[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]
I just laid out $390 for three Westminster Conservatory trips to the Met next year. The price does include round-trip bus rides from Princeton to Lincoln Center and back. No program choice though; the three operas on offer were all the Conservatory could buy block tickets for on Saturday afternoons. I hesitated before committing. Did I really want to see Bizet’s Les Pecheurs de Perles, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux? I’m not such an opera buff.
But I do like getting in to the city without effort and expense, even like lunching there by myself if one of my few Manhattan acquaintances still alive can’t make it. And what compares with the sound of a live orchestra? Although the first two trips are in January and February, not ideal for visiting New York, at this point in my life, when energy and stamina are noticeably waning, I take what’s offered when it’s offered. It’s not quite beggars can’t be choosers. Beggars don’t have $390 to burn.
Yet sometimes that’s what it feels like. I can no longer do the things I used to do whenever and however I want to do them. Recognizing that is one of the harder parts of getting old.
ON BEING OLD 
Amen sistah!
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BTW I love your shorts! Succinct!
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Thanks, Kate. Shorts are certainly easier to read. Not easy to write, though! 🙂
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Really? I do a random 5 once a week with 5 short stories and find it much easier than developing a full story. It allows me to use material that in itself wouldn’t be interesting after two sentences.
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Each of us is different, I guess. My shorts begin much longer. And could be longer still. (I have the kind of mind where one thing leads to another and another before it gets back to the starting point.) Then I pare the longer versions down, thought by thought, word by word. Until they’re — as you say — succinct. Maybe writing comes easier to you than to me.
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I don’t think so. It probably has more to do with my short attention span!
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Amen indeed!
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If you’re not loving the opera presented, leave at intermission and cruise around the city ??? It’s my favorite, and I love doing it alone, sometimes. 💕
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Nice try, Van. You’re a sweetheart for suggesting it. But believe me, “cruising” in the icy grey slush and snow of wintry Manhattan isn’t so fun. Also, I’d have to be back no more than exactly five minutes after the opera finishes or else the bus home would take off without me! And then I would need to find a taxi — lots of luck in rush hour — to get me to Penn Station for $20 give or take, where I would have to buy a $7.50 ticket for a train back to Princeton (usually one an hour, no empty seats for waiting all bundled up in your winter clothes), where I would then have to call Bill to pick me up, or else put out another $14 (flat rate) for another taxi. The point of the post, really, is that increasing age does more and more put you between a rock and a hard place.
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I get it. I went on a bus tour with a relative and some 50 toddlers going to see The Grinch, just this past December. I was meeting up with my daughter for the day, not going to the show. It was exhausting, cold, wet. But…I have no regrets. I love the city in all seasons. 💕 My legs… did not. They screamed at me for 2 days after. ☺
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Nina, wise words! We live in reality! Age does that to me too. The recent family fun, constant on the go, adventure in NYC was an eye-opener. There’s still a spring in my step, but less steps all at once, please! Christine
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How funny, we have just been choosing which ones to try and get for the Live from the MET cinema tickets. we’ll be seeing the Devereux, and maybe Manon Lescaut, but probably not Pearl Fishers. I dream that one day we’ll get there to see the real thing.
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Yes, it is a funny coincidence. But there must be great opera in London, too. Wouldn’t that be easier to get to?
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