Blackberry Jam

Living thousands of miles from so many of my loved ones, I am keenly aware of the need to maintain friendships through frequent communication — and phone calls are expensive. So I write, and I am grateful for the technology of e-mail, that has made writing so easy. What seemed at its inception to be most useful as a paperless memo among colleagues has become the bedrock of modern epistolary literature, without the expense, delays, and fuss of the post. Now I begin most days with my e-mail, much like a Victorian gentleman at his desk, carrying on a wide-ranging, vigorous correspondence after a good cup of coffee and my morning newspapers.

Because I’m a writer by vocation, and because I’m unemployed, I enjoy advantages that my correspondents don’t. Most often, they can’t — and I don’t expect them to — write as long, or even as thoughtfully, as I. And I’m okay with that. Really. I just want to keep in touch.

The trouble is that a couple of my dearest friends have acquired Blackberries, and those little gizmos may yet drive a stake through the heart of written communication. I hear less than ever now from these guys (and you know who you are). Part of the problem lies in the Blackberry keyboard, which is too small for Arrietty Clock to manage properly. But the larger problem lies in the efficiency.

One answers a Blackberry message immediately, much as one would answer a phone call, regardless of whatever else is going on. Therefore one writes in haste, and seldom follows up. (Why would you write again? You answered already.) One confirms one’s existence, and hints that one has read the previous message, but one shares no news, expresses no feeling, illuminates nothing.

To help you to understand what’s at stake, I’ve taken a few famous letters and supplied the responses they might have received, had Blackberries been in use in previous centuries.


Letter:
Giorgio Germont to Violetta Valéry (La Traviata)
You have kept your promise. The duel has taken place. The baron was wounded but will mend. Alfredo has gone alone into exile. I myself have revealed to him your sacrifice, and he will return to you, to ask your pardon. I too shall come. Take care of yourself! You deserve a better future.
Giorgio Germont

Response:
Luv U 2!
[Sent via Blackberry]

Letter:
Virginia O’Hanlon to the Editor of The New York Sun:
Dear Editor:
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.”
Please tell me the truth: is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon
115 West Fifty-Ninth Street

Response:
yes
[Sent via Blackberry]

Letter:
Rainer Maria Rilke, to a Young Poet
Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art — as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature. I am glad, in a word, that you have overcome the danger of landing in one of those professions, and are solitary and courageous, somewhere in a rugged reality. May the coming year support and strengthen you in that.

Response:
Thx!
[Sent via Blackberrry]

Letter:
Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, First Letter
Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours:
Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ; that in every thing ye are enriched by him, in all utterance, and in all knowledge; even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you: so that ye come behind in no gift; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom ye were called unto the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.

Response:
OK
[Sent via Blackberry]

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Be a Male Model! (Or Just Look Like One)

Clothes always fit ya / When you’re a boy

A recent New York Times headline, “Male Models Get Downsized,” should have roughly one half the world’s population snickering with undisguised glee. At last, men are getting their comeuppance, after decades, even centuries, of dictating impossible body images to women. The slimming down of female fashion models has gotten so bad that weigh-ins, with doctors present, are now customary before fashion shows: the girls are so thin, they’re unhealthy. And they are girls, because of course no grown woman could get anywhere near the pencil-thin profiles demanded by designers.

Ah, said the men, you don’t understand, we demand of ourselves something equally unreasonable: worked-out, pumped up, lithe, lean muscle. And the pressure was always rising: from flat stomachs to six-pack abs, to eight-packs, to the “Girdle of Adonis,” ad infinitum. Although a lot of guys resorted to steroids, supplements, and surgery, it was possible, with time and good genes, to acquire the desired silhouette in perfectly healthy ways. But the pressure was intense, men insisted. Women simply couldn’t understand.

This reminded me of a conversation in seminar with the late Carolyn Heilbrun: discussing the ways men historically subjugated women to physical tortures (corsets, brassieres, shaving legs and armpits, waxing, plucking, making up, cosmetic surgery, hair treatments, to say nothing of footbinding, lip plates and neck rings) in the quest of an oppressive definition of beauty, one of my male classmates started to interrupt. “Men suffer to look good, too,” he said.

Professor Heilbrun turned to him slowly. “If you’re going to talk about neckties,” she said, “I’ll scream.”

