A shy reference librarian, and a college student who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, meet in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over. What ensues between the...
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We sat in the cloud club section of the university auditorium for a traveling repertory company's performance of Die Zauberflote. What we miss in a close-up view we gain in good acoustics, which is just as well because neither a telemarketer nor a librarian can easily afford the more expensive seats. This, I think, had to have been as perfect a first date as one could get. A bonus is that I have established that he likes opera. Most of my acquaintances think my love of opera is insane, or at least a sign of some deeper character disturbance.
"I thought Monostatos was a bit much. So was the Queen of the Night, for that matter."
"You should have seen the libretto before Mozart edited it," he replies.
"It was worse? How could you get much worse than an evil, lustful Moor saying his blackness made him ugly, so he wanted to rape and kidnap the pretty white girl who wouldn't be interested in an ugly guy like him, which sounds like the plot of Birth of a Nation only too early and wrong setting, and a malicious queen with too much power telling her daughter that she'll disown her if she doesn't subjugate the hero, and oh, yeah, an occult brotherhood admonishing the hero and his sidekick to avoid women if they want to be enlightened?"
"It was worse. Rather in the same way The Taming of the Shrew was far more misogynistic before Shakespeare wrote his own version of the play, and The Merchant of Venice was even more anti-Semitic when it was Il Pecorone."
"Oh, well, at least the music was good," I say with a sigh as we climb the stairs to his apartment. I like the street his apartment building is on. It's a quiet residential cul-de-sac on the west side of town, without many other houses or other buildings on it. His section of the street is right across from a cemetery, and there are lots of trees, so the overall effect is almost park-like.
"That it was." He unlocks the door and lets me in.
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