An operatic intro

When you’re growing up, summer is a season apart. The other seasons are individual in their ways, but still fall under the umbrella of the school year, and so things that happen in the summer are thrown into greater relief. Summer trips, summer flings (I hear) and summer jobs.

One summer, while staying with my father in New Mexico, I was briefly a parking attendant at the Santa Fe Opera, a majestic outdoor amphitheatre at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. ( The Blood of Christ Mountains, as Paul Simon helpfully translates in “Hearts and Bones.” People in his songs are always going places that roll off the tongue. Graceland and the Mississippi Delta: “shining like a National guitar,” etc.) Each night I worked I would park at the entrance to the small reserved lot, checking people’s passes as they entered while twilight fell. “Tonight’s performance is … Salome,” our supervisor would say luxuriously over the crackling walkie-talkie.

But I didn’t pay much attention to the operas, honestly. As Salome or Madame Butterfly or The Magic Flute began I would cram into my tiny Honda CRX, flip on the dome light and get back to the old paperback I was reading: Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.

It was the best kind of summer book: a sweeping epic, melodramatic, scandalous. Operatic. And new to me – somehow I’d managed to not yet see the films, and so I was first introduced to the Don Corleone you meet only in The Godfather Part II. Young, that is. De Niro and not yet Brando.

Millions had done the same when the novel was a bestseller in the late 1960s, but after Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation? Most meet Don Corleone on his daughter’s wedding day, as he tells the mortician Bonasera that, for the Don’s help, someday he will ask for something in return.

After the opera was over and the parking lots emptied, I would follow the traffic back down to Santa Fe, quietly enter the house and say hello to the dog and cats, have a late night snack and get ready for bed. And then read more.

Later, of course, I saw the films. And I finally went to the opera for real in New York. La Traviata, which had played at Santa Fe the year prior to my job. But I was still young, and broke, and a bit clueless. What I recall most is that an English translation of the libretto appeared on LCD screens on the chair backs, and that a bottle of beer at intermission cost $14.

That old paperback copy of The Godfather had probably cost me a tenth of that amount. But I do remember where I read it better than I remember the Met.