I got an award!

And no, it's not that of "Queen of Lamest Blog Titles Ever". I only came in second for that.


The ever fabulous Raisa nominated me for a Blogger Award, which is very cool of her. There's a rule attached: tell my readers 7 non-operatic things they may not know about me. So here goes:

1. I'm fascinated by psychology. I adore it. Learning why humans react the way they do to situations is one of my favorite things, and I devour novels that deal with such topics. I also write them.

2. I had a deep and abiding yearning to be a Scholar of Some Importance as a teenager. Unfortunately, I'm really not made of scholarly stuff: I love to learn and research and write, but mostly in the realm of fiction. Dealing solely in fact irritates me, whereas the "what is" of writing is oh so enticing.

3. At one point in time I wanted to be a costume designer. I made loads of costumes, particularly for my home town's Renaissance Faire, and particularly outfits based on The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. I even spent a semester as an intern at the Utah Opera Company. Alas, that was when I realized that I'm really just not very good at things that aren't, you know, fiction, so I eventually gave it up. And I don't miss it.

4. I am incurable Romantic who has a hard time believing in the concept of True Love. And when I say "Incurable Romantic", I mean the head-in-the-clouds poet/writer/artist type who spends their days wandering in the woods and falling down holes, starving genteelly in Paris or Florence, and eventually dying horribly of TB. The ones who churned out poems and novels and music on such things as Death and Life and Life and Death. You know, that kind of Romantic.

5. I have always had a Thing for stories of Unjustly Imprisoned Men. I fully blame The Count of Monte Cristo and The Man in the Iron Mask for this. What did they do? How do they deal with it? What if they escaped? What if they were broken out? When I discovered Fidelio, it wasn't so much a surprise as a long time in coming.

6. I grew up with a deep and abiding hatred of Germany. Between my Jewish grandmother and her stories of the Holocaust and my immigrant father with his stories of escaping Cold War East Berlin, my judgement of the country in which I now live was one of deep disgust and shame for my ancestry and heritage. It took me years to get over it.

7. I love to cook and have been doing so for as long as I can remember. However, I have a hard time getting excited about actually eating. It's the joy of the act of creation that I like. I've been known to make food and then not eat a bite of it, but give it to other people with an "Oh, no, I don't eat X; I just wanted to try the recipe" attitude. This drove my mother bonkers growing up.

Now I'm supposed to tag a bunch of other people, but I'm not really comfortable doing that, so I'm gonna only pick one. And that is Lucy, from the fabulous, educational and informative Opera Obsession. Have at it, Lucy!

The Horror of the German Kinderlieder tape

Back in the fall of 1995, when I was nine years old, my family decamped from the recession-ridden backwaters of San Diego to the hippy-strewn wilds of the San Francisco Bay Area. My dad, a professional piano technician, had gotten a job with a new company up north, and so we packed everything we owned up and off we went.

That winter and spring were spent getting used to the newness of our surroundings (easy version: San Diego=desert, NorCal=forest). The following summer, my parents decided that it would be a good idea for us to learn even more about our new neck of the woods, and to that end, arranged a vacation for us. It was simple, elegant, and destined for disaster from the word go: a week-long family road trip up to the Redwood National Forest, and back again, staying in hotels and seeing historical sites (forts, mining camps, thousand year old trees) along the way.

We set out on a warm summer's day, crammed into the car with enough books, snack food, and music to last us at least a month. One of the tapes we had was a cassette of German Kinderlieder that my aunt had sent us, that we had occasionally listened to because, well, we're German. It was actually a really cool cassette: a large children's choir singing all the German standards. My little brother and I would put on our fake German accents and sing along, sending our baby sister into gales of laughter. We set out on our adventure with this cassette playing merrily along. It was still in the player when we stopped for lunch.

It was the hottest part of the day. Our car had a malfunctioning air conditioner. The cassette melted into the player.