Just as the fashion industry seemed to be coming to its senses, and demanding of female models a healthier, more robust silhouette, it seems the industry has completely lost its senses when it comes to the male models.

Hitherto, the standard height for models was between 5’11” and 6’3”, jacket size around 42R, waist size 32. According to the Times, the new standard for jacket is down to 40R, waist size 30 (or less). Without getting any shorter, today’s male models weigh less: down from an average of 185 pounds to 145 pounds. Selfishly, I’m not entirely displeased by this trend: I’m 5’11”, 145 pounds, I wear a 39R and a 30 waist, and I have friends in fashion who give me free stuff.

So you will see how generous I am when I say that my heart goes out to every man who is not equally blessed. These boys have never seen the inside of a gym. If there’s a way to look like them without resorting to bulimia, I can’t imagine it.

But I don’t have to, because I have come into possession of a handy guide, distributed by one of the leading modeling agencies. By following these simple rules, even a fat slob like Marcus Schenkenberg could look like a male model.

Tired of looking like this guy?
Just follow these simple steps!

Diet

Breakfast:
Cigarettes
Coffee
Ex-lax
Vodka

Lunch:
More cigarettes
Champagne
1 Stalk raw celery, for essential nutrients such as protein
(You there, the one who just said that celery does not contain protein. You may go now. We didn’t hire you to be intelligent, we hired you to be pretty.)
More vodka

Afternoon snack:
Listerine (Do not swallow!)

Dinner:
More cigarettes
More Champagne
More vodka
More heroin

Exercise:

Workout Routine 1: Warm-up: Wake up. Remain awake for the next week. Sleep three hours, then repeat. 365 sets of 15 repetitions.

Workout Routine 2: Lower Body: Walk to Philadelphia and back. But slowly! We don’t want you developing any visible leg or gluteal muscles! 4 sets.

Workout Routine 3: Upper Body: Take the right index finger. Insert it in your throat as far as possible, then hold this position. After vomiting, repeat the exercise using the left index finger. 4 sets of 15 repetitions.

Workout Routine 4: Stomach Crunches: Lie flat on the floor. Slowly bring your upper body forward, until you hear a loud crunching sound. Those are the bones of your spine breaking from lack of calcium. 4 sets of 25 repetitions.

Grooming:
Don’t.

Visualization:
If you must take a shower, close your eyes and think of Dachau.

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Flunking Nerdology 101

Growing up, I was a nerd. By most standards of reference, I still am, but these things matter less when you’re middle-aged. In junior-high school, nerdiness was a curse. It frequently led to my getting beat up by the football team, whether by individual players or by specially drafted offensive squads. But there was no help for it. I liked opera — and show tunes. I made good grades. I took French class. I didn’t like football. (There’s probably a connection between my antipathy for the sport and my treatment at the hands of the sportsmen, but no matter.) Oh, the list goes on.

The Onion A.V. Club has compiled its own list of indicators of nerdiness, “The Knights Who Say ‘Nerd’: 20 Pop Cultural Obsessions Even Geekier Than Monty Python.” As a Dallasite, I was one of the original Monty Python geeks — the local public-television station was the first in the country to broadcast the show. So I ran down the inventory, to see how I’d measure up by today’s standards.

I’m ashamed to say that I don’t even make a passing grade. Over the course of three decades, new nerdologies have been developed to which I could never aspire. I record my scores below.

“Remember!”

√1. Star Trek: I’m undeniably guilty of this one. I watched the show fanatically, I attended the conventions and met the cast, I collected memorabilia, and my little friends and I tried to make our own Star Trek movie. (I was Doctor McCoy.) In those days, we had only the original series to cling to, and I could identify the episode title within ten seconds of the program’s start. I knew the names of all the actors, writers, and directors. It’s pretty embarrassing to watch nowadays. The colors are gorgeous, but the performances are over-the-top, the scripts more often bad than brilliant. Yet the show gave its audience hope for a better future — that’s not bad. We reciprocated by hoping for a better future for the show. As if we awaited a Messiah, we prayed for the show’s revival, or a movie. In time, our prayers were answered, but except for a brief infatuation with Captain Kathryn Janeway (and the way I still cry when Spock dies in Star Trek II), I moved on.

