Cody’s blog

I had a good run yesterday, finishing my seven miles in just under two hours. Getting up at 6 am, though, left me pretty tired for the rest of the day. I should have taken a nap… but I didn’t.

I did manage to get everything on my list done: cleaned the fish tank, pumped water, and also did a load of laundry including my running clothes.

In the afternoon, I watched the DVD of the opera Turandot that I got recently. Despite the fact that I was so tired, I kind of dozed through part of it, I really loved it. Heh. Recalls the first time I saw it….

In the fall of ’94, I was living in San Francisco and had season tickets to the opera on Friday nights. That was the fall I bought my condo on Divisadero Street. I had scheduled the movers to come and collect my stuff on Wednesday, and had spent the previous week packing. The apartment on 17th Street that I was moving from was very dusty, and I stirred up so much dust while packing and cleaning that my allergies got worse and worse until, when moving day arrived, I was sick as a dog. I still managed to get everything I owned piled into the new condo, then went to work trying to arrange things so that I could get from one room to another and have space to sit and sleep.

All day Thursday and Friday, I was still sick and exhausted. If it had been any other opera scheduled for that Friday night on my season tickets, I probably would have just skipped it. But the new production of Turandot, with sets by David Hockney, had garnered such rave reviews that I really wanted to see it. So I put on my dress and dragged myself off to the opera on Friday night.

The opera was stunning. And I think my exhaustion actually played into my thorough enjoyment of it: I wasn’t sleepy, just physically wrung out. I barely moved throughout the three hours of the opera, and got completely caught up in the lush music, gorgeous sets and costumes, and the over-the-top story. I adored the Hockney set design: the stylized cutouts of the city, the broad sweeps of color. I have always been amazed and delighted by the wonderful things lighting can do to a set: the way certain parts of the staging can appear and disappear, suddenly changing the mood by differences in color and emphasis.

I particularly remember the very end of the opera: it’s dawn, Calaf and Turandot are in blue, the stairway and backlighting are blue, and the rest of the set is in black shadow. Then the Emperor appears all in gold. As Turandot sings her final line, the shadowed cutout walls begin to glow red. It’s sunrise, and Turandot’s newly-born passion. And the entire set gets redder and redder and redder. I remember sitting there thinking, it could not possibly get any redder—and then it did! It was a red that was almost palpable, it was so deep and brilliant and red.

I’ve seen other versions of Turandot, including the Met’s, which was also beautiful. But attending the Hockney production in San Francisco in its premiere season will always be a special memory for me, and so when I decided to get myself a DVD of Turandot, I of course chose the recording that was made of that production. Sigh. I love it just as much now as I did then. It was a lovely way to pass a summer Sunday afternoon.

Jerry’s tummy troubles seem to be over. Yay! Here’s a picture of her in the kitchen, with demon-kitty eyes.