Now, such an occurrence would render the tape unplayable, right? Wrong. That tape lived in the tape player, merrily singing away, for six months.*

To be honest, most of what I remember about that trip is learning every single song on that tape by heart, and trying to sing it in a variety of accents, or with farting noises (the glories of being ten, right?). By the time we got the tape player replaced, we could ALL sing the songs. All of them. To this day, there are certain songs that I simply cannot hear without going into gales of semi-hysterical laughter. My brother and I were out and about in Berlin the other day and heard one of them (I don't know the names, just how they go) and nearly died.

"Do you remember that tape?" he asked me.
"Dude, I will never forget it," I replied.

Never, ever. :)

*Somewhat to my horror, all of these songs are on YouTube.

31 Days of Halloween: Day 30

As a small child, I was terrified of the Bogeyman. Convinced as I was that one wrong move could strand me in a world of cabinet-dwelling dolls, this should come as no surprise. Don't get me wrong, I loved me a good scary story. I just couldn't handle it once the lights were out.

When I was around six, I saw an absolutely terrifying animated version of "The Nutcracker" in which the Mouse King's minions were children who stayed up too late and so were turned into mice by a 30-foot tall magician who dragged them kicking and screaming out of their windows and then threw them into the gutter. I didn't sleep for months after that one. Instead, I would lie curled up in bed, unable to sleep, convinced that if I looked out the window, I would see this evil bad man coming to steal me away and turn me into a mouse. And yet for some reason, this movie never put me off of Tchaikovsky's music, which was a staple to my childhood experience.

Thanks to Google, I now know that this film of horror is Nutcracker Fantasy, made by the Japanese, and that I was not the only child to have been traumatized by it. Seriously, who starts a kid's movie like this?!

31 Days of Halloween: Day 28

When I was very little, I often spent the night at my grandad's house. My grandmother, who died when I was four, had collected a whole slew of dolls, a passion that runs in the family (don't get me started on dolls; if I had the money, I'd have a ton of them). The dolls lived in a huge glass-fronted cabinet in the main living room, a small army of porcelain figurines decked out as Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Scarlett O'Hara, and every other fairy tale and fictional heroine you can imagine. I wasn't allowed to play with these dolls, being limited to the American Girl dolls that she had gotten for us grandkids. But I used to stand and stare at the dolls, making up stories for them in which they came alive at night and had all sorts of wonderful adventures. I was a hopelessly romantic child, as you can see.

One night, as I recall (and maybe this is a warped memory), I was staying at Grandad's and sleeping over in the guest bedroom. Or maybe I was at home; I really don't remember. Suffice it to say, it was late, I was very small, and I wanted a bedtime story. My big brother was there, and he is a masterful storyteller. And so he tucked me in, made sure I had my bear, turned the lights off, and proceeded to scare the hell out of me.

The story as I remember it went something like this:

"You know Grandmommy's dolls, the ones you're not allowed to play with? Well, there's a very good reason that you can't play with them."
"What is it?"
"Have you ever seen anyone open that cabinet?" (I shook my head.) "There's a reason for that, too. But I promised I would never tell you."
"Why?"
"Because it might scare you so bad that you won't ever go back to Grandad's. No, I really can't tell you."
"Oh please! I won't tell Mom!"
"No, no, it's a bad idea. Forget I brought it up. I've got a story about a pony; you want that instead?"

By this time, naturally, I was frantic to know what it was I was not supposed to know. So I begged and pleaded for a long time, and finally, he relented.

"Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you. So, you know Grandmommy's dolls?" (I nodded.) "Well, those aren't really dolls. They're actually people."
"No way!"
"Way. You see, they were once girls just like you: bright, curious, full of adventure...but they all did something wrong."
"What was it?"
"The Evil Witch caught them all, and as punishment for being naughty, she turned them into dolls. Which is why you must never, ever open that cabinet. Oh, you might hear them say, late at night when you get up to pee, that if you open the cabinet, you can save them. That they can turn back into girls and live happily ever after. But you must never, ever listen to them!"
"Why not?"
"Because if you open that cabinet, you'll turn into a DOLL." (I gasped.) "A beautiful, cold, porcelain doll with a pretty dress and curly hair. And you'll have to live in the cabinet, and you won't be able to play with your friends, or get Christmas presents, or snuggle with Mom EVER AGAIN. We'll all wonder where you went, and what happened to Christie, and you'll be right there, unable to tell us that you're stuck in the cabinet. Because each of those other girls didn't listen to their brothers, and they opened the forbidden cabinet, and now they can never, ever go home!"