Janeway confronts a Borg usurper.

2. Renaissance faires: I minored in Renaissance studies in college, and I still read the relevant texts, but I’ve never attended a faire.

3. Fantasy sports leagues: I’ve never understood any sport well enough to pursue this activity.

4. Michael Jackson: Speaking of Messiahs, listen to this guy sing “I’ll Be There,” and you’re getting a direct message from Jesus. If only Michael had died at 33 — instead he’s been crucified, and crucified himself, ever since. I loved the Thriller album, when it came out, but that’s like saying you love oxygen. I was never a Jackson camp-follower, merely an admirer — for a time. But some of my happiest memories are of dancing to “PYT” and “Human Nature” with Elise Goyette, a quarter-century ago. When those songs were playing, she was the only girl on earth.

√5. Wikipedia: I don’t edit Wikipedia entries, but I spend entirely too much time surfing its virtual pages.

6. Battlestar Galactica: The original series struck me as a weak substitute for Star Trek, and I’ve missed all the subsequent reformations.

If you think this is a picture of Billie Whitelaw in Beckett’s Not I, you’re a nerd. But a different kind of nerd.

√7. The Rocky Horror Picture Show: In junior and senior years in high school, I saw this movie 31 times. Since then, I haven’t seen it all the way through once. But I can still quote all the lyrics, and I haven’t forgotten how to do “The Time Warp.” I never dressed up, but I was a pretty hardcore fan for a time.

I remember doing the Time Warp
Drinking those moments when
The madness would hit me...

8. Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly): This pop-cultural phenomenon arrived on the scene too late to do me any good. I suspect I’d have been a fan, if I’d had the opportunity.

9. Media-specific role-playing (gaming in which one pretends to be a favorite movie or TV character): I’m not exactly guilty of this one, although for years I did woo a girl by pretending to be Lord Peter Wimsey, and referring to her as Harriet Vane. I’m confident this is not what the editors of The Onion are talking about, however.

10. Magic: The Gathering (a collectible card game): I’d never even heard of this before reading the article in The Onion.

11. World of Warcraft (a video game): I’d heard of this, but never gone near it — nor any other video game. That in itself must constitute a kind of nerdiness.


√12. The Simpsons: I’m pretty hardcore on this one. I have DVDs for the first nine seasons (after which we start running into far too many Worst. Episodes. Ever.), and I even listen to the Voiceover Commentaries by Cast and Crew; I collect figurines, and I was among the first people in France to attend the movie last summer. I don’t apologize. The Simpsons have made me a better person. Now, even my boogers are spicy.

13. Doctor Who: This British sci-fi series began in 1963, went off the air in 1989, then made a comeback in 2005. This is simply too much for me to handle. I can’t get involved in a series if there’s catching-up to do.

14. Frank Zappa: I admire him. I don’t own a single album.

15. Game-show tape trading: I can’t even see why this would be fun.

16. Animé: I like some kinds of graphic fiction, and I’m a big fan of Astérix and other French comic books. But animé never grabbed me.

17. Cosplay (dressing up as superhero cartoon characters): When I was four, my mother pinned a pillowcase to my shoulders, and I became Robin the Boy Wonder, joining the next-door neighbor, who had an authentic, store-bought Batman costume. Together, we would fight crime by running around the block as fast as we could. We never met any criminals, although this one time, we did see these older boys who chased us. That was the end for me of anything resembling “Cosplay.”

18. Live-action role-playing (acting out Dungeons & Dragons with costumes, swords, etc., in wooded areas): I couldn’t get into the tabletop version of Dungeons & Dragons. I wonder if the accoutrements would have given me the key to unlock the Cavern of Nerdy Delights, to smite the Guardian Orc, and to recover the Treasure of Fandom, giving me power over the Maidenly Wench. My guess: we’ll never know.

19. Second Life/MySpace/FaceBook: I have a blog. Does that count? I thought not. I’m too old for this one.

20. Fanfic: Although characters based on popular culture did surface in my early writings (the novel I wrote in high school is basically Star Trek Meets Upstairs, Downstairs — and yes, it’s that good), I was more interested in parody and in disguising my influences. Possibly because at an early age somebody explained to me the meaning of “copyright infringement.”

