggs; they were now on my plate at the kitchen table.

I had wanted her to wait for me. I had expected that she’d be able to stop cooking, to pause as if on a tape, and pick up exactly where we had left off. I began to whine.

My mother looked at me. “Eggs wait for no man,” she declared with a flourish. “Now eat them before they get cold.”

That simple sentence meant more to me than my mother ever thought it would.

It was the first time I realized that the world didn’t revolve around me, that things would continue to happen whether or not I was in the room or observing them. My world suddenly got much, much larger, and I was ready to accept that reality.

Eggs wait for no man. Once a physical reaction is set into motion, it is difficult to slow or stop it, and almost impossible to undo. There’s no use bemoaning the past; just make sure your eggs don’t burn, and enjoy them before they get cold.

So, while some people might compare life to a box of chocolates or a bowl of cherries, I say life is like a plate of eggs. Scrambled, poached, or sunny-side up, those eggs are the irrefutable result of change.

And I think change can be deliciously good.

This week’s Indie Ink Writing Challenge came from Jen O., who gave me this prompt:

Reflect for a moment on how something from your very early childhood, seemingly menial at the time – a television program, something you overheard an adult say, etc – came to affect you profoundly in your adult life. If you can’t think of anything appropriate, this can be fiction.

Jen O. gave me another prompt a couple weeks back; you can read that response here.

You can read Karla V.‘s response to my challenge here by the end of the week.

February 28, 2011February 28, 2011

Round Midnight

I remember the first time I ever met him. I had just finished a performance of Carmen at the San Francisco Opera, and as I climbed into the car waiting outside the stage door, I heard a strange sound coming from the back seat.

“Look who I have with me,” my mother said with a smile. She pulled a box from the back and handed it to me.

There was something moving inside the box. It meowed.

Of course I knew I was getting a kitten. This was my gift from my mother for turning the ripe old age of eight, and I had actually visited the family of kittens a few days earlier to pick the one I wanted. When I had played with them all, I had decided on a gray striped kitten who had been very rambunctious. I knew that I was going to call him Tigger.

I opened the box with anticipation and found…a tiny black kitten.

No Tigger.

Confused, I looked up at my mom and said, “I think you got the wrong one.”

She sighed and apologized. Apparently, by the time she had gotten to the family’s home, there was only one kitten left, so she took him. “But,” she said, “he is Tigger’s brother, so I am sure he’s also going to be just as fun.”

I started petting him and he purred loudly.

“Plus,” she added, “black cats are way cooler than other cats. Some people think they have magical powers.”

A magical cat? That sounded like a trade up to me. “But…what should I name him? He’s not striped, so I can’t name him Tigger.” My exhausted eight-year-old brain was trying to come up with clever names. All I could come up with was “Kitty,” and I knew that was just dumb.

“What about Midnight? He’s as black as midnight, after all.”

Looking at this tiny little black ball of fur, I nodded in affirmation. As we drove home, I started telling him that his name was Midnight, and that we would be friends. By the time we had made the hour-long journey home into the far reaches of Marin County, I had dubbed him Sir Midnight of Forest Knolls.

As I grew up, he was my best friend. He comforted me through convalescence after a broken collarbone, a dislocated knee, and numerous sprained ankles. He loved watching me garden, and did his best to kill any bugs, newts, or birds that got in my way. His favorite napping spots were the porch, the laundry basket, and the roof (which he reached by climbing the plum tree that grew next to our house). He was incredibly intelligent, and learned how to open the sliding glass door for himself to let himself out.

We could never teach him how to close that same door, much to our chagrin.

When my mother’s boyfriend tried to molest me, Midnight knew. After that incident, he spent more time with me, on my lap and in my bed. When I fell into depression, Midnight would come over to me and sit on me. He would look at me with those big green eyes and tell me that he wasn’t going to let me kill myself, and if he had to sit on me to stop me from doing it, that’s what he would do. He weighed 20 lbs. He was not a small cat.

When I went away to college and my mom started dating a woman who was allergic to cats, Midnight had to leave the only home he had ever known. He lived with my dad for a year, but my stepmother complained bitterly about having a cat in the house. And so after my second year in college, it was decided that I would bring Midnight back to the East Coast to live with me in my new apartment.

I know he was traumatized by the plane trip, especially since the tranquilizer we had given him had worn off by the time my delayed flight finally touched ground in Boston. The poor cab driver had to hear him yowl all the way from Logan Airport to Powderhouse Square; I tipped him extra for his trouble.

Midnight lived for 13 years. He died of intestinal cancer that I had not been able to catch early on (I was a poor college student and didn’t take him to the vet very often). I wasn’t even there when they took him to the vet, because I was at a summer apprenticeship program. When my subletter/catsitter told me what was going on, I borrowed a friend’s car and drove from Rhode Island to Somerville. The vet explained that they could do surgery, but there wasn’t a very good chance that he’d have a good life after the surgery…plus, I couldn’t afford all those expenses; I could barely afford the cost of putting him down!

It was an extremely difficult choice, but I wanted Midnight to be happy. I could tell he wasn’t happy at all the way he was, and after all he had done for me, I knew I needed to be strong for him.

I watched as the doctor injected him. I petted him and told him I loved him.

He purred loudly. He knew I was there.

And then his purrs got quieter. His breathing slowed.

And then he was gone.

I cried a lot that night. I drove over to my boyfriend’s house and spent the night sobbing in his arms. Midnight had been everything to me as I was young, and I blamed myself for not taking care of him better as we both got older. But I was still young then, and he was very old, and I know now that it was just his time to go.

I’d like to think that he’s still around, watching from afar. My husband and I now have two wonderful (and crazy) cats, Itchy and Scratchy, and I like to think that Midnight has given them tips on how to deal with me. Just because they’re not black cats doesn’t mean they don’t have magical powers, too.

(I wrote this post because I was inspired by someone who will be taking her dog in for surgery today. My thoughts are with her.)