As you can probably imagine, six-year-old me was scared right out of my pants. For months after this story I couldn't actually walk past the doll cabinet, but had to navigate all the way around the house to avoid it. The dolls' cold glass eyes seemed to follow me, daring me to open the cabinet and join them, in a sort of reverse-Narnia. It took me years to get that my brother had been epically messing with me.

When I first heard this particular recording of Offenbach's Doll Song, I could only think that it would have been the perfect background music for that singularly creepy story.

31 Days of Halloween: Day 19

Today: the German Grocery Store



Being from America, I am used to having all of my foodstuffs in one place, neatly wrapped and presented for the happy and healthy wholefoods eating hippy that my university colleagues assumed me to be. Shopping in my local grocery store, I could find everything I wanted, plus a multitude of ingredients for cuisines from other cultures, namely pan-Asian, Mexican, and Indian. I knew that European supermarkets were different. My French teacher used to tell us of holidays in France where she would go from butcher to baker to fromagerie. I used to sit and listen to these stories, dreaming about the romance of it all. I would be one of those chic European girls with her cute market basket, tripping merrily from store to store to make my purchases: a roasting chicken here, a sprig of herbs there, bread from the bakery. And then, I imagined, I would go home and cook it all up into a delightful meal fit for the sophisticated and intelligent woman my fifteen-year-old self dreamed I would be.

Well, fifteen-year-old self would be proud in every way of twenty-five-year-old self, but she would, admittedly, grimace in chagrin at the non-romance of navigating the markets.

This is a typical day at the shops:
1. I set out with my cute market basket (yes, I bought one of those. I have an Inner Romantic to answer to, after all) for the market. I have my list in one hand. I'm getting ingredients for chicken soup and minestrone soup, because it is Soup Season.
2. I enter the first supermarket. It is crowded with moms and dads and babies, and elderly people happily stink-eyeing the younger generations out of the way. First, none of the vegetables I need for soup are in stock. Celery? What's that? says the bewildered clerk. Bravely, I make my way to the meat section, only to find that the only available chicken breasts look like they came from a one-hundred-year-old chicken, and the ground beef from a mad cow. Sighing, I get the basics-milk, butter, cream, pasta, etc-and make my way to the casse. A palatial exhibit of gluhwein stands next to the counter, supposedly to ease the trauma of being nearly killed by strollers multiple times.
3. Drop purchases off at home and head to the next, slightly more expensive supermarket. There I find chicken, beef and the vegetables, but they do not carry cheese. Also, their bread section is pitiful and unworthy of the name. Better to go to the proper bakery. My basket is very heavy by the time I am done.
4. Third stop: bakery. Service is prompt and they slice the bread for you.
5. Fourth stop: cheese shop. Or rather, cheese stand, because this lovely little place is located in the local mall, of all places (as are two doctors, a lawyer, and a fitness center). They only take cash, so I heft my basket and march to the ATM. Then the woman on duty asks how old I'd like my Gruyere: one year or two. I opt for the one year; she wraps it up and tells me I have a pretty accent. "From Holland?" I always get Northern Europe, for some reason.
6. I realize I'm out of face wash and duck into the drogerie to buy some. There is only one clerk on duty and the line is a mile long. But I wait, because if I don't I'll regret it.
7. And home, where I collapse in my chair and reflect that multiple-market shopping isn't nearly as glamorous as it sounds.

Wish me luck, I'm about to go out and do exactly this.