My Score: Four out of ten, not even a Gentleman’s F. I’m a failure as a nerd. (But I may have to contest the grade, because they didn’t even mention Tolkien.)

I should like to register a complaint.

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A Milestone

Let it be noted that on this day the first of my godchildren and first of my namesakes is turning 18. The other kids are following his example with unseemly haste. Soon, everyone I know will be grown up.

Will is a perfectly charming fellow, and I’m immensely pleased with the way he’s turned out. After careful deliberation, I have recorded my thoughts and impressions on the occasion of his majority, in a rigorously structured three-paragraph essay; I hope you’ll indulge a proud godfather by reading further.


Paragraph 1:
AAAAAAEEEEEAAARRRGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Paragraph 2:
EEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOUUUGGGHHH!!!!!

Paragraph 3:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

That about sums it up. Thank you for reading. And happy birthday, Will.

With love, Uncle Bill

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Strange Bedfellows

The new first lady of France: All rise.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy got married yesterday to the singer and songwriter Carla Bruni. This inspired me to look up some of her many famous ex-lovers, and courtesy of Wikipedia, I can drop a few names: Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Kevin Costner, Donald Trump, Yannick Noah, the actor Vincent Pérez, and the former prime minister Laurent Fabius. She’s got eclectic tastes; they call her “Maneater,” but her diet is extraordinarily well balanced. However, it’s not my purpose to gossip, because there are very serious policy questions at hand.

The first question: She always identified herself as a left-winger. Will she now start to vote for her right-wing husband? (One can’t take it for granted. In the last, closely contested election, Sarko’s then-wife Cécilia didn’t vote at all.)

The most urgent policy question is this: Now that she’s first lady, will radio stations be obliged to stop playing her songs? I suspect the answer is oui, at least during electoral campaigns, and I base this on the gorgeous example of Béatrice Schoenberg.

Béatrice, the ex-wife of the composer of Broadway’s Les Misérables, is married to Jean-Louis Borloo, who was employment minister under Jacques Chirac and who is now in Sarkozy’s cabinet, saddled with a title that is too long to record here. Something to do with the environment. Or something. Even when I look at the title, I don’t really know what it means. But he’s not a bad fellow. And I have a huge, sloppy, embarrassing crush on his wife.

La Belle Béatrice: When she delivered the news, you paid attention.

Until recently, Béatrice was the weekend anchor on the evening news on France 2, a state-owned (but politically neutral) television network. During the run-up to the presidential elections last spring, left-wing critics jumped all over Béatrice, insisting that even if she was objective (and only a few tried, unconvincingly, to prove that she wasn’t), Caesar’s wife, or Borloo’s, must be above suspicion. She was shunted off to a little science program, and Americans with long memories will remember that’s precisely the vehicle CBS used to get rid of Walter Cronkite, after he left the evening news.

So, come the next campaign, I fully expect to hear authoritative left-wingers insisting that Carla’s songs are full of coded messages exhorting listeners to vote for Sarko. The French are very good at that sort of thing: theirs is, after all, the culture that gave rise to Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and to Deleuze and Guattari. It will be no challenge whatever to deconstruct, and then to denounce, the politics of Carla’s music.

Yet there will be a double standard of sexism at work, because not even the most rabid Sarko-hater would try to ban the songs of Johnny Hallyday (who is at once France’s most beloved star and Sarkozy’s biggest fan). Even to suggest such a thing would be political — and quite possibly literal — suicide.

Johnny: The most/only powerful man in France

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Curiosities

That’s Punxsutawney Philippe to you, buster.

A great deal has been going on in the world that intrigues me lately, and for which I have no explanations.

Groundhog Day dawned with a crunchy frost covering the garden at Beynes, yet by early afternoon the azure skies over the surrounding hillsides were bespangled with hang gliders, and the temperature was warm enough to permit caps and heavy jackets to slough off. It’s a gorgeous day. My question is whether this means spring will arrive sooner than later. And my next question is: How do the French predict the weather when they have no groundhogs?

Trust! (Except when inconvenient)

Back in Washington on Monday night, during his State of the Union address, President Bush repeatedly exhorted his listeners “to trust the American people.” I found this fascinating. Is he talking about the same American people who, by whomping majorities, believe he’s led the country in the wrong direction, is bungling the economy, and ought to get our troops out of a war they believe to be misguided at best?

