Like all memories, my first concert memory is true at the center, and shpackled together with sparkles, and rose-colored glass, and likely some fiction.
This is what makes my writing worth reading, don’t you think?
At the age of three, I would don my Sunday best, which meant tights and patent leather and a barette in my hair, as well as a winter coat. Judy would take me, and we would sit in the lower mezzanine, which is still my favorite place to attend a show, and wait for the show to begin. The orchestra would be making the putzing, practicing, warm-up-y sounds, and the audience would chitter with one anther in anticipation. As the lights would dim, the audience would fill with applause and I would slip out of my shoes and draw my legs into my coat, and possibly Judy’s coat nestled behind me.
The chorus would enter the stage, always in the same order, which meant my dad would arrive first. A base - basso profundo, the lowest of the low, like James Earl Jones - and tall, meant he was always in the top row, stage left, at the back. My mother was close to last, as a very petite woman and a first soprano - the highest of the high, but softer than the screechy portrayal - which meant she was always the last person on stage, first row, all the way stage right, nestled with the percussion section so tightly you wouldn’t have been able to spot her from the orchestra section.
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