Dear Dirty America

My dear friend and fellow writer Dan Rudy, gave me a delicious description of his recent experience at the opera:

Madame Butterfly! It was absolutely gorgeous! And yet, at the same time it had a lot of the ‘theatre’ sort of feel about the production that left a (not an unpleasant, say, but an otherwise tangible) taste in my mouth. Same sort of cock-eyed cynicism struck me though, seeing the opera crowd; a bunch of mawkish old women in furs and balding emaciated rich men. I was about the tallest person there, and one of the youngest. (Certainly the poorest, I’ll warrant.) And yet I hit it off with the couple beside me, an elderly couple where the wife was a UND [University of North Dakota] grad of decades ago and the husband a retired violinist for the Portland symphony. I don’t hate people as much as I sometimes seem to hate the idea of them, I guess. On the individual level, most everybody’s pretty okay, and I think it’s beautiful.

Rudy is a contributor to DDA, but you can catch his palavering at Rudian Days.