Granted, he probably thought nobody was listening to him.

Next question: Are we sure he stopped drinking?

Now that John Edwards has dropped out of the race to replace Bush, Ralph Nader is talking about running again. On account of how he has the best interest of the country at heart, and all. Speaking of Groundhog Day, haven’t I seen this movie already? Yet I remember it as being funnier.

Ask not what you can do for your country.
In fact, just shut up.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey appeared before Congress, too, where he showed off his Alberto Gonzales imitations. Though he was a bit too authoritative (he still speaks in complete sentences), Mukasey is new to the job, and I’m sure he’ll get the hang of it. In the main points, he excelled: he refused to answer questions or to give opinions, he irritated the senators, and he insisted that the President is not necessarily obliged to obey the law. Perhaps emboldened by this performance, Bush promptly issued one of his famous signing statements, to explain that he didn’t intend to obey a recently passed defense appropriation bill. Because obviously the Constitution didn’t mean what it said about giving Congress control of the nation’s purse strings — what it meant to say is that appropriations are the President’s prerogative. Obviously.

The curiosity here: How much are we paying these guys? And is it too late to hire a temp?

My point, and I do have one:
Justice is blind. And also dumb.

There was one incident this week about which I have no curiosity whatsoever — and that’s in the interest of self-preservation.

The cellar at the house in Beynes hadn’t been cleaned out for three decades or more, but on Tuesday Bernard and I tried to sort through some of the detritus. We found a doll’s baby carriage that probably belonged to Bernard’s mother; we found coal scuttles and a laundry vat; we found three disused lawn mowers, one of which had no motor; we found tin cans, a suitcase, chairs that crumbled at a touch, a bidet, a Franklin stove, and a water heater from the 1930s. We found straw, too, covering the dirt floor and practically begging for mice to take up residence, and so I began to clear it out. And there I found a most unusual object.

It was pale grey and longish and flat. At first I thought it was some sort of plaster saint, in low-relief, worn down by the passing of time. Not to my artistic taste, and not what one ordinarily finds in the home of Free Thinkers, yet the sort of thing one finds in country homes all over France. Then I noticed the tail. And the teeth.

You’ll be glad to know I didn’t take a picture.

For the object was not kitschy but kitty. My conjecture is that a cat strayed into the cellar, and started poking about the straw, when something fell on him. Now he was mummified. An offering, perhaps, to the Egyptian cat-god, Bastet.

I do not construe this as a curiosity, however. Because that’s how cats get killed. Even in France.

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Blasts from the Past

Stratas as Tchaikovsky’s Tatyana

The modern opera singer faces realities that her predecessors never contemplated. The mezzo Maria Malibran died before the age of sound recordings: although written descriptions of her voice survive, and she is still held up as a model of her art, we don’t know what she really sounded like, and we have only a few paintings and sketches to show what she looked like.

Today, however, the singer must contend with the likelihood that, decades after a performance, future generations will stumble across a DVD or YouTube clip and be struck, perhaps for the first time, by her. “What an amazing voice!” they’ll cry. And “She’s so beautiful!” And “Where did she get that hairdo?”

These thoughts are provoked by my discovery of a couple of performances by Teresa Stratas from the 1970s: a DVD of Franz Lehár’s operetta Der Zarewitsch, and a YouTube clip of the Letter Scene from Tschaikovsky’s Yevgeni Onegin, in German. Watch the clip, and you’ll see what I mean.

When we were preparing the program bios for Rags, Teresa mentioned that, by her count, she’d made 17 opera films. We tried to list them, but we couldn’t come up with more than ten titles: the rest, she said, were made when she was young, and she’d been trying (with some success) to forget them ever since. Too bad for her. It’s now clear that, sooner or later, like it or not, they’ll turn up.

The Onegin excerpt reveals Teresa in the kind of dramatic role with which I associate her most strongly, projecting youthful vulnerability and mounting passion with vivid singing: I can’t wait to see the whole film. Or rather, I continue to wait to see the whole film, as I’ve waited ever since Teresa first mentioned it.

