Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus (11 page)

Of course I’m sure that you, Mr. or Ms. Smarty Pants Reader, immediately figured out the right answer, which is: “SOME DO DOOT.”

No, really, I’m sure you solved it. If not, you should watch the show. Or you can contact me. If you play your cards right, maybe I’ll sell you a vowel.

I
 really didn’t want to get into another fight with the classical-music people.

Awhile back I wrote a column in which I was mildly critical of classical music on the grounds that it sucks and I hate it. Rather than respond to these arguments on their intellectual merits, many classical-music fans responded with snotty personal attacks in which they suggested that I am the kind of cultural moron who sits around all day watching TV with a beer in one hand and the remote control in the other. This is a lie. Sometimes I have beers in BOTH hands, forcing me to operate the remote control with my feet.

No, seriously, I happen to be a highly cultured individual. I have been involved in tour groups that walked briskly past some of the world’s finest works of art. I personally own several hardcover books and have read
The Cat in the Hat Comes Back
out loud at least 400 times. I am perfectly comfortable ordering food in a swank French restaurant (“Mr. Garçon, I’ll have the beef
en route”)
.

In short, I have culture out the wazoo. I just have never cared for classical music, because I believe that the artistic themes it embodies are not presented in a manner that is intellectually relevant for the modern listener. Take, for example, the following actual unretouched lyrics, written by Lorenzo da Ponte for the Mozart opera
Cosi Fan Tutte
(literally,
Annie Get Your Gun):

After carefully analyzing these lyrics, the objective critic is forced to arrive at one incontrovertible conclusion:
They are written in a completely foreign language
, probably Spanish. You have to ask yourself how in the world these opera people expected to reach a modern audience if they didn’t even have the common courtesy to write in English. Compare the seemingly deliberate impenetrability of their lyrics with the inviting clarity of the 1964 song “Mammer Jammer,” in which Don and Dewey, exploring the complex depths of human relationships, state:

Please do not misunderstand me: I am not saying that people cannot enjoy opera. I am just saying that these people are wrong. They also could be in big medical trouble. I base this statement on an Associated Press article, sent in by many alert readers, concerning an alarming incident in Denmark involving an okapi, which is a rare African mammal related to the giraffe. The article states that this
okapi—I am not making this quotation up—”died from stress apparently triggered by opera singers.”

The okapi was not actually attending an opera when this happened. It was in a zoo located 300 yards from a park where opera singers were rehearsing. A zoo spokesperson was quoted as saying that okapis “can be severely affected by unusual sounds.”

So here are the essential facts:

1. An okapi, minding its own business, was killed by opera music being sung
   three football fields away
   .
   

2. Okapis are members of the mammal family.
   

3. Most human beings, not counting Congress, are also members of the mammal family.
   

When I consider these facts together, a very disturbing question comes to my mind, as I’m sure it does yours:
What were three football fields doing in Denmark?

Another question is: Could opera, in sufficient dosages, also be fatal to human beings? The only way to find out is to conduct a scientific experiment, in which we would take a group of volunteer subjects—and as the person proposing this experiment, I am willing to courageously volunteer that these subjects be scientists from the Tobacco Institute—strap them into chairs, and blast opera at them twenty-four hours a day until such time as they are dead.

Of course to ensure that this experiment was scientifically valid, we’d also need what is known technically as a “control;” this would be a second group of volunteer Tobacco Institute scientists, who would be strapped into chairs and blasted with some
other
kind of music. I am thinking here of the Neil Diamond Christmas album.

Once this experiment had proved scientifically that opera music is fatal, it would be time to think about requiring that some kind of Surgeon General warning be prominently displayed on Luciano Pavarotti. Also we’d have to study the effects of “secondhand opera,” which is what you get when inconsiderate individuals start humming opera music in a poorly ventilated office, and suddenly their coworkers are dropping like flies, especially if their coworkers happen to be okapis.

Ultimately, we may have to ban opera altogether, along with—you can’t take chances with the public health—ballet, nonrhyming poetry, movies with subtitles, and any kind of sculpture that does not accurately depict naked women. I realize that, for taking this stand, I’m going to be harshly criticized by the so-called cultured crowd. But I frankly cannot worry about that, because I have the courage of my convictions. Also,
Inspector Gadget
is on.

M
y advice to you, if you ever get invited to play the part of a corpse in an opera, is:
Ask questions
. Here are some that I would suggest:

1. Does the plot of this opera call for the corpse to get shoved halfway off a bed headfirst by people shrieking in Italian?
   

