A dream of opera.

The other night before bed I was reading a history of opera, and I had just finished reading a part about how with Beethoven's only opera he wrote he wrote multiple overtures for it that he was dissatisfied with but some of which were really good and so sometimes people would find a reason to insert them into some place in the middle of the opera, and then I dreamnt:

I'm in the front row of an opera house, but also above it, and the lighting is dim and there's an open boat full of like cargo sitting on water, and somehow I know it's the hold, and there's a man in rags lying down, and I know that soon the music in the score will stop, and he'll rouse from his sleep and start singing and that's the point where they'll insert a song that's not supposed to be in the opera.

Then, that happens, and the man gets up, except now he's a woman, and he's on the stage, which isn't a stage now, but it's water, and she's slowly swimming in the water towards the front of the stage while singing operatically, and the music is quiet and simple and the words I can remember are just a repeated Latin-y phrase that's supposed to be an imperative plural and a vocative plural, but both are nothing I recognize vocabulary-wise, and the next thing I know the woman is at the very front of the stage and there I am in my seat, and I see how the stage has been turned into a giant pool, with like a big barrier with big crinkles that is holding all the water in, though some sloshes over a little bit at the top, and I think how experimental that all is, and how incredible it is that a woman can sing like that while swimming.

. . .

And then I wake up.

Addendum.

The day that I heard these anecdotes, the (lesbian) sister popped back into the apartment five minutes after she left, which she never does.

As it turned out, she was headed to rehearsal for that one lesbian feminist chorus she's in, and she had taken off her wedding ring in her sister's apartment for some reason and had set it down and then had forgotten about it, and she had to go back to get it so she could wear it to rehearsal.

"People would be talking!", she cracked.

Lesbian anecdote (2 of 2): Historical anecdote about the prosthesis wearer.

Years and years and years ago, the woman who eventually got the prosthesis was a nurse in New York City, and one day in the ER a gunshot victim came in, and everyone around her got all panicky and freaking out like "oh my god my god my god" for some reason, and she wasn't really sure why they were doing this, so she was the only person to keep her head cool like usual.

Then, the guy died, and everyone but her started crying, and one of her coworkers turned to her and was like, "Don't you know who that is?".

"No," she was like.

"It's John Lennon!", her coworker was like.

"John who?", she was like.

"John Lennon, the Beatle!", her coworker was like.

"Oh, John Lennon!", she was like.

. . .

She wasn't one much into pop culture, and she vaguely knew who he was from Beatlemania, but she hadn't kept track of him and what he looked like over the years.

. . .

My one client with disabilities's (lesbian) sister really really loves the Beatles, so her friend who ended up getting the prosthesis held this story back for years, since she wouldn't know how she would react to it.

As it turns out, she was kind of weirded out, that her friend was there with John Lennon when he died, but ultimately she was glad that she was there with him.

"He probably was too, when he was between the veils," she was like, "to see that someone there was calm and trying to help him."

Lesbian anecdote (1 of 2): Prosthesis.

The one (lesbian) sister of my one client with disabilities was telling me the other day about her friend's first date after having had a mastectomy.

She had a prosthesis, but her date didn't know, and they ended up hitting it off, to the point where the date went on and on and on and the next thing you know they were lying down clothed in bed just making out with each other, and she was getting a bit freaked out about what would happen when things went farther and this new woman she really liked somehow discovered that her one breast wasn't real.

So, at an opportune moment, she broke off, and was like, "Excuse me, I need to go to the bathroom."

Then, she got up, started walking to the bathroom, and then quickly slipped off her prosthesis, turned around, and threw it on the bed, and was like, "Here, if you want to, you can keep yourself busy with that for a while."

At that, the other woman saw the prosthetic breast lying on the bed and just started cracking up so hard.

. . .

The one (lesbian) sister of my one client said it wasn't just a humor thing, but also a way of testing out the other woman, to see if she was fine with someone who had had a mastectomy.

"And she was," she was like, "It totally broke the ice about it and everything."

A Rastafarian on the subway the other day.

The other day, this (older) (black) guy with dreads and a bright red, yellow, and green knit hat with a pot leaf on it got onto the subway, and he sat down across from me on the car.

He had this really nice light brown wood staff with him that was made from a single piece of wood that had been carved into little discrete squarish bulb sections, and one had an ankh carved on it, and some of the others had other little stuff carved on them that I can't remember, like the letters of some name of G-d.

"That's a really nice staff," I was like.  "Did you make it yourself?".

"Yes," he was like.

"That's cool," I was like.  "Are you a part of some religion?"

"Rastafarian," he was like, crisply and shortly, but not really meanly or brusquely.

At that, I just nodded.

I had seen some stuff about Rastafarians on TV lately, but for some reason I didn't think it was appropriate to tell him about that.

The design of "pull-ups" really impress me.

At the resthome, we call adult diapers "pull-ups," for dignity's sake.

In any case, whatever you call them, their design impresses the heck out of me, like to the point where the person who designed that design should get a Nobel Prize or something, they made such a big contribution to humanity.

Anyways, they may not look like much when you just look at them, but they're very very carefully crafted around the legs, so that the frilly apparently decorative edges of the fabric fold in, and that way if someone accidentally shits, all the shit juice and the clumps are more likely than not to stay in the diaper as it soaks everything up and gets weighed down, and nothing really falls out onto the pants.

That kind of accident has happened several times while I've been working, and each time the amount of shit that's been in the diaper and didn't fall out and get onto anything has really been impressive.

The trick afterwards, I discovered, is to very very carefully tear up the leg hems and take off the diaper, and then to pull it back over the toilet, so that any drips or clumps fall down into there and they don't get onto the rim or onto the floor or even onto the pants that had been protected.

"Live and learn."

Book malaise.

It's so funny how a person can go through spurts with books.

Like last year I was all about compilations of stories in frames and I just couldn't put down the Decameron, then I got Canterbury Tales, and I set it down almost right away, I just didn't feel like it.

Then, recently, I was all about sci-fi, and I checked out like 3 books from the library all of them sci-fi and I ripped right through them, and then all of a sudden I just didn't feel like reading sci-fi anymore, to the point where I couldn't even think of a title that I hadn't read that made me curious or interested, though before I had easily thoughten of three of them.

So, I was kind of listlessly casting around for a book but couldn't think of any, and so I picked up Canterbury Tales again, and it's not bad.

I'm waiting for some books on the history of opera, in the meanwhile; I ordered a used copy of a recent one-volume history online, and I also texted a friend a request to check with her one professor friend for a recommendation of a good biography of Wagner.

That's what I'm really hungering for, now, one of those two books, but I don't quite have them yet.