Ivory Dome

In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, Steve Jobs said the following:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

As I approach my sixty-second birthday (six more than Steve Jobs ever celebrated in his all too short life), it makes me stop and think how little time I have left to make a difference.

This morning on the Today Show, they showed the famous 1984 commercial for the Macintosh. I couldn’t help but think about the juxtaposition of the death of Steve Jobs, a true original in every sense of the word, and the Occupy Wall Street crowd: the Individual vs. the Collective.

Twenty-seven years from now, Steve Jobs will still be remembered – not for following someone else’s dogma, but for marching to the beat of his own drum. We can’t all be geniuses, but we can each be the unique person we were created to be.

Someone once said, “If you want to leave footprints in the sands of time, wear work boots.” Steve Jobs did just that, and the world is a better place for it.

It was with a great deal of sadness that I read today that my childhood hero, Duke Snider, passed away at the age of 84.

Back in the 50’s, it seemed that every kid where I grew up in upstate New York  was a baseball fan of one of three teams – the Yankees, the Giants or the Brooklyn Dodgers – to the exclusion of the other two.  Everyone in my family was a Dodger fan, and although we tolerated the Giants, we absolutely despised the Yankees (maybe because they beat the Dodgers so many times in the World Series).  By the time I started seriously following baseball in 1960 at the age of 10, the Giants and Dodgers had already moved to California.  But during those  years before the New York Mets came on the scene in 1962, we were still staunch Dodger fans.

My earliest memories of the Dodgers go back to the World Series of 1959, when they beat the Chicago White Sox in five games.  There were some great players on that team:  Gil Hodges, Junior Gilliam, John Roseboro, Wally Moon, Don Drysdale, Larry Sherry – but the one that captured my imagination was the center fielder:  Edwin Donald “Duke” Snider.

When I started collecting baseball cards the next season, I traded with every kid in the neighborhood who had a Duke Snider card.  By the time I stopped collecting cards a few years later, I had Duke Snider cards from 1952, 1954, and 1956 through 1962.  Sadly, when I went off to college, my father decided my baseball card collection (numbering about 2000) was taking up too much space, so he took the box out to the garage and stopped the first kids to walk by, asking them if they wanted any.  As word caught on around the neighborhood, within about a half an hour (so I found out later), my entire collection, to include all those Duke Sniders, were gone.

I actually saw the Duke in person once.  It was the summer of 1963, and my family traveled down to Yonkers (just north of the Big Apple) to visit my aunt and uncle.  My father, my brother and I went to the Polo Grounds on Saturday for Camera Day.  By then, Duke Snider had been traded to the Mets.  As the players strolled along the warning track, posing for the fans, I suddenly find myself within a few feet of the Duke himself.  I took a few photos, but what I really wanted was an autograph.  As a thirteen-year-old, I was faced with a dilemma:  Do I respectfully ask, “Mr. Snider, may I please have your autograph?” or do I take a bolder approach:  ”Hey, Duke!  How about an autograph?”  I chose the latter.  The only response I noticed was a slightly faded smile on his face; he kept on walking.  I kind of doubt he would have given me an autograph if I had chosen the more polite approach, but I’ll never know for sure.

That was almost half a century ago, and so much in this world has changed since then.  A few months later, a President was gunned down in Dallas, then came the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, Watergate, and so many other events that complicated our lives.  But for me, Duke Snider represented a simpler time – a time of heroes and of innocence.  He will be missed.

According to my best calculations, spring began about two hours ago at 17:32 hours UTC today.  And although it doesn’t feel like spring here in Amarillo (27 degrees and blowing snow), my thoughts are drifting away from the prospects of ObamaCare and towards warmer days and a favorite poem of mine by e.e. cummings:

in Just-
spring          when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles       far         and wee –

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far       and         wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and
        the

                goat-footed

balloonMan         whistles
far
                                and
                wee

For anyone who knows me, either personally or through my posts at Ivory Dome, it’s no secret that I’m a big opera fan.  Here in Amarillo, we have a really great opera company with a world-class performing arts center at its disposal.  But with only two productions each season, I have to look elsewhere to feed my opera appetite.  I used to attend at least one performance at the Santa Fe Opera each summer, but gas prices have been making that option less and less attractive.