George Solti’s recording of the opera was my high-school graduation present from my godmother, Ann Coleman, and it inspired my brief, ill-starred studies of the Russian language. Fed to the teeth with being called Guillaume, Wilhelm and Guglielmo in language class, I announced on the first day that “Menya zavut Yevgeni Onegin” (they call me Eugene Onegin), and Yevgeni I was from that day forward. I identified with all the opera’s characters, though. And I translated a verse of Lensky’s aria for the dedication of my first novel — to Teresa, as it happens.

The Zarewitsch is a horse of another color, and not only because it shows Teresa in a complete work. Like Onegin, it’s set in Russia, more realistically than one might expect from the composer of The Merry Widow. Teresa plays Sonia, a former serf who’s now a cabaret star, specializing in saber-dancing. Disguising herself as a boy (as seen here) to ingratiate herself with the misogynistic son of the Tsar, she winds up falling in love with him. When she finally takes off her cap, she’s got a very groovy hairstyle that may be the same wig she wore in Onegin.

Much of the singing part lies very, very high, and since the audio quality on the DVD is superior to that on the old Philips album of the soundtrack, it’s fun to hear Teresa sail so high. But the film is perhaps more important as a document of the ways Teresa encouraged, toyed with, and ultimately shattered her image as a kind of operatic sex kitten.

She was young, pretty and petite, and whenever people weren’t calling her “Baby Callas” (a name with which neither she nor Callas herself was entirely comfortable), they were giving her cuddly parts in crossover showcases like this one. They also asked her to pose for cheeky, cheesecaky pictures, which occasionally resurface. One of her other Lehár vehicles, Giuditta, featured her in a mod hairdo and an orange pantsuit, riding a motorcycle: va-vroom. Regrettably, I’ve only seen a still photo, and never heard her sing the big number, “Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiss,” nor any of the role. (Written for Jarmila Novotná, another great beauty.) But that picture alone is worth at least a thousand musical notes.

Throughout Zarewitsch, you get glimpses of the Teresa that lay simmering, even then, beneath the pretty surface. Surely the socioeconomic drama appealed to her — a peasant in love with a prince — and in her always-haunting eyes, you can see a bitterly impoverished background at which the script only hints. The filmmakers sneaked around certain challenges: her dancing, sword-fighting, and German dialogue are all performed by other women.

Within a few years, Teresa would portray Strauss’ Salome on German television (pictured at right), and Berg’s Lulu onstage in Paris and New York: sex kittens as man-eating tigresses. “Why didn’t you look at me?” Salome demands of John the Baptist, whom she has just had beheaded, in a scene that required Teresa to throw the director out of the studio and to take charge, directing herself. It’s almost as if she’s wreaking vengeance on all of us, producers and audiences alike, who underestimated her or misjudged her art — or her sexual appeal.

From that point on, even when she returned to pretty-girl or glamour parts she’d sung in her youth (Mimì, Nedda, Violetta), her beauty served a new purpose. She lost weight, and her tiny body seemed more fragile than ever, unable to defend herself against the forces that oppressed her. But she gave each victim a voice.

Her portrayals of consumptive heroines were so convincing (not least because Teresa contracted tuberculosis when she was a child) that one British critic announced in a book — a book — that she had died of the disease. For real. Neither the English nor the American edition corrected his mistake.

As Mimì, at the Met: She only pretends to die here, folks.

She seemed a pretty lively corpse to me: she had just tried to strangle me for some reason or other. (There was — and is — always some reason. She is an eminently reasonable person.) We talked about the book, and I wondered whether some response might be required. “Write him a letter,” I said, “like Mark Twain: ‘Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.’” But Teresa preferred to let the poor guy figure it out for himself; she wasn’t going to rub his nose in it.

Nearing seventy now, she is still darned lively, and though she isn’t singing anymore, one can still hear her. Her YouTube clips multiply; a lot of her work is turning up on DVD. One of these days, I’m going to see every opera movie she made. I expect that in her performances she will always bring me new ways to understand the truth. But I doubt if anybody could ever make me understand some of those hairstyles.

An earlier incarnation of Mimì

[A footnote (or hairnote): Teresa once told me that her 1960s bouffants were created by sticking a ball of tissue paper on her head, and sweeping the hair up around the ball. Who knew? Add some hairpins and a great deal of hairspray: now you can do it yourself. The tiara is optional.]

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