Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Something else I owe my wife for
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All right. Won’t be any surprise. I always gave women their due, I thought, when it came to singing. I loved Piaf, Ella, Doris Day, Lena Horne, Billie Holliday, Ronnie, Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston to a point, you know, all the good ones, even Martha Tilton. I even made excuses for the also-rans, Grace Slick, Stevie Nicks, Pat Benetar, the Heart sisters, Janet Jackson, Diana Ross, and even Roberta Flack, who broke my heart with two songs and was never heard from again. (No. Find your own links.)
But when it came to opera I knew nothing. Nothingk. My wife and I grappled with the great Pagliacci-Domingo debate. One’s too this, one’s too that. Nessun Doooormat. Blah blah blah. Until the day she brought up Maria Callas.
Well, I knew all about her. Nice beak. Onassis castaway? Opera? Wasn’t she that? Who’d want Jackie? I mean, really. Eurotrash.
And Pat said, “Have you ever actually listened to her?”
Well, no. I stopped listening to sopranos when WFLN kept talking about Joan Sutherland. Old lady singers singing young girl arias from ‘La Boheme’ with discreet coughs interspersed.
“Get over yourself,” Pat said. (Tact has never been a hindrance for her. The last thing she is, according to her three children, is a controlling person. “She’s just, uh, candid,” they all say.) ‘She’s the greatest female voice in history. Listen…”
I did. She was right. I went directly to the Super Bowl of female arias.
GOAT is the word I’m groaping for. From gentle and soft to soaring and heart-breakingly, piercingly anguished, world-breaking angel with no transition at all? With no break in voice at all. And not even at the end of her range. Impossible. Nobody can do that but an archangel.
This post was last updated at 11:25 AM, Tuesday, July 8. Latest entries are “Responding to a Post by Michael Smith,” “Sometimes They Drag Me Back in,” and “An AI video Hoax to be wary of.” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses... NEW: Undernet Black was updated recently. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 193...
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