Enter the Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD.  Beginning in the 2006-2007 season, selected Saturday matinees have been simulcast on the big screen in High Defintion at participating theaters.  During the first season, the closest theater was in Colorado Springs, even more remote than Santa Fe.  But this season, the Hollywood 16 on I-27 in Amarillo joined the Met network. 

The first two operas I attended (Gounod’s Roméo et Julliette and Britten’s Peter Grimes) didn’t really grab me.  The quality of both performances was excellent, but I just wasn’t that familiar with either opera.  It’s been my experience that the better I know an opera, the more I can enjoy the performance on all levels: sets, costumes, and acting, as well as the music.  In addition, attendence in Amarillo was not very impressive – about a dozen at each performance.

But this Saturday’s opera was Puccinni’s La Bohème.  Not only is this one of my personal favorites, it’s one of the most popular in the entire opera repetoire.  This was reflected in attendence; I estimated 30 to 40 in the audience.  The story is fairly simple:  four young bohemians (an artist, a poet, a musician, and a philosopher) share a garret apartment in Paris.  Rodolfo (the poet) meets and falls in love with Mimì, a seamstress who’s dying of consumption.  They break up, but in the end Mimì returns to Rodolfo in order to die with him at her side.  There’s a sub-plot involving a tempestuous relationship between Marcello (the artist) and Musetta, a real coquette if ever there was one.  But the main story is about Mimì.

Richard Wagner referred to opera as Gesamtkunstwerk – a combination of music, drama and design (both costume and set) that is greater than the sum of its parts.  This production of Bohème was a great example of this.  The sets, designed by Franco Zeffirelli, are legendary for their realism,  the costumes were authentic for the period,  the cast members were believable actors as well as superb singers, and the orchestra was brilliant.

Mimì was played by the Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu.  From her first entrance in Act I, I was stricken.  The character of Mimì is so lovable, and Ms. Gheorghiu played it beautifully, both musically and dramatically.  I’m always deeply affected at the end of the opera when Mimì dies, but I found myself emotionally invested from her first entrance, and certainly through Acts III and IV as her pending death becomes more and more inevitable.  Whether it was Ms. Gheorghiu’s performance, my love of the character Mimì, or the fact that this was my first Bohème since facing my own mortality last May, this was the most memorable of the many performances of this opera that I’ve experienced over the years.

There’s one more opera this season, Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment featuring French soprano Natalie Dessay on April 26. I probably won’t attend this performance, because I’m afraid after the La Bohème, it might be anticlimatic.  There’s also a live performance of Floyd’s Cold Sassy Tree that evening, and I don’t know if I can handle that much opera in one day.  But even so, there will be 10 more operas next season, with the schedule to be announced this month.  At $22 a ticket, it’s well worth the money.

Driving home from work, with the sun shining and the temperature in the high 70’s, I was reminded by the announcer on the radio that today is the first day of spring.  This time of the year always reminds me of a poem by e.e. cummings that I would end up reciting imperfectly, because I hadn’t read it since high school, some four decades ago.

Through the magic of the Internet, I’ve been able to find it after all this time.  Reading it actually brought tears to my eyes, like running into a long lost friend.  Here’s wishing you all a Happy Springtime; I hope you enjoy this poem as much as I do:

in Just-

spring       when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles       far       and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far       and       wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

 from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s

spring

and

     the

             goat-footed

balloonMan       whistles

far

and

wee

 Having been an opera affectionado for over three decades, one of the greatest regrets of my life is that I never got to experience the great Pavarotti in person.  The brilliance of his tone, the power of his voice, and the absolute passion of his performances were unsurpassed among tenors of his day.

The one performance that time and again epitomized all of these qualities was Pavarotti’s signature aria, Nessun dorma from the opera Turandot by Giacomo Puccini.  Even if you’re not an opera fan, take the next 3 minutes and 10 seconds to savor the  artistry of this extraordinary singer.  (Sorry for the link, but I don’t know how to embed a YouTube screen):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VATmgtmR5o4

Adio, Luciano!  You will be missed indeed.