Cocktail hour at the Gala
Dear George,
Katja has loved the opera since she was a little girl
and used to listen to the Met on the radio on Saturday afternoons at her
grandparents’ house. I doubt if I
ever heard an opera as a kid, but Katja started getting tickets for us when we
moved here as a young married couple.
Back then the opera was held at the zoo, and the performers had to
compete with noisy elephants and hyenas.
After going to summer opera for many years with her mother or me, Katja
joined the Opera League last year, a volunteer organization which does
fund-raising, educational programs, etc.
She asked me to join the League too, but, being more of a country music
guy and pretty nonsocial, it made me nervous and I didn’t want to do it. Katja understood and said the only
thing she wanted me to do was to go in the spring to the Opera Gala, a formal
dinner-dance affair for opera lovers and supporters. I wasn’t enthused, but it was a long way off, and I
reluctantly agreed.
We haven’t danced for a long time, so we signed up in
late February for ballroom dance lessons at the university. The class
meets on Tuesday afternoons, and there are about two dozen members, mostly
novices. We’d taken ballroom dancing years ago, so this was a
refresher. We started with the foxtrot and the rumba; then the waltz and
the meringue and an introduction to swing. We also learned a Latin dance
called the bachata which was fun though we’d never heard of it. After a
few weeks we felt like we’d at least be able to foxtrot reasonably well.
The Gala was scheduled for late April. Katja
started shopping for a ballgown a couple of months in advance, but she was
disappointed in the stock in local department stores. She asked if I’d
like to drive up to Chicago to shop for a ball gown there, but I responded by
pretending to lapse into a coma. Finally she ordered a ball gown she
found in a catalog from an exclusive department store in Texas. The gown
arrived a week later, and it looked pretty elegant to me, but Katja wasn’t
certain. She tried several bridal shops in the suburbs, but they said
that they needed three months’ advance notice, and by then it had gotten too
late.
Sometime in March we got a letter from the Opera
League, describing details of the event.
One line stood out to me:
“for husbands, appropriate dress will be white tie and gloves.” I
read the line aloud to Katja and insisted that I wasn’t wearing a white tie,
and I definitely wasn’t wearing gloves. She just laughed and said that I
could wear my gardening gloves. That was funny, but only slightly.
The week of the Gala rolled around, and they gave a
short description of the event in the entertainment section of the
newspaper. My heart nearly stopped when I saw that the tickets ran from
$250 to $5000 per person. I worried for a brief moment that we’d spent
$10,000, but that didn’t seem realistic. I was afraid to ask and decided
I’d better make a serious effort to enjoy the occasion. Katja had bought
me some new leather shoes for dancing, and I started breaking them in.
She’d wanted me to get a tuxedo, but I said I would make do with the black
velvet jacket and black slacks that she’d bought me ten years ago. On the
day of the Gala Katja had an appointment with her hairdresser, Kevin. Kevin said he could imagine Katja at the Gala, but he couldn’t quite see
me at it. I said Kevin was right on target. When we got dressed,
Katja put on a luxurious multi-level pearl and gold necklace that she’d bought
years ago and that she’d never had occasion to wear. She looked very
lovely.
The Gala was held at a fancy downtown hotel. The
cocktail hour started at 6:30, and we arrived at 6:45, leaving our car in the
hands of valet parking. Roughly five hundred people had gathered in the
hotel’s gigantic ballroom which featured 40-foot high mirrors and moving clouds
on the ceiling. All the men were dressed in tuxedos. I only saw one
or two white ties (mainly black bow-ties; a few red, a couple plaid), and I
didn’t notice any men wearing gloves. The women were elegantly dressed in
floor-length ball gowns, lots with gold or silver gilt and occasional
corsages. By and large, it was an older crowd – mostly white haired – and
it looked like high society to me. We met up right away with our friends, Molly and Charles, who we’d known were going. I’d been given an envelope when
we checked in, and Charles said I should have two tickets for complimentary
drinks. I couldn’t find them in my envelope so I went back to the
registration table to correct the situation. The woman at the table asked
what “level” I was. I said I didn’t know, but that my friend said I
should have gotten two complimentary tickets. She politely handed me a
pair of tickets for drinks, and I got a Manhattan for myself and a white wine
for Katja.
