There's a headcold pounding out dull notes in the middle of my forebrain, but I'm not letting it flatten the giggles.
On Tuesday night I skipped climbing but with good reason, Kitty and I had tickets that I had bought way back in November to the Barber of Seville.
At the Mississauga opera, the tiny european-style opera house with the magnificent accoustics, located way west of nowhere.
We saw La Boheme there, for my birthday, and I cried, and the tenor hadn't been powerful enough and the baritone not expressive and the soprano too angrily shrill, but this time
This time it was perfect, the basso profundo rumbling out with just about the sexiest sound I've ever heard, an everpresent silly grin on his round face. The Soprano was the cutest thing, sticking her tongue out left and right, the mezzo singing with the stereotypical power I've learned to expect from mezzo's.
The tenor was a bel canto tenor, not a booming Pavarotti but a man with all the prettiness that a woman should have woven into his tones. His long red hair suited his bounce.
And Figaro, oh Figaro... Stage presence perfect, all the flair and all the joy and all the silliness and everything I could have ever wanted.
Oh Figaro, how long have I had a crush on that character?
Tuesday night's actor had him pegged, and he made the neverending coloraturas look easy, not a tremor in him anywhere.
I'd forgotten that Rossini operas are one big long coloratura, by the end of it my stomach ached in sympathy.
I can manage twenty seven seconds solid before falling down exhausted, these hand-picked stars from everywhere on the planet spent three hours belting them out as though they were comfortably strolling.
When I was in eleventh grade, about to graduate high school, I was lost to the whole world by then, angry and cruel and careless. The teachers had stopped trying to reach me by then, my parents had stopped hitting me, because I'd stopped feeling all of it.
In eleventh grade, we didn't have a french launguage class, we'd all passed the bilingual test with flying colours and were split off into journalism and theatre.
I picked theatre, the school's most despised teacher taught theatre, with his skewed glass eye and his sombre reputation.
The journalism teacher wanted to be everyone's mom, and I didn't want anyone caring about me.
In theatre class, we put on french plays, we did The Barber of Seville by Beaumarchais and Jean Annouilhe's Antigone.
I directed the first, played Antigone in the second. (the director of Antigone said I was the only person stupid enough to understand Antigone's obstinate refusal to intelligently save her life. At the time, and even now, I still agree with her honour)
Directing The Barber of Seville was... Life-Changing in too many ways. Discovering french drama, losing myself on weekends to long perusals of the Absurdists and Sartre, learning about the power of words and how Beaumarchais' writing helped fuel the inspiration for the French Revolution.
I learned about the power of passion, I secretly learned that it was alright to care about things that no one else cares about and can't take from you.
I learned that this despised teacher was a strict, proud man, who demanded intelligence and discipline and everything that a gang of seventeen years olds didn't want to think about.
I loved it. The moment I showed him that I understood his words, that they made me think, that I had taken Rhinoceros home for the weekend and wanted to ask him about metaphors -- the moment I showed him that I cared about the topics, not the grades, not the cars that the boys were driving or the school dances...
He started speaking to me with real words. He taught me beautiful things.
And in the morning, the two of us were the only ones in the entire school that showed up at 7am (I just wanted to be somewhere warm and out of the house, he was an insomniac too, and volunteered to host detention from 7:30 to 8am each morning) -- in the morning I would sit in his homeroom and he would play Rossini's Il Barbero di Sevillio, and turn it up real loud and I'd compare it to the heavy metal that I was listening to at the time and he would take me seriously.
By the time the school had stopped ordering me detentions, I was showing up to them voluntarily.
And so that Rossini opera was my first love in classical music, associated with so many of my beginnings and adventures, and I have listened to it so many times since then.
On Tuesday the opening bars pushed me hard into the back of my seat and held me tightly until hours later. I'd never heard them live. I'd never heard them so real. I watched Figaro's mouth move and I understood his techniques and I felt and saw each note on a backdrop of visions.
The first time I moved to France for a year, on M. Daneschrad's inspiration.
That time I was in a fistfight with a kid in school, and M. Daneschrad turned purple with fury and told him to go fight with someone else with a pea-sized brain.
The way he taught me to appreciate words, plays, scripts, then sculpture and music, the way it was so important to him that it became significant to me.
This man with the glass eye who only smiled when no one else was around, so strict and serious and full of passions.
When I returned from France the first time, I went looking for him, to thank him for having helped me want such great things from my life, for having taught me they were possible.
They didn't know how to reach him, he'd retired, they'd heard he'd been sick, and I never made the effort to really look him up.
Tuesday night, in the midst of giggle-fests and outright laughter at the antics on stage, a very large part of my heart was thinking of this man who believed in beauty.