Mein lieber Schwan

Let me tell you one of my favorite stories from university.

Back in the day, about six years ago now, I had a friend who worked as a waiter/organizer/jack of all trade at a ranch in California. This was not your typical rodeo ranch, though. This ranch catered to weddings. You could rent the whole shebang and get married there. There was a little outdoor chapel strewn with roses and ivy, a hall for dancing in, and-this was what won the brides over, I think-a horse-drawn carriage pulled by four elegant horses to whisk the bride from her pre-wedding cottage around the shining silver lake on which floated a flock of swans, and up to the chapel, where she could then process in all her glory to the strains of one of the most hackneyed pieces of music ever written*. It was immensely popular.

Now, my friend's job during these weddings was to seat the guests, act as waiter during the reception, and, crucially, make sure the swans stayed in the lake during the bridal drive. Because they didn't like to, you see. If a swan happened to waddle out of the water during the bridal procession, he had to run up and shoo it back in. Nine times out of ten, the swan went back in the water. But on that day, that hot, bright Saturday, as the strains of Wagner played in the background, the unthinkable happened.

The bride was coming. The guests were waiting. The music was playing. One of the swans got out of the lake. My friend hurried forward in the age-old pose of man trying to scare off poultry: knees bent, arms outstretched, hissing "Shoo!" This swan did not shoo. It looked at him. He looked at it. And then, in his words, "it made a velociraptor noise" and seized him by the crotch.

As any sensible 21 year old man will do when grabbed by the crotch by a giant waterfowl, my friend immediately began to scream and dance around, as the bird held grimly on and shook him. He said that it went on like that for an age, but in reality it was maybe twenty seconds before one of his colleagues ran up, seized the swan by the neck, and hurled it back into the lake. For a moment they thought it would come roaring back, but after some frenzied squawking, it settled back into the water.

"Are you all right?" my friend's colleague howled. They were clutching each other, shaken.
"I think so," gasped my friend, who had suddenly developed a perfectly rational terror of swans.

And then they heard it: a storm of applause behind them. They turned. There stood the entire wedding party, holding cameras and video recorders and applauding wildly. My friend straightened his suit jacket, bowed slightly, and hurried away. As he went he passed the bride in her carriage. She was laughing into her bouquet.

Later, during the reception, my friend was continually accosted as he walked around with trays of champagne.

"Are you okay, bro?" was the topic of conversation.
"I feel for you, dude. That thing looked like it wanted to eat you."

"I just wanted to crawl into the floor and die," my friend mourned when he told me this. "It was awful: first I was nearly emasculated by a swan to that damn wedding march, and then all the groomsmen got hammered and kept asking awkward questions. I'm never getting married! Not there! And there will be no swans!!" Swans, he concluded, are vicious, ruthless children of darkness.

I won't lie to you, I was pretty much on the floor crying with glee when he told me, myself. I'll never be able to sit through a production of Lohengrin without thinking about this story.

*How can anybody actually sing this with a straight face? I'd be grinning diabolically.

Snowflakes, stories and ballerinas

Every little girl goes through a phase where she wants to be a ballerina. The tutus, the floaty tulle skirts, the satin ballet slippers...as children we are born into a world of imagination and High Romance. I was one of those little girls who had twice weekly ballet classes, the highlight of whose week was donning leotard, tights, and ballet shoes to go swoosh around the studio, pretending I was a snowflake, or Cinderella, or Clara. And I absolutely lived for The Nutcracker. Even after class, even in the middle of summer, I could put on the music and dance around, and I was a part of that story. That was a special talent I had, to read myself into a story and exist there for hours at a time. It made it hard for me to be bored. "Go play in a story," my mom would say, and I'd go to my room, put on the music, and off I would go.

Given that classical music was involved, my parents aided and abetted my obsession with ballet in general and The Nutcracker in particular. I remember that we had Baryshnikov's amazing version, and later George Balanchine's. And believe me when I say that I knew both of those performances backwards and forwards, inside and out.

I eventually moved away from ballet (an extremely strict teacher killed the joy in dancing for me). I found out early on that if the music didn't have words, it didn't interest me as much. I still love The Nutcracker, though, and watch it every year. And I am telling you all this because the Weinachtsmarks, or German Christmas Markets, opened today, onto a bright, snowless Berlin (I adore snow), and I am listening to "The Waltz of the Snowflakes" in my own version of a snow dance.

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.

Don Giovanni: Commendatore

I have always loved that when the Commendatore's statue walks onstage, Don Giovanni's initial reaction is, "Well, damn. I didn't see that coming".

I was raised with Don Giovanni in much the same way I was raised with Figaro. Driving to the orthodontist, my dad would put on his favorite recording of the opera and play all the highlights: the overture, Leporello's intro through the Don's entrance, the Champagne Aria, the Finale. And I would sit there, glued, listening to Samuel Ramey and Ferruccio Furlanetto be amazing. Those two basses will always be MY Don Giovanni and Leporello.

For some reason, we never really listened to the Act One finale, which I discovered on my own in university, and which is frankly my favorite part of the entire opera.

Here I give you this AMAZING Commendatore scene, from Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 production for the Met. It's amazing that the stage didn't explode from so much awesome.