At 7:30 we went upstairs to another huge room and sat
down at a table for eight with Charles, Molly, and several strangers. Looking
around, everyone seemed to be having a fine time – lots of smiles and animated
conversation. Katja was chatty and fun; I was pretty quiet. The waiters were readily available to
fill the wine glasses, and I had four or five glasses of white wine in the
course of the meal. Dinner was good except for the sirloin steak entrée
which was tough. Katja couldn’t cut hers, so we traded portions. I
felt bad for the people who paid $5000 for tough steak. Just before
dessert an opera star from the Met came out and did four songs, including “I
Could Have Danced All Night” from “My Fair Lady”. She wore a gold
gilt dress, had a beautiful voice, and received an enthusiastic ovation.
When dinner ended, we went back
downstairs to the ballroom for dancing. A DJ was playing music which a
friend later explained was “club
music”. It was very fast, very loud, and had a constant beat. Molly and Charles listened for a few minutes, then decided it was time to go home.
Katja and I made our way up to the front of the room. Despite several
hundred people being present, only a smallish group were dancing at any given
time. The dancers were mostly younger people in their thirties and
forties, doing free-style, no-touch dancing; also a few balding men struggling
to keep up with their younger trophy wives. Katja and I waited for the DJ
to play a foxtrot, but that never happened, nor did he ever play a waltz or a
rumba. Given a mostly post-age-65 crowd, the hip DJ’s music selection
seemed out of place. Finally we decided to try the bachata, which you can
do to anything that has a steady beat. That worked o.k., though we were
the only bachata dancers in the place. Then we did some swing dancing
too. We danced for most of the next two hours, and we had as much fun as
we’ve had in quite a while. The party was still going full force at
11:30, but we decided to call it a night. Katja said she hoped we’d go
dancing again in the future.
When I went to valet parking, I gave the guy our
ticket and said we’d been at the Opera Gala. He asked me if I had a
complimentary ticket for parking. When I said I didn’t have one, he said
the parking would cost $15. That seemed like a terrible mistake, so I
went back upstairs to the registration table and told the lady that I hadn’t
gotten my complimentary parking ticket. As she’d done earlier the evening,
she asked what level I was. I said I wasn’t sure, but I thought that I
was probably at the $250 level. Giving me a look that I interpreted as
scornful, she said, “That’s why. You don’t get complimentary parking at
the $250 level.” I think I must have appeared so forlorn that a nicer
lady started looking around to see if they had any extra parking passes.
Much to my luck, she finally found one and gave it to me. I thanked her profusely at least two or
three times.
When we got home, Katja asked me to unhook her
necklace. I fiddled with it for several minutes, but I couldn’t get the
clasp undone. I thought maybe part of it had broken off. Katja tried for a while, but she
couldn’t do it either. Finally she said I should just break it apart, and
she would have it repaired. I proposed instead that she go to sleep with
her necklace on, and we’d find a jeweler the next day. In the morning I
located a mall jewelry store that was open on Sunday, and we drove out.
The clerk at the store took a look at the clasp, pushed on it once, and it
popped open. She smiled; we laughed, both of us a little
embarrassed. I tried it myself while we were there with the clerk.
It popped right open for me too. Driving home, I thought to myself that
we’d managed to get through the Opera Gala unscathed. But I was happy to
be back in reality.
Love,
Dave
G-mail Comments
-Vicki L
(5-3): Hi David, Your Gala
story left me breathless. I just don't know how you do it. In some ways, your
marriage to Katja mimics mine to George - the partner consistently pulling us
onto our growing (or is that 'groaning') edge. I'm so glad you had a great time. The finale at the jewelers
was a lovely tribute to aging. Sis
Sounds like it would have been well worth $10,000!
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