From www.birminghamverse.com a blog by Daniel Hurst:
A lady named Hermione Lee says that all marriages are inexplicable. Yeah, and a guy named Harold Bloom goes on to say that Shakespeare taught us the black box theory of marriage. We never know why we married, why marriage did or didn’t work, and, after it crashes, we can’t recover the black box.
Such is love.
There were twenty or more singers at the Opera Birmingham rehearsal for The Marriage of Figaro on Saturday. And just about the first thing I noticed was – when the singers weren’t actually singing – how “over it” many of them seemed to be. During this all-afternoon run-through – which is admittedly work for them – there were lots of times when singers were off to the side, “off stage”, waiting around for the moments when they got to perform, looking a little bored, typing on laptops, i-tech, and cellphones. Or maybe just snoozing. I thought, “Do they not like this?”
So I’m there for the whole afternoon to watch from the sidelines and – of course – I’m spellbound by the whole thing. Even with no costumes, no sets, no orchestra, and few real props, it’s a terrific performance. Not just the singing and dramatic details, but just the spectacle. In contrast to what I thought about the singers, I could barely take my ears off it. And I wondered how it would be possible to sit in that room and not pay attention.
But after sitting there a while and watching the performances, I’m certain my first impression of those singers was wrong. It’s kind-of like something I’ve occasionally called The Bob Dylan Effect: What would it be like to be married to a genius? Someone who could be effortlessly new all the time?
For example, let’s say I somehow wrangle a date with Regina Spektor. I’ll admit that I’d probably get a bit nervous. In fact, I’d probably be in awe, just on general principles, and then even more amazed that she somehow liked me back. Shoot, let’s be honest, I’m amazed when anybody likes me back. Let’s say – just in bizarro world – that I manage to marry Miss Spektor. (As long as I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony.) How long could it last that I could sit around and listen to her singing and tinkering around at the piano, before I got up and needed to do something else? Would I listen less as years went by?
Like Billy Crystal says in When Harry Met Sally, “You take someone to the airport, it’s clearly the beginning of the relationship. That’s why I have never taken anyone to the airport at the beginning of a relationship. Because eventually things move on and you don’t take someone to the airport and I never wanted anyone to say to me: How come you never take me to the airport anymore?”
Put another way, I’ve been lucky to date a few truly beautiful girls and found that – directly contrary to what I thought would happen when I was fourteen – after a while, I start paying attention to her as something entirely more than just beautiful. In fact, I can almost forget the beautiful part. Until we’re at the grocery store and she walks back an aisle to get some salad dressing or something and I get absorbed in some other thing until I happen to look up and see this beautiful girl from a hundred feet away and having just an instant to wonder “holyCOWwhoisthat?!?” before realizing that it’s my girlfriend and it makes me amazed all over again that such a beautiful girl could think it was cool to hang out with me.
Or maybe, when you date someone, you tend to stay pretty close to her when you’re out and you don’t get enough chances to appreciate her from ten feet away, or a hundred feet away, or the next table over at a restaurant, or to just stare at the back of her head like we all used to do in school. Those perspectives are mainly for the people outside your relationship. Those people who can still see her and be spellbound by how beautiful she is. But you’ve traded those perspectives for a closer and more complex view.
Back to those opera singers . . . they’re inside the relationship. At some point, they met the opera and they were spellbound because she was so beautiful. And they asked her out. One date became two, two became three, and the blink-of-an-eye later, they were studying and training and singing – pressed right up close and in a relationship with this beautiful thing.
When I was fourteen, I misjudged marriage too. I read Romeo and Juliet, looked around at adults, and thought, “How is it all so routine? Where’s the passion?” But it’s there. You don’t commit to a relationship – or spend your Saturday afternoons at practice – without a good bit of passion. And love. And a comfortable, well-worn, mutual respect after years of wrestling around with one another. Relationships are full of nuance.
On the other hand: “Genius, and not marriage, is my subject, and the age-old advice not to marry a genius probably is sound enough.”
Thanks again to Daniel Seigel and Opera Birmingham for letting me watch another Marriage of Figaro rehearsal.
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