2. If so, is this corpse wearing a nightgown-style garment that could easily get bunched up around the corpse’s head if the corpse finds itself in an inverted position with its legs sticking up in the air on a brightly lit stage in front of hundreds of people whom the corpse does not personally know?
   

3. If so, what, if any, provisions will be made to prevent a public viewing of the corpse’s butt?
   

Fool that I am, I failed to ask these questions when I was invited to be a deceased person in an opera. This invitation resulted from a column I wrote concerning an animal in a Denmark zoo that died from stress brought on by hearing
opera singers rehearse. I concluded that opera is probably fatal and should be banned as a public-health menace, just like heroin, or aspirin bottles with lids that can actually be opened.

This column generated a large amount of mail from irate opera lovers who:

1. Pointed out that they are far more sophisticated, urbane, and cultured than I am, and
   

2. Used some really dirty words.
   

(Here is an actual quote from one of these letters, slightly modified for the family-newspaper audience:
“Cost Van Tutte
is Italian and not Spanish, you sock plucker. Duck shoe,”)

But I also got a very nice letter from Janice Mackey, general manager of Eugene Opera in Eugene, Oregon (civic motto: “Eventually You Stop Noticing the Rain”). She invited me to play a corpse in Eugene Opera’s January 8 performance of
Gianni Schicchi
(pronounced “Johnny SKEE-kee”), a work by the famous opera dude Puccini (“Poo-CHEE-nee”), who I believe also wrote the 1966 Tommy James hit “Hanky Panky” (“Hang-kee PANG-kee”). As a professional journalist, I am always looking for new ways to get paid for being motionless, so I said sure.

Eugene is located in southwest Oregon, approximately 278 billion miles from anything. To get there, you have to take a series of “commuter” airplanes, each one smaller than the last, until finally there isn’t room for both you and the pilot, and you have to fly yourself. “Eugene is that way!” the airline personnel tell you, gesturing vaguely. “Just look for the rain cloud!”

But Eugene Opera turned out to be a very professional outfit featuring baritones, sopranos, bassoons, tremors, mezzanines, etc. I attended a brief rehearsal, during which the professional opera singers practiced shoving me off the bed and gave me invaluable dramatic tips on playing dead (“Don’t move”). They also filled me in on the plot of
Gianni Schicchi
, which involves a wealthy thirteenth-century Florentine named Buoso Donati, who is pursued by a seemingly indestructible android from the future.

No, wait, that’s the plot of
Terminator II
. The plot of
Gianni Schicchi
is that Buoso is dead, and a bunch of people sing very loudly about this in Italian for 45 minutes of opera time, which, for a normal human, works out to roughly a month. I spent most of this time lying still on the bed with my mouth open. This turns out to be very difficult. When you have to hold perfectly still in front of hundreds of people, you become a seething mass of primitive bodily needs. You develop overpowering urges to swallow, twitch, scratch, burp, emit vapors, and—above all—lick your lips. “YOU NEED TO LICK YOUR LIPS RIGHT NOW!” is the urgent message your brain repeatedly sends to your tongue. You find yourself abandoning all concerns about personal hygiene and praying that Puccini was thoughtful enough to include a part in
Gianni Schicchi
where the singers decide, for whatever reason, to lick the corpse’s lips.

But this is not what happens. What happens is that the singers, while searching for Buoso’s will, shove the corpse off the bed, the result being that I had to hold perfectly still while upside down, with my face smushed into a low footstool and my legs in the air, through several arias (“aria” is Italian for “song that will not end in your lifetime”). Fortunately, under my nightgown I was wearing tights, so the
audience was never directly exposed to my butt, which could have triggered a potentially deadly stampede for the exits.

Finally the singers put the corpse back up on the bed, so for the rest of the opera I could just lie there thinking explicit bodily thoughts. At times I also listened to the music, and I have to say that, although I am by no means an opera aficionado (literally, “guy”), I was deeply moved by one part, which was when a stagehand, Doug Beebe, crept up behind my bed, unseen by the audience, and whispered, “Dolphins 21, Chargers 8.” He was updating me on an important NFL playoff game in which I had a strong artistic interest. And although the Dolphins ultimately lost, I definitely enjoyed performing in
Gianni Schicchi
and did not find the experience to be the least bit fatal, so I sincerely apologize to all the opera fans I offended.

Except for the gas poles who wrote the nasty letters.

I
was at an airport, reading a newspaper, when the World’s Three Most Boring People sat down next to me and started talking as loud as they could without amplifiers. They were so boring I took notes on their conversation. Here’s an actual excerpt: